A Gift for the Community

By Richard O. Jones  
Reprinted with permission of the Journal-News

Research is the key to creating a public sculpture that fits the community that will have to live with it.

Minneapolis husband/wife team Stanton Sears and Andrea Myklebust have made a specialty of public art by being more than carpetbaggers coming in to plunder the public art coffers and shaking up the status quo.

“One of the things that makes our work go over is that we spend time in the community where our art is going to go,” Sears said. “It doesn’t come out of the blue.

“Some of the more dramatic controversies come from artists who try to antagonize.”

He cited sculptor Richard Serra as one of those who go out of his way to create controversy. Serra once said that he is “interested in work where the artist is a maker of ‘anti-environment’ which takes its own place or makes its own situation, divides or declares its own areas.”

But Sears and Myklebust hope that citizens of Hamilton will come to appreciate “The Hamilton Gateway” not only because of its distinctive look, but because of the way it reflects the history of Hamilton.

When they were placed on the list of finalists and invited to submit a proposal, the first thing they did was make a road trip.

“We spent four or five days here,” Myklebust said, “taking photographs of buildings, going through the library and the museums, talking with (local historian) Jim Blount, going through old newspapers.

“You don’t know what you’re looking for, so you look at everything.”

“You do a lot of walking around,” Sears said. “There’s a physical side to it, too, that you have to take in, to walk all around the space and look at the site lines: What do you see coming in from the underpass? What can you see coming up the street the other way?”

One thing they knew right away that they had to contend with, Myklebust said shouting over the sounds of a passing fire truck, is “a loud, busy intersection.”

“We wanted to try to soften the space, to create a little shelter from everything that’s going on out there, to see if it’s possible to make a nice place to sit,” she said.

Sears credits his wife for coming up with the idea to approach a sculpture with historical references. What particularly struck them in this case is the diverse industrial background of the city, particularly in the contrast between the paper mills and the metal industries like Estate Stove and the foundries.

They conceived main tower, then, of “The Hamilton Gateway,” to combine the hard, rugged image Hamilton’s steel industries with the heavy plates of steel by rendering with the softer, flowing open images of paper being made, represented by the curved profile of the tower and folds along the bottom. The stainless steel bridge is filled with images inspired by the river and its industrial role.

“There was a decision on our part to make that history visible in the art work, perhaps to invite further exploration,” she said. “Someone may ask why there are fish and gears wheels in the bridge, and somebody might be there to answer that it’s all about the river and its importance in the development of industry through the use of hydraulic power.”

There’s also a reference to the great flood of 1913 in that the black granite on the bottom of the smaller column rises approximately seven feet from the ground, the high-water mark for that site in 1913.

The surrounding architecture also played a key factor in their design considerations: The limestone facades of the nearby bank buildings, the design and function of the buildings with which it shares a corner and the location of the sculpture in what is considered the edge of the downtown area. Hence, the “gateway.”

“The symbol of the gateway has a lot of potential interpretations,” Myklebust said. “Because these are government buildings, it could be a visual metaphor for democracy as an open form of government.

“The lantern also has a lot of allusions to government and to the court functions of the buildings, suggesting vigilance or truth seeking.”

To help people understand the various references contained in the sculpture, Myklebust and Sears will install plaques to explain why some of the forms are what they are.

“We desire to create lively and human public spaces,” Myklebust said, “something that people will feel is worth saving in the future and the best way to do that is to speak to their own experience. There’s a big chunk of education that goes along with it.”

“As they start to know more about it, the more they will understand and appreciate it,” Sears said. “As we travel around creating sculpture, we get glimpses of different places, the landscape and the trees, the politics and the history, the culture of the people.

“We called and asked Rick H. Jones (the executive director of the Fitton Center for Creative Arts) and asked if he knew anybody who fished in the river because if we put fish in the sculpture, we want it to be the right ones,” Myklebust said. “If you get it wrong, people will know you didn’t care enough to get it right.”

They said that there are common characteristics to all the work they do in terms of materials they use, but it’s all site-driven and  every project looks different.

In addition to “The Hamilton Gateway,” they are also working on a Peace Officers Memorial for the new Butler County Jail and have begun working on designs for some streetscape elements for High Street between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Ohio 4.

Whatever their future involvement, Hamilton will forever hold a place in the hearts of the artists. During one of their research trips here, Sears purchased Myklebust’s engagement ring at Elder-Beerman. They were married last October.