THE RISE AND FALL OF PUBLIC ART

TUSCALOOSA -- Two sculptures stolen from the NorthRiver Yacht Club in December and the recent news of the demolition of Holy Spirit Catholic Church remind us that public art is not always permanent.

[This essay appears in a slightly different version on the back page of the Spring 2008 issue of The University of Alabama Department of Art's Image Resource Center newsletter titled “The Loupe.” I have made a few changes for clarity and included links (in the right column) to the newspaper stories and other sources cited.]
Above: Craig Wedderspoon, untitled (Soft II), aluminum, 94 x 92 x 165", detail, Woods Quad installation, Jan. 2007; photo by Rachel Dobson.

Frank Engle –- professor of ceramics and sculpture in the UA art department from 1949 until his retirement in 1981 –- was commissioned by Holy Spirit in the early '60s to create sculptures for the (then) new church building dedicated in 1965. A Tuscaloosa News article (Jan. 2, 2008) said that the current building would be destroyed soon to make way for a new one. In preparation, “volunteers began salvaging anything they could from the sanctuary.” According to church member Lucy Kubiszyn, the church commissioned Engle to create a crucifix, statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, a medallion at the altar, and panels depicting the fourteen stations of the cross and the apostles, along with a mosaic altarpiece. Bethany Windham Engle has said that the towering blood-red mosaic reredos behind the altar will probably be destroyed because of the difficulty in dismantling it.

Robert Mellown, UA professor of art history and a colleague of the Engles, noted that in the early 1960s The University of Alabama commissioned Engle to create a sculptural fountain in front of Bryant Hall. The work created controversy mostly because of its depiction of male genitalia. Mellown recalled that vandals would regularly add Tide detergent to the fountain before football games, which gunked up the plumbing. The sculpture was destroyed by the university in the 1980s.

Today you can find examples of public art around the UA campus. Craig Wedderspoon and his students have worked on several public art projects in Tuscaloosa. Besides the Workers’ Memorial on the Riverwalk, Wedderspoon’s students are designing a Peace Garden with UA’s Community Crossroads, for the north side of Woods Hall. And his own monumental aluminum work now in the center of Woods Quad will eventually become surrounded by a landscaped garden, and be the first of a series of periodically changing sculptures there.

THE ALABAMA BIENNIAL

Wedderspoon, who joined the department in 1999, said that before he ever thought of coming here, he had heard of the art department because of its Alabama Biennial, which occurred in the years 1991, 1993, and 1995. Five pieces remain on campus as part of what former A&S Dean James Yarbrough designated “The University of Alabama’s permanent outdoor collection.”

These venerable pieces have not been immune to vandalism. In late 2003 and early 2004, Peter Flanary’s Walt Whitman Cult Wagon was tumped over three times in two months. UA graduate Paul Outlaw’s 3-piece installation outside the Rec Center was regularly vandalized from 2004 until it was finally dismantled in 2007. The recent theft of Jack Warner’s [NorthRiver Yacht Club] sculptures, the defacing of the Confederate Memorial in Montgomery, along with the demise of some of Engle’s works and the salvaging of others, illustrates the fragility of exposed art, no matter its size, weight, or meaning. When sculpture–-or any work of art–-leaves its maker’s hands, it becomes vulnerable. Artists have always had to deal with this fact of life, but the finality of destruction continues to amaze us.

Above: Peter Flanary, Walt Whitman Cult Wagon, 1995, cast iron, steel and stone, 42 x 27 x 134", located on the south lawn of Garland Hall, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Photo by Rachel Dobson.
Essay and photos reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art, College of Arts & Sciences, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.