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Love it, or hate it, sculpture stays here

Request for larger piece adds $3,000 to its cost
The new art piece “Arc of History” has been installed at the intersection of U.S. Highway 550/160. The $28,000 piece has received comments for and against its aesthetics.

The public continues to respond, both pro and con, to “Arc of History,” the new sculpture at the intersection of U.S. highways 550 and 160.

“I’ve fielded two calls today, and people certainly don’t call to say they love it,” city of Durango spokeswoman Sherri Dugdale said. “But I think the Public Art Commission would say that whether people love it, hate it or are indifferent to it, the reaction is that they’re engaging with it, and that’s the point of art.”

The art commission asked artist Tom Holmes to make the sculpture larger than his original proposal, so it would be more in scale with the site, she said, and that led to an increased cost in materials and engineering. So the city agreed to pay an additional $3,000 on top of the original payment of $25,000. The $28,000 is 0.04 percent of the city’s budgeted expenditures in the adopted 2014 budget. The bulk of the money stays here because Holmes traveled to Durango to use local stone and fabricators for the project.

“If you look at the budget, the artist’s not going to make that much money,” said Cristie Scott, the chairwoman of the Public Art Commission. “It’s not like he’s walking away with $25K in his pocket. This is an asset, it’s something we’re adding to the city’s collection. The value’s not going to go away.”

The sculpture joins Durango’s already extensive public art collection, which has an estimated value of about $1.2 million.

Because the city doesn’t own the island where the sculpture sits – the Colorado Department of Transportation does – CDOT’s engineers had to sign off on a design where the metal will be under constant stress from the vibrations of passing traffic.

“People need to understand that there are going to be landscaping there, too, and this sculpture was designed to work with that,” Dugdale said. “Another thing the committee liked was how (the sculptor) described how it would look in different seasons, too, such as snow melting on it in the winter.”

It’s not just the look of the piece selected that went into the decision process, Scott said.

“We had an incredibly tight timeline on this because of CDOT’s schedule, and we needed to consider safety and how it would look over time,” she said.

The sculpture was chosen from three finalists out of 26 submissions. The art commission held an open house April 3 at Durango Public Library for residents to comment, with many people voting for “Arc of History.” A committee that included commission members, city and CDOT officials and community members made the final selection the next morning after presentations by the artists or teams of artists.

“There’s a bigger picture here than a single piece of artwork,” Dugdale said. “There’s still this presumption that people come to Durango to ride the train and then may stay a little longer if they discover our nonprofits’ arts activities. But that’s really not true.”

The Buxton Study, which was a joint project of the city, the Durango Chamber of Commerce, the Durango Area Tourism Office and the Economic Development Alliance, evaluated our tourism sector using Visa card charges.

“What I noticed was that the top spenders, by and large, were from elsewhere,” Dugdale said. “They’re people who support the arts both at home and here. More than half of those attending cultural events came for arts and culture programs, and if they weren’t offered here, they would have gone somewhere else. So art has a huge economic impact on our community.”

The other two finalists, both local, were:

Kelly Hurford, Craig Stoffel and Walker Christensen’s “Explore Durango!” It was a miniature mining tower surrounded by buffed sandstone rocks to resemble the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. The tower was surrounded by mesh and would be lit from within.

Gunnar Anderson and Ann Christensen proposed “Live. Build. Thrive. Durango!” It was a tree with colored balls at the end of the branches, to represent the thrill of fireworks bursting.

“Our goal is to have a diverse and widely eclectic collection, not all the same style, not all representational,” Dugdale said.

Despite the negative comments, Scott is delighted the piece is attracting so much attention.

“Our selection process is always open to the public,” she said. “Maybe this will get more people involved.”

It’s not unusual for the art commission to ask for changes after accepting a proposal. The city’s most recent addition to its public art collection was the sculpture at the Durango Intermodal Transit Center, which was a donation. The commission asked the artist to make that one taller, so it would have more presence, and the birds would be up by the windows, and to close in the stairs, so people wouldn’t be encouraged to climb on it.

“Although,” Dugdale said with a laugh, “there are often suspicious-looking small footprints on it.”

And how does Scott feel about “Arc of History”?

“I love it,” she said. “I think people are so upset about the construction, and this seems like the cherry on top of that. But it’s not an eyesore, and I think once it settles in, people will either forget about it or learn to enjoy it.”

abutler@durangoherald.com

This story has been updated to clarify a quote by Durango city spokeswoman Sherri Dugdale about people who come here for the arts.



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