Kent State to Dedicate Sculpture Mile Wednesday

Kent State University will hold a dedication ceremony for the Kent State University Sculpture Walk Wednesday at 10 a.m.

The sculpture walk currently consists of four works of art along the University Esplanade, the pedestrian walkway crossing campus. Kent State has plans to add more pieces on campus and extend the walkway into the city of Kent and downtown.

Free and open to the public, the dedication begins at 10 a.m. in the Kent Student Center Kiva during the university’s annual Spring for the Arts week. A coffee bar and refreshments will be available prior to the start of the program. The program includes a slideshow of the public art pieces, brief comments from a representative from the Ohio Arts Council and the four artists whose art appears along the sculpture walk. The artists are:

• Cleveland sculptor Giancarlo Calicchia – The piece, titled Athleta, is part of Calicchia’s series The Witnesses. The stones used in the piece were all created from boulders left behind after the glaciers retreated. Calicchia excavated the granite monoliths, some as deep as 12 feet, from his vineyard and surrounding farm in Madison Township in Lake County..

• Kenyon College art professor Barry Gunderson of Gambier, OH – His piece is called Eye to Eye and is a response to the human mind and how it works. It also is a tribute to the Department of Psychology.

• Susan Ewing, associate dean of the School of Fine Arts at Miami University and resident of Oxford, OH – Her piece, titled Starsphere 2010, relates to the First Amendment of the Constitution and is aptly located near the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the north end of Franklin Hall in the University Esplanade Circle.

• Sculptor Jarrett Hawkins of Deer Park, OH – His abstract piece, Limits of Spoken Language: Congeries, made of Corten Steel is located in Risman Plaza (the plaza in front of the Kent Student Center).

Following the program, attendees will be encouraged to visit the public art pieces and learn more about them from the artists responsible for these works, weather permitting.

The four works of art that appear along the University Esplanade are part of the Ohio Percent for Art Program. A 13-member committee that included staff members from Kent State’s Office of the University Architect, university employees, two members from the local art community and a regional member from the Cleveland area, along with the Ohio Arts Council, chose the artists from a pool of applicants, all of whom are artists from Ohio. The finalists were chosen after presenting their sculpture concept proposals.

The Ohio Percent for Art Program requires that 1 percent of state funds of $4 million or more for building or renovation be used for the commissioning or acquiring and installing art works. The law was established in 1990 by the Ohio Legislature, and it is administered by the Ohio Arts Council. Kent State’s project, the Kent State University Sculpture Walk, was the idea of Tom Euclide, the university’s associate vice president for facilities planning and operations.

The city and community will be adding more art to the walk as Kent’s downtown development project continues. Several pieces have already been commissioned by Kent developer Ron Burbick for inclusion within , a retail development in downtown Kent.

To watch a video about the sculpture walk, visit www.kent.edu/news/video/sculpturewalk.cfm. To view an interactive map of all of the sculptures on the Kent Campus, visit http://maps.kent.edu/sculptures.html.