Linn County unveils art gift to Cedar Rapids park

CEDAR RAPIDS - Greene Square Park is in this city, which is the county seat of Linn County, a geographical fact that has prompted the Linn County Board of Supervisors to contribute more than $200,000 for art and other costs in county funds to help with the city park's $2 million transformation.

The groundbreaking for the park project, which will turn Greene Square Park into Greene Square, is set for 1 p.m., Wednesday. On Monday, the supervisors approved a contract for $225,000 with sculptor Bruce Beasley of Oakland, Calif., to create and install in the park a 40-foot-long, 26-foot-wide, 20-foot-tall, coil-like sculpture of brushed stainless steel.

'This is not just a big block of something that you can only see from the outside,” said Sean Ulmer, executive director of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art who led an 11-member Linn County art selection committee. 'This is something you can experience from all four sides as well as by walking through it. I think people will come to see it, and more than that, to experience it.”

Along the way, the Linn County supervisors have heard some criticism about their decision to spend six figures on a work of public art.

In fact, in last fall's close race in the Linn County's most rural supervisor district, incumbent John Harris said the supervisors ought to consider lower-cost art, while unsuccessful challenger Becky Shoop, deputy Linn County Auditor, said the county shouldn't spend anything on art for the park.

However, it was Supervisor Brent Oleson who pushed for the supervisors to use its money for a very specific piece of the Greene Square Park project - a world-class public sculpture - that he said forever would put Linn County's mark on the block-square, downtown Cedar Rapids park.

A many-month search by an 11-member Linn County selection committee resulted in art proposals from some 200 artists from around the country and beyond, said Supervisor Linda Langston, who served on the selection committee.

She said about a quarter of the proposals were eliminated quickly because the artists focused their attention on Judge George Greene, a founding father of Cedar Rapids for whom the park is named. Some proposals suggested a man on a horse, which isn't what the selection panel was looking for, she said.

The committee winnowed the field to about 11 or 12 proposals, then selected three finalists to come to the city to make presentations.

The choice of Beasley for the project was a unanimous one, Ulmer and Langston said.

Ulmer called Beasley 'internationally renowned” and he said he was one of the youngest sculptors to ever have a work of art placed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City when he did in 1961. He's been creating sculpture for more than 50 years, Ulmer said.

Langston said Beasley's sculpture, which he won't name until it is in place, is a big piece for a sizable park and is intended to connect the Cedar Rapids Library on one side of Greene Square Park and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art on the other.

In the written part of his proposal, Beasley said his piece will be 'a bridge between these important institutions, linking them on an intellectual, spatial and creative plane.”

Langston wasn't bashful about the Board of Supervisors's commitment to invest in Greene Square Park with a piece of public art.

'This really says, and not just to this community, but to anybody who comes to visit, that we value this public space, these are important places in our community,” Langston said. 'So Greene Square, the Museum of Art, the library really become defined as an important part of who we are.”

What is it, she said, that people love about their city and their county?

'I hope when we are done that the whole Greene Square complex will be something that people love, that it will be a gathering place where people feel enriched,” she said.

She pointed to the Cloud Gate sculpture - nicknamed The Bean - in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, and said the coming sculpture in Greene Square may share some things in common with it.

'People may not understand it, but they'll get their pictures taken with it and they'll talk about it,” Langston said. 'So in that respect, the art will do a lot of what we wanted.”

The Linn County supervisors are paying for the Beasley sculpture from the $500,000 sale of the historic Mott Building, which the county had purchased some years ago to demolish for a new county building it never built.

Some of the art budget of $250,000 for Greene Square Park has been used to seek proposals and to bring the three finalists to town.