Who do you have to blow around here to get information on public sculpture? I’ve spent plenty of time and effort gathering public sculpture database websites and a small print library at home, but every time I want extensive info on public pieces away from home, I go nuts.
The basic info source for the stuff is supposed to be the Smithsonian Art Inventory site:
http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/
It’s OK, but it lacks a very basic ingredient. If I want to go to a geographical location to see what’s there, or to hunt down a piece I don’t know the name of but I’d recognize it if I saw it, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, SOL. If I put the name of the city under the owner field, I might come up with something, if the piece is owned by a city itself. But if not…
There are places, of course, that do a bang up job of listing their public art. Cleveland, OH, for example. Though my no means complete, the website http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/ohio/cleveland/clevelandindex.html gives you a great springboard.
So I go to my best friend, Google. I do image searches and web searches. But if I don’t know the name of a piece, or its sculptor, I’m in the same kettle.
My latest hunt is an example. I’ve been writing an article on using a sculpture safari as a way of touring Honolulu. Things were going well enough until I wanted to find out the name of the piece on a hill near King Street and Bishop. It has three huge tribal figures, one female flanked by two males. I wanted to know more about it.
Think I could find ANY reference at all to it? Try again, Jack.
Although the statue of Sun Yat-sen in Honolulu’s Chinatown has several references on google, I can’t find the name of the sculptor or the date it was dedicated. I did read an intriguing reference to the fact that its placement was determined by feng-shui, but that was all. SIRIS was no help because the city, apparently, doesn’t own the statue.
All of this is part of a larger problem. Nobody knows nuttin’ about sculpture in their town, unless it has an outstanding icon, like Honolulu’s King Kamehameha statue.
It’s beyond me how a city can have real live culture standing out there in the wind and rain and have no idea it even exists until it’s time to actually shell out a few bucks for restoration or maintenance.
What does it take to make people notice statues? After all, they surround them.
I did an article for the island newspaper a couple of years ago about our small island’s public sculpture. It was a great hit. No one knew we had any. But I managed to find 6 pieces within easy walking distance of one another! And this is on an island that totals about 10 square miles!
I flew to Bermuda seven years ago to attend my nephew’s wedding. Before I went, though, I called the Chamber of Commerce there for some info on public sculpture.
“I think there’s a statue outside the art museum,” I was told. “And there’s a sculptor who lives on the north side of the island.” Other queries didn’t fare any better. Of course, the island, though not a mecca for outdoor statues, has a pretty respectable collection of them.
That’s enough of a rant, but if anyone from Honolulu can enlighten me about the three figures on a hill, (one of them sits on the top of this blog today) post a comment!
