By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Dowagiac Dogwood Fine Arts Festival officials believe the Grand Old City's collection of six pieces of public art in a city of 6,000 could be the most per-capita in the nation – perhaps the world.
More than a decade in the making, the collection has grown to the point where Dogwood is marketing it as a destination with a "Sculptures in the City" brochure prepared for an anticipated walking tour.
Also, "This festival time (in May 2007), we're going to try on the weekend to get a horse-drawn rig to take people around to them," new President Chuck Ringland said Friday.
John Vylonis of the Visual Arts Committee recently completed the periodic cleaning and waxing the four bronze pieces require – including the deceptively named "Stone" Lion.
"They will be our epitaph," says Tuck Langland, the Granger, Ind., sculptor who created both Dance of Creation in Farr Park and Resting Dancer by City Hall.
"Dowagiac is a city that understands something about its present and is building a future," Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, praised while attending the 2002 Stone Lion dedication.
Dance of Creation, who wore an orange Chieftain poncho before she ever thought of wearing a red holiday scarf, was the first, dedicated May 15, 1995, as a gift of the Tremble-Dalton families.
Next came Richard Hunt's Active Hybrid on May 12, 1997.
The steel sculpture, a gift of St. Denys Foundation, stands in Mill Pond Park at the east edge of the city.
Of it, Hunt, of Chicago, says, "In some works it is my intention to develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her."
Resting Dancer, a gift from the Harold B. Franklin family, was dedicated May 19, 1999.
(Jan) Rosetta's Stone Lion came to Beckwith Park on May 13, 2002, as a gift of the William F. Moran family for their 30th anniversary in Dowagiac and in memory of their wife and mother, Violette Tillman Moran, who died in 1994.
Stone Lion was wreathed in 2003 with red-bowed greenery like the big cats in front of the Chicago Art Institute.
Rosetta, a wildlife artist from Loveland, Colo., has said, "When I form his image in clay the animal is mine. I can finally possess him without moving him from his natural place. I respond to him as I start a realistic rendition of the pose he has suggested to me, and then he responds to me as I add the stylization that expresses my feelings for him. Now we have achieved a rapport denied us in the real world."
Animals are also the focus of Nina Akamu's Mount'n View, unveiled May 9, 2005, as another gift of the Wanda L. Franklin family.
Akamu is best known for completing a 24-foot-high charger, "Il Cavallo," 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) conceived the largest equine statue ever and Europeans discovered North America.
Mount'n View is at the corner of Commercial Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, outside Dogwood headquarters in Huntington Bank.
Her 8 1/2-foot-tall bronze was inspired by something Akamu saw during 12 years living in Italy.
Akamu's 56-hand, seven-section bronze horse half a millennium in the making, was dedicated Sept. 10, 1999, in Milan, Italy. An identical cast was unveiled Oct. 1, 1999, at the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.
"Its torso was the size of a school bus," she told the Daily News. "Assistants standing next to the wall of clay couldn't see a thing and they couldn't hear me, so we had to devise a system. I bought headsets at Radio Shack and put one person on the horse and the other 50 feet back. Then I devised a laser pointer system taped to a camera tripod so it wouldn't shake. We had three teams working simultaneously."
Akamu lived on Mountain View Road in upstate New York, but "I don't have a mountain view, actually."
She also professes to be afraid of heights, but looked like a circus aerial artist clambering up scaffolding to the top of the horse.
Of her work, Akamu says, "You must carry your burdens in life, bear them and don't complain excessively. Do not blame others for your problems and misfortunes. If you rise above that, you can attain your full growth potential and not remain dwarfed. In doing so, you rise above all else, gain a clear perspective and begin a new life. You become a Nubian (goat), nu bien, new being."
Like Active Hybrid, the city's most recent acquisition, the swiveling Sunflower by Fritz Olsen of Sawyer, dedicated May 15, 2006, is not bronze, but white Vermont marble.
Also in Beckwith Park, it was given by Dan and Katherine Brosnan's seven children.
Dance of Creation creator Tuck Langland took a blowtorch to Dance of Creation in September 2003.
First Silly String stained her neck, then came the steam boiling off her bronze skin in Dance's first facial in eight years of standing on the triangle near Borgess-Lee Memorial Hospital at Main and Division streets.
Not to worry. She was soon green as new.
After softening up the patina with flame, Langland used a paint brush to dab on pigments suspended in water.
Applying heat "makes the water evaporate rapidly," so color adheres better.
"Otherwise, it would just sit there," he said.
Langland coached Dogwood Visual Arts Committee members in the rudiments of public sculpture maintenance.
"What people normally use for green is copper nitrate," Langland explained. "Copper nitrate will bond to the bronze and make it green, but unfortunately it tends to do strange things over time – like produce burgundy-colored patches at random."
Langland compared her green hue favorably to another gal who's spent a lot of time on her feet – the Statue of Liberty.
"That's natural oxidation because it's by the ocean," Langland said. "And, of course, the Statue of Liberty is copper. This is bronze, which is copper with some other things in it. The Statue of Liberty was not cast. It's hammered sheets of copper over wooden forms, then bolted on this big steel structure inside. When they renovated it, they took one bar of iron out and replaced it with stainless steel until the entire structure was replaced. It never came down. It's like replacing a building a brick at a time."
We'll give the last word on public sculptures to Langland, the man who was first to create one for Dowagiac:
"Who are we and what have we become? Public sculptures answer the question, whether we intend them to or not. So notice public sculptures and listen to what they say, because they speak for all of us, now and in centuries to come. They will be our epitaph."