In February, a controversy arose and quietly resolved itself in a matter of days, but it left a lingering impression among artists, gallery owners and students that this city remains stuck in the past, even while it is home to one of the premier contemporary art colleges in the nation.
The Kessler Collection, owner and operators of the Mansion on Forsyth Park, the café concessionaires of the recently renovated Fort at Forsyth Park and the Bohemian Hotel offered a nine-foot, six-inch contemporary bronze art sculpture of a dog to donate for installation at the park.
Within a week, CEO Richard Kessler withdrew his offer amid issues of liability, placement, ownership and “appropriateness.”
The Savannah Morning News reported Kessler had requested expedited approval for the public art. The City of Savannah rightfully recommended the donation go through the procedures adopted in 2007 as part of its “Markers, Monuments, and Public Art Master Plan and Guidelines,” which established both a Technical Advisory Committee and Site and Monument Commission to evaluate potential installations and make recommendations to the mayor and aldermen.
Fine.
However, deeply buried in the News article is a quote from Site and Monument Commission Chairman Gordon Smith that reads, in part, that “the proposed artwork is ‘a folly’ that disrupts the architectural integrity of the fort and should be placed somewhere other than Forsyth so as not to disrupt ‘the sacred nature’ of that part of the park.”
Hmm.
In a city with buildings that date back to the 18th Century, where a median holds the final resting place of Jewish ancestors and a tree-canopied sidewalk next to a colonial cemetery once served as a dueling ground, what land is not sacred? Would all contemporary art be evaluated as a disruption to the architectural integrity of our well-preserved city?
It’s hard to tell. The public art in Savannah trends toward historic monuments, fountains or realistic statues (children play at Yamacraw and Johnny Mercer is in repose in the revamped Ellis Square). The master plan provides no real objective standards for evaluating public art, except to suggest that a work should be “appropriate to arts and humanities.”
Since the master plan’s adoption three years ago, the Kessler donation is only the second time the Technical Advisory Committee and Site Commission considered a work of art. Of the 10 members of the committee, only three represent the art community.
For 30 years, the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought in many talented muralists, designers, architects and sculptors of local, regional and national renown. As students and professors, they create rigorous and significant works, but those creators display their works behind gallery doors or in the public realms of Atlanta and Chicago.
With this amazing inventiveness in our midst and readily available, where is the city’s willingness to embrace contemporary art?
“A site that invokes history should not automatically preclude a contemporary aesthetic interpretation,” said Christopher Nitsche, a sculptor and professor of Foundation Studies at SCAD.
“Significant sculpture of our time offers a contrast to such a site, which may ruffle feathers in the short term, but has a way of growing on the people who experience the art,” he said.
Nitsche recalled Picasso’s 1967 installation for Chicago’s Civic Plaza, which was publicly ridiculed at its unveiling but now marks the city’s watershed moment as a destination for great public art.
Maya Lin initially received death threats for her design of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., but now is regarded as the standard-bearer of contemplative and contemporary monuments.
Savannah must not become a city that memorializes only its past at the expense of celebrating the imaginative talent living within its present and surely to come in its future.
The time has come for serious consideration of contemporary art as part of Savannah’s civic pride.
