Sunday, July 05, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Artsy bike rack fits city's outdoor branding
ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times
Roanoke is not letting John Wilson install an artsy bike rack in front of his gallery downtown.
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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Dan Casey
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If you believe a clash of the arts and municipal government ended in May with that ridiculous arrest during the "Must See TV" brouhaha on the Roanoke City Market, sculptor John Wilson has a story for you.
It's a minor conflict about a distinctive and artsy bike rack he fashioned. And the city hall runaround Wilson experienced when he wanted to install it near the curb in front of his Campbell Avenue gallery in Roanoke.
"I'd do the installation and it would belong to the city," Wilson says.
Instead, the city said, more or less, "Thanks, but no way."
Wilson, 66, is a San Francisco transplant and former contractor who shed his paying job a couple of years ago because he wanted to sculpt full time.
He and his wife, artist Suzun Hughes, sold their West Coast real estate and moved here to open Wilson Hughes gallery at 117 W. Campbell Ave. in April 2008.
Artist-designed bicycle racks aren't exactly revolutionary stuff. In recent years, they've popped up in numerous cities, including Austin, Texas; Louisville, Ky.; Portland, Ore.; and Arlington County in Northern Virginia.
One of the more famous ones, created by the musician and New York artist David Byrne, is shaped like a dollar sign and is installed on Wall Street.
Those creations have actually been promoted by some of those municipalities, and featured in national publications such as USA Today. The pictures you can find of them on the Internet are conversation-worthy and extraordinary.
Which, after all, is one of the purposes of art.
Except in Roanoke it seems. Here, the rule is: Bike racks on public sidewalks must be mind-numbingly ordinary. None of that eye-catching, imagination-stirring stuff.
The only rack permitted by the city's street furniture-design guidelines, says Public Works Director Bob Bengtson, are those inverted U-shaped metal types that are so boring, they're hard to notice even when you're standing next to one.
"That's what's identified in our street design guidelines that were adopted," Bengtson told me Tuesday.
Doesn't this seem odd in a city that desperately wants to be an arts destination?
Local interests have invested more than $50 million in the striking Taubman Museum of Art.
For the past couple of years, new art galleries have popped up downtown faster than dandelions in a vacant lot.
On June 1, the Roanoke City Council approved the creation of an arts district downtown, which the Wilson Hughes Gallery will fall within when details are ironed out.
The city also is making a valiant effort to buy and install public art in a variety of places around town.
At the same time, other powerful interests such as the Roanoke Regional Partnership are trying to brand Roanoke as a city with a strong outdoor culture.
Roanoke has applied for national designation as a "Bicycle Friendly City." And Ride Solutions, the commuting alternatives agency, has been busy at work installing those boring upside-down U-shaped bike racks as part of that effort.
"The combination of bike racks and public art makes a lot of sense," says Jeremy Holmes, the director of Ride Solutions. "It's something I have looked at trying to do and encourage. I think it fits in with what the city, or the region as an urban area, wants to be."
Susan Jennings, the city's public art coordinator, said she offered to install Wilson's creation along one of the city's greenways -- if he would donate it. "I love it. I think it's way cool," she told me.
Wilson is willing to donate the rack, but only to the sidewalk in front of his gallery. Otherwise, he'd rather sell it and recoup the $500 he put into it.
(Right now, the only way you can see it is to visit the recently opened Car Less Brit Museum at Second Street and Kirk Avenue downtown.)
When we talked last week, Bengtson allowed that it might be possible to have Wilson's rack re-evaluated as public art rather than as street furniture. That could allow the city to slide it past the design guidelines, he said.
You don't have to be a mathematician to figure out this equation: Arts culture plus outdoors brand equals eye-catching bicycle racks downtown.
Let's hope the city does that simple math and begins acting like the arts and outdoors mean something after all.
Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
