Public artists run a gauntlet very different from anything that typically confronts their studio-bound counterparts. From submitting their proposal, winning approval from a committee, to designing a piece to meet budgetary, environmental, and durability requirements – they must work to preserve their original vision amidst all the comments and constraints. Sometimes the result can be striking and exceptional. At other times such art can devolve into visual monotony, passed by without much regard.
Both the very best and the most run-of-the-mill public art can be viewed at the four stations just opened along Link Light Rail Line 1, starting at Northgate and ending at Lynnwood. Five artists are represented, all long-time veterans of the public art scene. Each of the artists gives a nod to the local cultural or physical environment, as required by the commission, and all create work in the most lasting of materials: metal, concrete, or glass.
Of the four stations, only one would merit visiting just to see the art: Lynnwood City Center. Both Claudia Fitch’s sparkling steel hummingbird and Preston Singletary’s technicolor glass panels are museum-worthy, a high compliment.
Claudia Fitch is known for creating monumental sculptures deploying a wide variety of materials, and here she puts that experience to good use with her giant metal bird towering over the ground-level station plaza. It would be easy to imagine a kitsch version of a bird based on – as Fitch’s piece is – the highway signs along Route 99, home of motels, bars, and strip malls. The brilliance of City Hummingbird is how it transcends its commercial sources. Fitch twists and shapes sheets of steel and aluminum into a series of brightly colored sections that suggest the various complex textures of her avian subject. Neon tubes and light bulbs are nestled throughout to add glow at night, and the flapping creature seems poised for takeoff, wings spread, tail extended. It’s the artist’s best piece to date.
Preston Singletary is as adept with glass as Claudia Fitch is with steel, and he is also no stranger to large-scale installations deploying the familiar motifs of Northwest Native art, but in highly original ways, as here. Singletary is the only artist whose work completely transforms the station environment. Enormous glass panels deploying a palette of primary red, blue, and black depict friendly creatures in the style of NW formline art, their size and high contrast overwhelming the many architectural framing elements which might otherwise upstage their effect. The best moments are the two seating areas, where enormous stylized beings extend out their arms to fully enclose the shelter, like the local ancients welcoming the modern commuter.
Singletary’s mastery of the medium is particularly visible in the details, as where a school of life-sized salmon etched into the glass slowly fades into the distance, a subtle show of technical wizardry that suggests deep space in what is otherwise flat and graphic. The escalators are also framed by anthropomorphic creatures, stretching in the direction of travel to add a feeling of movement to the enclosure. The glass panels create beautiful shadows on a sunny day, adding even more color to the workaday environment.
At the Shoreline South Station, Seattle public art veteran Buster Simpson has chosen to address the parking structure rather than the station itself. It’s all a bit wonky, a sort of giant Tinkertoy system for diverting the water from the roof to two blue steel pipes, stretching far overhead. Each pipe ends at an off-kilter concrete pillar, like a rock cairn about to fall over, very eye-catching and rather kinetic. One assumes the constructions would be much more interesting when it rains, where one pillar serves as a fountain, while the other supports a link in a wall-mounted irrigation system.
For days when the rain isn’t falling, Simpson has added a sundial and a set of metallic disks depicting the Big Dipper to the side of the parking structure wall. There’s no clear connection, visually or metaphorically, between the astronomical and the hydraulic, and one wishes for more drama and more activation of the station environment as a whole.
Unlike Simpson, Shoreline North artist Mary Lucking addresses the station platform, as well as creating sculptures for the station entrances, and designing the metal screens that enclose the parking structure. Without reading the helpful panel that describes the artwork, a viewer might not recognize all the art as being by the same artist.
The most appealing works are the squiggly metallic plants that sprout from various walls at the borders of the station. Their twisty bright yellow-green forms look like a fern that’s been plugged into an electric socket. The metal screens vaguely suggest grasses in the wind, but there isn’t enough variety to activate the pattern over the large area they cover. The platform art is nothing that would make a commuter’s workday more appealing: a set of repetitive amoeba-like green blobs set in glass panels, without the sort of color or shape invention that rewards our attention.
The most vexing installation is the metal panels by Los Angeles artist Kipp Kobayashi. Something major got lost in the transition between the artist’s conception and the final product. Kobayashi began with a rather lovely, if commonplace, idea of visualizing the station support structures as inhabited by giant tree forms, as though the old growth of yore had burst forth to inhabit the new architecture. It’s easy to see a committee being impressed by his proposal, where ghostly trees make a bold visual statement.
Unfortunately, the technology that Kobayashi and his technical counterpart in Vancouver employed failed to bring his original concept to fruition. The images were transferred to copper-colored metal panels perforated with thousands of lentil-sized tabs, the direction and angle of the tabs changed to vary the reflection of light, theoretically bringing the original imagery to light, as a sort of dot matrix.
Only it doesn’t. Try as I might, walking around and around the supporting station structures, I saw only the vaguest semblance of tree forms, nothing that would be noticed by a busy traveler, let alone an effect that would justify the scale and expense of the art.
The 1% for Art program, with 1% of the capital budget devoted to public art, inspired a surge in public works. But all the stars have to align – artist, client, budget, technique – to end up with a significant and memorable result. When they do, as with the Lynwood City Center station, the result is a permanent, public amenity that transcends the ordinary and enriches our shared environment.
