Last month I revisited a city that I know well from having grown up in Eastern Pennsylvania many years ago. I am happy to report that Philadelphia is still a delightful place with not only effectively contextualized historic sites and glorious new performing arts centers but also a flourishing visual arts scene. In the latter regard, besides its four major art museums, the city boasts an impressive array of public art, including colorful murals on the sides of many of its buildings and a significant collection of municipal sculpture, including notable works by Claes Oldenburg, Henry Moore, Robert Indiana and Roy Lichtenstein.
Our neighboring city of Augusta may not have Philadelphia’s deep pockets when it comes to public art, but it has made strides in recent years to enliven its streetscape with a number of visual art projects, including an innovative sculpture trail, now in its second iteration.
The brainchild of the Greater Augusta Arts Council in collaboration with the City of Augusta, the trail is principally composed of 10 sculptures on loan from the artists themselves for a period of two years. At the end of that period, some of the pieces may be added to the City’s Public Art Collection. This was the case with four of the sculptures featured in the first trail, which was on display from January 2021 to the end of last year. Add those four to the current mix plus a sculpture donated by the Finch family, and one has 15 3-D works currently on view.
The first trail ran mostly along Broad Street. However, anticipated road improvements have necessitated the placement of this second trail mostly along the Augusta Riverwalk. The trail’s proximity to the water certainly engaged the imaginations of some of the artists who are part of the 2023-2024 cadre. Take, for example, Connecticut-based Chris Plaisted, who fabricated from steel an abstracted rendering of the HMS Endeavor, the Royal Navy bark captained by James Cook on his first research voyage to Australia and New Zealand from 1769-1771. To a curvilinear, orange-tinted base the artist has attached by eight rods two flat gray metal segments representative of the vessel’s sails.
Plaisted’s piece “Endeavour” is a fitting homage to Augusta’s proud past as a river port and its status as the second city of an erstwhile British colony. Another water-referenced work is Flaminio Antonio’s “Ruthless.” Using hundreds of recycled fragments of steel and iron, the Florida-based artist has produced a gleaming silver shark-like creature that reads like a steampunk invention from Victorian Age science fiction.
Also made of recycled materials, including steel and compounded cement, is Lee Bell’s “Duet’s Dance,” which purports to represent two herons in conversation. From her Black Lily Studio in Sarasota, Bell specializes in creating large-scale mixed-media sculptures of birds, insects, and other animals coated in what she describes as “exterior grade colorants.” The latter component gives the two intertwined bird figures in this particular sculpture an appealing luminosity.
Space allotted to this weekly column does not permit me to do justice to each of the 15 sculptures placed along the Riverwalk and through the Augusta Common, but I would be remiss not to mention one last piece that, like the Antonio and Bell sculptures, is inspired by the natural world. This is Robert Finch’s “Tropical Dream,” which was donated to the city by the family of the late artist. Finch, an engineer-turned-sculptor maintained for many years a studio in the Central Savannah River Area. The work in question fabricated of welded steel coated in red polyurethane resembles both a bird’s tail feather and a sinuous vine that one might encounter in the tropics. The piece reminds me of the large-scale Finch sculpture that once adorned for a brief time the USC Aiken campus, just outside the Etherredge Center; that particular work was an abstracted gamecock tail.
Those planning to spend a pleasant hour walking the trail can download to their smartphone a self-guided digital map via the Otocast app. A link is available at augustasculpturetrail.com.