Category: Arts and Science Council

Open Streets, funding culture and arts, densifying single-family zoning, etc.

This photo shows the event known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the east-west street grid in New York City. I took it July 12, 2018, at Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan. It has nothing to do with this blogpost. I just like the picture. And I like the idea of Manhattanhenge, named after England’s Stonehenge. And I like a good street grid.

I haven’t posted for weeks, due to a variety of life events including travel, the flu and a death in the family.

So to give Naked City Blog readers something to read that is not Trump news, here’s some of my writing from recent months published in The Charlotte Observer and Charlotte Five, which some non-Charlotte readers may not have seen:

How should Charlotte pay for the arts?

Does Charlotte really need an environment committee?

This festival is just the start of opening up Charlotte’s streets

The racist roots of single-family zoning

Charlotte: The Venice of the Carolinas?

I’m blogging from a conference of the International Urban Fellows of Johns Hopkins University, in Athens (Greece, not Georgia). I’ll be updating this and sending more posts as time and internet access allow.

ATHENS – Laugh if you want. I’ve just had a conversation with an Italian professor from Venice that made me think Charlotte and Venice may have a lot in common.

Without the canals, the seaside locale and the splendid cathedrals.

Pier Luigi Sacco, who grew up in a town in central Italy but who now teaches at the University of Venice, started saying that Venice doesn’t respect its historic buildings or its tradition of arts and culture. My response was only slightly more coherent than, “Say what?”

We un-cultural Americans, of course, think of Italy as a land of high culture, where beauty and art are worshipped daily.
Not so in practical Venice, said Sacco. Venice values the arts only if they can be shown to improve economic development, he said. It’s a city with a centuries-old history of commerce, which has led to a very practical and mercenary outlook on such things.

Sound familiar? Charlotte is also the kind of place where artists have to justify the arts as an economic engine. (To be fair, that’s true of many other American cities.) Our Arts & Science Council does studies of that sort routinely. So do state arts agencies. I know New York City did a similar study not too long ago.

Sacco described how an important art historian in Venice had told a conference of other art historians that the importance of the arts was so that tourists would leave the city with empty pockets. (!) That’s putting it a bit nakedly, I guess, but if you listen to our local boosters you’ll hear a lot of similar thinking, more politely couched, about Charlotte arts groups.

Now, about those canals …

(Disclosure note: The Johns Hopkins Urban Fellows Program paid my travel expenses to Athens for the conference.)

‘Tryon Bridge Towers’ artist did WWII Memorial

What ARE those things on South Tryon Street? The two metallic structures erected just past the Big O building at the bridge over I-277, are not, as you might have thought, witches-hat-derived homage to the show “Wicked.” They are a gift from the Queens Table, a group of anonymous – and apparently wealthy and influential – public art donors who have brought us the Socialist-realist monuments at The Square.

Update 3:30 PM – The artist is Friedrich St.Florian, an architect based in Providence, R.I. He designed the World War II Memorial in Washington. Here’s a link to a series of photos of the works being installed. The current name appears to be “Tryon Bridge Towers.”

Here’s a link (courtesy of the folks at CLTblog) to a presentation to the City Council in April 2009. It explains the Queens Table: “A small group of anonymous donors established the Queen’s Table Fund in 1991 to celebrate Charlotte by quietly finding and filling needs that are not otherwise being met to enhance aesthetics and quality of life in the City.” (May I suggest that art teachers for CMS could be an unfilled need for the next decade?)

Among their prior gifts, in addition to the four statues at The Square, are the Queen Charlotte at the airport (often described as “going into the lane for the layup”) and “Aspire,” the bronze on Kings Drive outside the Temple of Karnak-sized new Central Piedmont Community College building. I have come to love the airport statue, I confess. “Aspire” will have to grow on me. The things at The Square are an embarrassment, art as envisioned by aging CFOs, perhaps. (No I don’t know who really selected them.)

I am checking in with Jean Greer, Vice President of Public Art at the Arts & Science Council to see what she knows. (Update: Jean tells me the project didn’t go through the ASC Public Art Commission although she knew about it through Charlotte Center City Partners. It sits on N.C. DOT property, she says. The N.C. DOT is in the process of crafting an art policy for state rights-of-way.)

Jean is one of the lucky souls who gets to stand up at occasional City Council dinner meetings and give presentations on current public art projects and endure silly jokes from council member Andy Dulin and – for the 14 years he was mayor – Pat McCrory. McCrory buttonholed me last week at the James Jack statue unveiling to say he requires two things of public art for him to like it: You don’t have to be high to “get it” and it shouldn’t be something a 5th-grader could do. He approved of Chas Fagan’s James Jack statue.

I don’t know about this new work. At first, as I went past for several weeks I kept thinking it was some odd NCDOT construction equipment abandoned to the weeds. Then it became clear it was “art.”

Pardon me for sounding like McCrory but this one reminds me of robotic equipment, as portrayed on “The Jetsons,” or possibly a depiction of the trash compactors on Darth Vader’s Death Star. It does not make my heart soar. If anything, it destroys any soaring my heart might have been inclined to do. (Not that a soaring heart is likely as you walk across the bleak, Sahara-like I-277 bridge.)

Annual cost to the city, for maintenance, such as mowing, planting, electricity: $ 8,450.

Charlotte: Graveyard for theater?

Is Charlotte a city where the arts are healthy? You be the judge. The latest, unfortunate wrinkle in the city’s theater scene is that Steven Beauchem, a theater enthusiast who was trying to see if support exists here for professional regional theater to take up where the now-defunct Charlotte Repertory Theatre left, has called it quits.

Here’s what Beauchem wrote, in a lengthy e-mail. In a nutshell, he concluded that “Charlotte isn’t ready for locally produced, regional-level, professional theatre.” There simply isn’t enough community-wide support to make it feasible to found such an effort, he came to believe. The Catch-22, he notes, is that to demonstrate that support exists you have to put on some productions, and that to put on productions you have to have support. (And all you libertarian types, “support” doesn’t mean govt money.)

It’s wrong, he says, to blame the Arts & Science Council or the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.

I’d love to hear what theater-lovers (and others) think about Beauchem’s efforts and his conclusions.