Temporary Public Art
by Daniel Grant
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Shelter I
Sasha Meret
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Just a few years after completing her granite public artwork for the City of Sarasota, Florida in 1991, Athena Tacha’s Memory Path was becoming unrecognizably stained and corroded. The photographic images sandblasted into sections of the stone were losing their clarity, and the smooth surface was increasingly pitted. The reason? City maintenance workers were using recycled water, undrinkable because of its high bacteria count and acidity, to hose down the piece and water the surrounding grass, causing the damage.
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Memory Path, however, fared better than the artist’s Marianthe, an outdoor work commissioned in 1986 by the University of South Florida at Ft. Myers, which was torn down and scrapped in February. Constructed of bricks and metal supports in a spiral maze, Marianthe was given no maintenance, which resulted in significant rust developing that weakened the structure and made it a potential hazard to students who might walk on or near it.
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Rain #1
Elizabeth Castagna
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Life Among Ruins
Barbara Wilk
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“I leave very specific maintenance instructions, and no one follows them,” a frustrated Tacha said. She added that “a damaged work is detrimental to my reputation…first because there is nothing left for people to see and, second, because it leaves the impression that my work isn’t durable.”
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There has been huge growth in the number of outdoor monuments since the 1970s, spurred by the Percent-for-Art regulations that require governmental agencies to spend ˝-1% of construction or renovation funds on the acquisition of artwork for those sites. But the growing maintenance issues for such public works raise the question, “just how permanent is public art?”
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The Pleasure of Ruins
Cecily Firestein
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One solution might be to educate public groups and companies so they might better anticipate future conservation issues. A growing number of cities and counties have actually adjusted the Percent-for-Art laws to include money for maintenance. “We changed from a 1%-for-art program to a 2%-for-art program, using the extra money for care and preservation,” said Nancy Knutson of the Broward County Cultural Affairs Office, which oversees the public art program.
Read more about Athena Tacha's work here.
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Read our archived Art in the News |
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