Featured News | December 12, 2014
The Art in Public Buildings selection committee has chosen artist Dakota Warren of Los Angeles to create a sculpture for the Yellowstone Building at Northwest College (NWC) in Powell.
Warren’s artwork is a monumental sculpture made of glass and tinted concrete entitled Archean Ingress. It will be installed in the summer of 2015.
“I am honored by this opportunity to contribute to Wyoming’s’ public art collection,” Warren said. “Being from a rural community myself, I understand the positive effect that meaningful public art can have on an already charming place like Powell.”
Of the 90 applications received for the project, the committee narrowed the choice to five artists who came to Wyoming to make presentations.
“The overall quality of the pool of applicants challenged committee members to select a single project, a single artist to command attention and to stimulate reflection for passersby for at least several decades to come,” said Richard Wilson, a member of the selection committee. “Dakota Warren presented both a portfolio of completed commissions as well as an engaging proposal for a monumental tower of dyed concrete surrounding two cores of stacked glass.
Wilson noted that Warren’s proposal reflects the state’s unique geology.
“His installation will be seriously massive and playfully colorful. It has the potential to compel wonderment at the interplay between the chromatic solids of the sedimentary surfaces and the translucent glass cores as they are penetrated in varied ways by diurnal and seasonal qualities of local light. It will compel reflection on themes that higher education institutions are charged with exploring: the nature of space and time, the eternal and the evanescent, and the sacred and profane.
“Passing by on Seventh Street, drivers may actually slow down to look and wonder. Public art has that potential.”
The committee included Gerald Giraud, NWC VP Academic Affairs; Neil Hansen, Wyoming Arts Council Board; Fred Ebert, NWC Communications; Deb Williams, NWC Nursing; Dennis Brophy, NWC Social Science; Denise Kelsay, NWC Art & Galleries Coordinator; Renee Tafoya, NWC Art; John Giarrizzo, NWC Art; Richard Wilson, community member; Jerry Rodriguez, community artist; Joel Anderson, architect.
For more information on the Wyoming Art in Public Buildings program, contact Camellia El-Antably at the Wyoming Arts Council, 307-777-5305 or camellia.el-antably@wyo.gov.
The Wyoming Arts Council believes that experiencing the arts should be accessible for all, including people with mental and/or physical disabilities, older adults, military/veterans, people living in institutions and those who lack access to the arts due to geographic isolation, cultural difference and economic hardship.
