Tag: public art

Does god really need a billboard?

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Someone seriously expects us to believe god loves billboards, particularly one lording over the river?

Time for an intercession?

According to one website, the patron saint of advertising, Saint Bernadine of Sienna:

…was accustomed to preach holding a board on which were the first three letters of the Savior’s name in its Greek form–‘IHS’–surrounded by rays, and he persuaded people to copy these plaques and erect them over their dwellings and public buildings.

Oh, Saint Bernadine, what did you unleash?

Maybe we need an intervention by Panchito instead?

Note: Read about the St. Catherine of Bologna-pleasing bridge railing by George Schroeder here.

Update on June 15, 2012: Seeking a poem by Yeats I cannot remember, I came across an assemblage of tree quotations at garden digest containing the most obvious one to have included with this post:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.

Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, 1933

And then this by extension:

No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

John Muir

Lest you think this was an attack on religion, war has broken out in San Antonio. Atheists have launched a counter-attack, mounting their own billboards along major arteries. Claiming nonbelievers are ostracized in San Antonio, the billboards invite them to “join the club.”

Two wrongs definitely do not make a right; they just make more wrong things.

Wish Lady Bird Johnson would fly up out of her grave and haunt them all.

Update on February 2, 2013: Oh, no. They are multiplying. Billboards “showing the way to God” are so abundant, they qualify for Clear Channel’s “volume discount,” according to the San Antonio Express-News.

“Upsize your life,” reads one.

Like fast-food burgers and fries, signs are among things that shouldn’t be upsized.

Kersey’s pieces like portable public art you can throw in the dishwasher

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To get an idea of the sculptural beauty of coffee mugs crafted by potter Diana Kersey, ride across the Mulberry Street Bridge or the Millrace Bridge leading to the Brackenridge Park Golf Course. Each of these bridges is graced with more than 200 square feet of the artist’s figurative tiles.

At first, I felt silly interviewing someone who recently completed these two major public art installations about coffee mugs, but Kersey put me at ease. Yes, she still loves taking a lump of clay and shaping it into a mug as her potter’s wheel turns.

“Small projects allow me to explore design ideas,” Kersey said. “These small works play into the design elements of larger ones.” Plus, she is never bored because: “No two mugs are exactly alike.”

Gayle Brennan Spencer in San Antonio Taste Magazine, December 2011

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Steve Bennett spotlighted the first bridge Diana Kersey completed on the San Antonio River in a June edition of the San Antonio Express-News:

“The city wanted me to do something on the health of waterways,” Kersey said. “I started thinking about amphibians — you know, if the amphibian life was healthy then the waterway was probably healthy. And in doing my research I learned that the most common toad in this region is the Gulf Coast toad. It’s the one that we all know, that we all run across in our backyards.”

In bas-relief sculptural panels embedded in the bridge’s concrete guardrails above 8-foot sidewalks, Kersey visually tells the story of the life cycle of the toad, from the courting days of Mr. and Mrs. T to strips of frog egg “tape” floating on water to developing tadpoles and “froglets” to the mature toad with the ridges over the eyes and the mouth that turns downward, sort of sadly. The overall effect is a “primordial narrative” like the well-known ape-to-man evolutionary image.

The Millrace Bridge installation was scattered around the tables and floor of her studio when I interviewed Kersey for the story on coffee mugs. The clay since has been glazed and fired to attain striking colors evoking the exuberance of majolica pottery.

Kersey described how she takes clay large-scale in an interview with Gene Elder for Voices of Art Magazine:

I don’t really create ’tiles’ in the traditional sense. I build the panel as one giant piece of clay, and then when it is complete I cut the work up into smaller shapes that can easily be fired, transported and installed. That way the grout lines becomes an important part of the overall design.

Now installed, the panels on the bridge relate to the history of the park and the golf course. Gutzon Borglum, who worked on designs for Mt. Rushmore in his nearby studio, and George Brackenridge, looking a bit dour as one would expect from the man who forbade the consumption of malt beverages on the parkland he donated, are among the relief portraits in clay.

But the story of Queenie the dog stumped me completely? Kersey enlightened me:

Queenie the dog was the beloved dog of Jack O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien was a sportswriter for an early San Antonio paper and a huge fan of golf at Brackenridge. He helped start the Texas Open in the early years. Anyhow, the dog was always by his side and became a bit of a mascot at Old Brack. A portrait of her has hung in the clubhouse for over 60 years and is still there.

Kersey’s mugs are like small slivers of portable public art that you can take home with you – art that can be thrown in the dishwasher. Find Kersey at work in her new studio and showroom downtown in the Atlee Ayers Building at 112 Broadway.

Ribbons of Gaudi-inspired steel ripple above the river

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By the time I started this blog, most of the public art projects on the Museum Reach of the river seemed like old-hat. That is not to say the art is stale; I love it. I walked along there only this morning.

But I think the newest addition, a design inspired by balconies on a Gaudi apartment building in Barcelona, is by far the most stunning.

I already was a George Schroeder fan. Even though the stoplight is outrageously prolonged, I find myself driving south down New Braunfels, cutting across Funston and sitting at the intersection on Broadway to admire his entryway to Brackenridge Park. Its lines are so sensual and distracting, the poor car behind me generally is forced to honk.

I’ve become more of a Mission Reach kind of girl, but watching the installation of the railings on the Camden Street Bridge keeps drawing me back to that part of the river. That, and the fact there are no b-share stations south of Blue Star.

Steve Bennett of the Express-News wrote such a great story about the sculpture, I simply will defer to him:

“The whole design is based on the river,” says Schroeder…. Like a lot of Schroeder’s monumental public sculpture, such as “Passage” at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, “River Movement” was inspired partly by wanderlust.

“When I do these projects,” he says, “I try to make something that is drawn from my international travels. I try to bring something from that back to San Antonio.”

A longtime admirer of iconoclastic Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí‘s sinuous 1912 building Casa Milá, also known as La Pedrera (The Quarry) for its undulating limestone walls, Schroeder finally got a chance to see it in person during a trip to Barcelona…..

“The tangled-up metal (on the balustrades) looked very organic, an integral part of the building. So I kept that inspiration and drew on it for this project.”

My favorite part of Steve’s story is his assessment of the importance of this work:

What he’s done is create another San Antonio landmark that will endure for decades, a work that mimics, in an abstract way, the ripples on the water and the breeze blowing through the plants on the banks, even the wakes of the tourist-laden barges that cruise by regularly.

And, my other favorite part: I had not realized there was more to come. The San Antonio River Foundation also is funding more of Schroeder’s work at Newell. 

Thanks.

And while you are in the neighborhood, don’t forget to look upward for the Jesus Moroles stellae….

November 11, 2011, Update: So often when I walk this part of the river, it is barely light. But yesterday morning, I waited for it to warm up a bit. The bright morning sun reflected from the rippling river onto the underside of the bridge makes Schroeder’s design inspiration even more obvious.