Artistic Irony
If a qualifier of good art is irony, Mecklenburg County received a wicked return on investment.
Among myriad construction projects that have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for public art are two libraries currently operating on limited days and reduced hours because of budget cuts.
Two bronze tree sculptures, with a price tag of $32,000, greet patrons when they visit the new Hickory Grove branch library, but not on Monday, Thursday or Sunday. The branch is currently closed those days because of budget cuts.
The Beatties Ford Road library has a series of hand-painted textile mobiles suspended from its rotunda, at a cost of about $18,000, but the branch is currently closed to expedite a renovation, presumably so when it’s finished that branch, too, can operate on limited days and reduced hours.
The two pieces of library artwork, along with their combined cost of $50,000, are part and parcel of the nearly $2 million that has flowed into funding Mecklenburg County’s public art plan for the recently completed fiscal year and for the new one that started this month.
At least that was the plan, until the county’s budget crunch put the brakes on a majority of construction projects and, by extension, the public art that is required to accompany them. It’s been that way since 2002, when Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte each approved an ordinance that mandates 1 percent of a capital project’s budget be spent on public art to adorn the county or city building.
A new jail? It has to have public art. A police station, medical examiner’s office or sewage-treatment plant? They have to have public art. A new art museum, stuffed with actual art, or a hall of fame filled with racing memorabilia? Ditto and ditto.
That’s why last year Mecklenburg County, swamped by debt and slashing funding for programs and services, completed about $728,000 worth of public art.
The aesthetic bounty harvested in the middle of a brutal recession included $212,000 for artistic landscaping for the Valerie Woodard Center, the first phase of a large garden outside the Department of Social Services. Another $219,000 was spent on a series of carved granite benches and four multi-ton boulders – artistic boulders, of course – placed on a section of the Little Sugar Creek Greenway.
The Revolution Park Sports Academy, at the corner of Baringer Drive and Remount Road, is a kick in the grass with its “20-foot vertical marquee wall of colored glass and LED light.” Price tag: $85,000. Sticking with art in athletics, the Shuffletown Sportsplex offers a $72,000 interactive sculpture that visitors can turn a hand-crank to open and close a towering baseball mitt, topped by a wind vane that’s supposed to honor the area’s history as a farming community.
Other public art completed last year include the previously noted sculpture at the Hickory Grove branch library, while $108,000 was spent on cast-resin panels in ribbons of blue and red, suspended from the entry of the offices of the public defender.
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