Guerrilla tree planters, here’s a project for you

(See note at end about where to find this blog after Friday.)

Today was a sunny morning, unseasonably cool for mid-June, and so I took my last 4-mile walk to my job at the Observer (Friday is my last day after 17 years on the editorial board). Only had one vehicle nearly hit me – a white SUV at Morehead and Kenilworth. At least I made him squeal his brakes.

I’ve chronicled some of my pedestrian adventures in my weekly op-ed columns, such as (“The foot challenge for Sun Belt cities” and “City walkability goal hits an icy patch” and “Walk this way. If you can.”

This morning, I thought – not for the first time – about the possibility of a little guerrilla,  tree-planting campaign. I tend to think of this as I walk up South Tryon from Morehead Street to the Observer building at Stonewall Street.  The N.C.-owned right-of-way alongside the I-277 bridge, where those odd witch-hat/Klan-hood sculptures sit, is bare grass. It’s a bleak trek across that bridge, let me tell you, and once you get past it, you sure could use some shade. What you get, though, is grass. And some “art.”  (To be fair, the sculptures do offer a bit of shade at the right time of day.) But what about it? Someone want to sneak onto some of our fair city’s spots-that-need-shade-trees and just plant some trees? Come December, if you see someone out there with a shovel and some oak or maple saplings, it might just be me.    
 
After June 17, if you want to read The Naked City blog, don’t look for this URL (marynewsom.blogspot.com) because it will be disabled when I leave the Observer.  Instead, seek out nakedcityblog.blogspot.com. Right now it’s in the process of being designed (using the word “design” quite loosely). That’s where you’ll find me after my last day at The Charlotte Observer. 

Atonement: Bringing Gumby back

If you read my Thursday op-ed, “Some good ideas, in need of patrons,” you may have noticed the end section, about getting Gumby back.

The whole sordid episode involving New York sculptor Joel Shapiro – whose career in 1987 was just starting a sharp upward trajectory – was embarrassing at the time and helped firmly entrench a national image of Charlotte as a city of rubes and rednecks.

Our city art commission had chosen his proposal for a 22-foot bronze work, a collection of rectangles resembling a human in motion, for the front of the to-be-built (and now demolished) Charlotte Coliseum on Tyvola Road. But one art commission member, Robert Cheek – who later went to prison for cocaine trafficking – didn’t like the choice. He helped whip up popular scorn. Either Cheek or deejays John Boy and Billy dubbed the figure “Gumby,” after the green clay animated figure.

Ultimately the City Council, which in those days had final say on public art purchases, nixed it 7-4. History note: Voting against the work were Richard Vinroot (later to be mayor), Ann Hammond, Al Rousso, Ron Leeper, Roy Matthews, Gloria Fenning and Minette Trosch. Trosch said she feared repercussions on the public art program if they accepted the art. Voting for it were Cyndee Patterson, Pam Patterson, Charlie Dannelly and Velva Woollen.

Of course, the “Angels in America” spat 10 years later didn’t help. Just as people elsewhere were starting to forget how many Charlotte folks were keen to make fun of art, we reminded them that many here were also so homophobic they’d kill funding to the arts because a theater group performed a work that depicted gay men.

Cut to 2011. I see the affection people have for Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Firebird” – dubbed Disco Chicken by some – at the Bechtler. You can hardly go by (and since it’s between my office and Amelie’s coffee shop, I go by it a lot) without seeing someone photographing someone else at the Firebird. The temporary exhibition of large Saint Phalle works in the park across from the museum draws a steady stream of viewers, including children scampering through that huge skull. (Be sure to go inside, where it’s mirrored and blue and serene.) The Bechtler, filled with modern art, is drawing great crowds.

I think Charlotte has matured. Finally.

The whole episode was painful for Shapiro. He later told the Observer’s Richard Maschal it was “a low point” in his career. Shapiro was at that 1987 council meeting. Our old files have a photo from the meeting, with Shapiro looking on as a speaker holds a clumsy wooden contraption saying it was something he made in fifth grade. The photo caption doesn’t say that the speaker was making fun of Shapiro’s work, but that would certainly be my guess.

Seeing which way the vote would go, Shapiro left before it was taken and returned to New York. Today his work is in major museums all over the country, including the National Gallery and the N.C. Museum of Art. You can see it at Davidson College. You can see it in Greenville, S.C. But not in Charlotte.

So why don’t we try to bring that Shapiro work back to where it should have been all along? Although it would have cost $400,000 in 1987, today his works can sell for seven-figure (corrected) sums. This would take patrons with significant money. Queens Table, where are you?

Would Shapiro consent to this? He might not. But maybe he’d see that this city has grown and changed. Sure, there are plenty of people (including some politicians) who think any sculpture other than soldiers on horseback is weird, or who look at a Picasso and say, “My fifth-grader could do that.” But that’s true in New York as well as Charlotte. The difference is that there are plenty of people here today with a much wider appreciation of art.

Plus, I think there’s a reason the name “Gumby” stuck, even among Shapiro supporters who were angry and embarrassed about the whole thing. Even the tiny wooden model had life and spark, and so much personality it demanded a name. So Gumby it became, and Gumby is how it is remembered in local lore.

Now it’s time to bring him home. After all, Disco Chicken needs a buddy.

Photo: 1987 Observer file photo of Joel Shapiro with a model of his proposed sculpture. Photo by Diedra Laird.

‘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.