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Five public art projects funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Youngstown State University
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Public art projects selected for the downtown area are taking shape.
Work started Monday morning on one of them – a curved wall made out of 3-D-printed decorative ceramic blocks, each inlaid with a solar-powered light. It’s located in the grassy area in front of The Vindicator at West Front Street and Vindicator Square.
Another project, located in the grassy hillside at North Hazel Street next to the steel museum, already has been completed. It’s a green-space project titled the Wedge at Hazel Hill, which includes a 15-foot-wide wooden stage that can be used for performances and landscaping, including a rain-collection system.
The five projects are part of the INPLACE (Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts Through Community Engagement) initiative, which is funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Youngstown State University. Each project received $20,000, and each is in some stage of implementation, according to Leslie Brothers, director of the McDonough Museum of Art and one of the INPLACE selection panelists.
Brian Peters of Kent is the designer of the “solar screen” project in front of The Vindicator.
His piece will be between 6 and 7 feet tall. A two-man crew from Youngstown Tile and Terrazzo of Canfield began laying the ceramic tiles Monday, after a concrete base was poured last week. Work is expected to take several days.
“It uses a new piece of technology,” Peters said, referring to the 3-D-printing process. He designed and printed the 144 blocks at his Kent studio. Each block has a photovoltaic solar receptor built into its center, with a battery and light sensor. On the other side of each piece is an LED light.
“They will absorb the sun’s rays in the daytime, and release it as light at night,” he said. The amount of power each receptor collects in the day will determine how long it stays lit. This could cause variations each night; for example, if the sun is strong in the morning but clouds roll in during the afternoon, the lights on the eastern end of the sculpture will remain lit the longest.
Peters explained that his sculpture faces north so that it’s curved exterior wall can track the sun’s path.
A professor of architecture at Kent State University, Peters designed and built a similar structure for the 2014 Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland. The Grand Rapids, Mich., native is in the process of moving to Pittsburgh, where he will begin this fall as a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.
Peters pushed for the site near The Vindicator because of its proximity to the America Makes National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute on West Boardman Street, which is a focal point for 3-D-printing projects.
All of the projects are expected to be completed in the next few weeks. The other three projects are:
A sculpture fashioned from a shipping container that will function as a bus shelter. It will be placed on one of the plazas on Central Square.
A shadow art stage along the alley on the south side of the City Hall Annex building, at the foot of the Market Street Bridge. From this stage, announcements and art, in the form of shadows, will be projected on to the south side of the annex building and be visible to inbound motorists on the bridge.
The lighting of an abandoned concrete-arch railway bridge over Mahoning Avenue, a few blocks west of downtown.