(Image: Seattle Office of Arts & Culture)
The first installation of an artist’s new “quiet space for communal mourning and personal contemplation” is lighting the northeast corner of Cal Anderson Park.
The first of three stations in Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s sculptural Ribbon of Light installation in the park debuted early this month as Capitol Hill nonprofit Gay City hosted a World AIDS Day commemoration marking 40 years since the first cases of the virus were identified.
The new work is part of the AIDS Memorial Pathway connecting the park to The AMP Plaza and Capitol Hill Station.
(Image: Seattle Office of Arts & Culture)
CHS reported here on the transition of the pathway to become part of City of Seattle’s art collection. The pathway was dedicated this summer. The pathway’s centerpiece rises in the Capitol Hill Station Plaza and elegantly incorporates a large block full of transit system utilities. Artist Christopher Paul Jordan’s andimgonna-misseverybody is a giant X made from speakers, a 20 foot by 20 foot structure, designed by the artist to represent X as a positive symbol turned on its axis to erode the perceived binary between HIV positive and HIV negative people and symbolizing a solidarity between the two.
The We’re Already Here installations from design firm Civilization, meanwhile, consist of bright signs bearing messages from “collective action” — protests, demonstrations, rallies, and campaigns — from the activism around the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Hung-Yan Law’s works now add to the pathway with the first station in place in a series of three laminated glass sculptures that will be placed along the landscaped pathway adjacent to the main trail of the park. The artwork is inspired by “the words of poets impacted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” and meant to represent pieces of the sky that have fallen to the ground.
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Was any thought at all given to the graffiti problem at the park?
I mean this isn’t the worst public art we have in Seattle — and the bar is set so low on that that it’s practically below ground — but a lighted sculpture like this is going to be a magnet for graffiti…which will, if history is guide, only be removed sporadically.
At best.
So we shouldn’t do anything nice because of graffiti?
If you want to get rid of graffiti, eliminate tax cuts on the wealthy and fund our failed education system, don’t eliminate artwork.