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All Sculptures Great and Small
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Think about how the CWRU campus has changed in the last twenty years. What comes to mind? Chances are, the big stuff. Maybe the Kelvin Smith Library curving elegantly on its green grounds. Or the Celeste Biomedical Research Building standing tall over University Circle. Grand statements stay with us. But in working on this issue’s cover story, on the University’s Putnam Sculpture Collection (see “Sculpture, Sculpture Everywhere”), I realized that the sculpture collection’s assemblage of smaller gestures is just as important to the evolving identity of CWRU’s campus. For every Agnar Pytte Center for Science Education and Research, with its striking, glassy Hovorka Atrium, there’s a piece like Gene Kangas’s Snow Fence, a whimsical work alongside Thwing Center. The sculpture is not as noticeable as the long building on Adelbert Road. If you’re charting change, though, create a column for Snow Fence and its thirty-one brothers and sisters.  The sculptures began dotting the campus only twenty years ago, when Snow Fence inaugurated the collection. To those of us on campus today, their quiet presence is a given, like the tall trees shading the Mather quad. Yet graduating classes from the 1970s and earlier never experienced them.Some of the works almost escape notice. William McVey’s The Good Samaritan, for instance, is a stone figure tucked away in the Baker Building lounge. Others are impossible to miss. Philip Johnson’s Turning Point (shown on the cover) and new Turning Point Garden are the products of an artist whose influence on the built environment in this country has been beyond measure. Atop the hill on the south side of campus, Carl Floyd’s Unstable Tables is a row of rock creations that appear to lumber along like circus elephants. (Turning Point Garden and Unstable Tables are shown in the story.) With the images that appear in “Sculpture, Sculpture Everywhere,” we’ve set three other photos in this issue amid the Putnam Collection. On this page is Keith Haring’s Two Dancing Figures, in the Kelvin Smith Library. In Home Pages, student ambassador Vicki Vitacco is shown with Snow Fence. And in "The World Watches," students are photographed beside Alphabet Series: Blue, a work by Fletcher Benton outside the law school. The Putnam endowment ensures that the collection, dedicated to regional artists, will grow for years to come. Great or small, the sculptures in the collection share one trait. They have changed forever the space they inhabit. A request: Write to us. We appreciate the letters we receive, and we would like more. Hearing what you have to say helps us produce a better publication. And the more letters we get, the more lively the dialogue in our Mail department. The letters section is your chance to comment on what you see in the magazine. Did something tickle you, trip you, have you spitting nails? We’d like to hear. Send your comments via e-mail to me, at kxk7@po.cwru.edu; by fax, to 216/368-4835; by US mail, to Letters, CWRU Magazine, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7064; or through our Web site.  Ken Kesegich, editor kxk7@po.cwru.edu Photograph by Daniel Milner |
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