Showing Pasts and Aspirations Along a Highway

Artist Janet Echelman was one of the presenters at the Public Art 360 symposium in Chapel Hill last spring. In browsing through YouTube for public art ideas, I ran across this sculpture of hers done a few years ago for the culturally rich city of Porto, Portugal. After opening with a quick overview of the artist's other works, the video takes you through five years of development and installation on "She Changes," a signature piece which captures the city waterfront's heritage as a fishing community and puts it in the sky above a highway where imaginations and the wind can play with it. The video shows how drivers approach the work, measuring 160 feet tall and 300 feet wide, and then how pedestrians enjoy it as well.

On the YouTube site the comment section under the video is half-filled with snarky comments about the work, half-filled with serious ones (heaven help those who try to please the tastes of the drive-by verbal assassins of the net). The piece was not inexpensive. I don't know how much of its 1.6 million dollar cost was paid for with private funds and how much with public; nor how much of its costs were for land acquisition, or materials, or construction. But as a piece of inspiration, and an authentic jumping-off from a community icon - the fishing net - it works for me.

Art doesn't "work" for everyone in the same way - as the sampled audience in the video shows. Really good works assuredly don't. But what an aspiring, confident statement. I lift a glass of tawny Oporto product in admiration....

Top image from Sculpture.org website, courtesy Florence Lynch Gallery; photo by Joao Ferrand and David Feldman.