Cd'A may fork over funds for different types of public art
LISA JAMES/Press A man walks by ‘Forks in the Road,’ a public sculpture on Fourth Street in midtown Coeur d’Alene. The sculpture has been damaged by motorists, and fixed by the city, a few times since it was installed.
The forks are not named for a waterway or a highway intersection.
They cannot be used to spear peas.
The two oversized eating utensils, stationed along Fourth Street in Coeur d’Alene’s midtown neighborhood, are one of more than 149 pieces of public art in Coeur d’Alene, and they carry the distinction of having twice been struck by cars.
“Vehicles appear to have jumped the curb and bent tines on the forks,” said Sam Taylor, deputy city administrator.
The metal tines of the forks, officially called “Forks in the Road,” an original work by Coeur d’Alene artist Jason Sanchez, needed repair. There is a fund for that, but how the city allocates money for public art and its maintenance, and how it designates art, is changing.
The City Council at its May 2 meeting will address a revision of the ordinance that outlines how public art is defined, funded and cared for.
At a committee meeting this week, Taylor asked for the City Council members to re-evaluate the city’s arts commission agreement, which defines art as physical and tactile. He asked that other types of art, including the performing arts, be added into the funding mix.
“We believe it’s time … to expand the funding for other forms of art,” Taylor said.
When the city’s ordinance to fund public art — which allocates 1.33 percent of the value of capital improvement projects to buy and maintain a burgeoning collection of indoor and outdoor street, mural and park art — was adopted in the late 1990s, many members of the art commission and City Council had an inflexible view of public art.
At the time, art equaled sculptures.
“They wanted to make sure they had hardware,” City Council member Dan Gookin said. “The language of the agreement was that it was basically only for sculptures.”
When Gookin brought a suggestion to the council to help fund the local symphony, he was told the funding agreement didn’t allow it.
Since then, he and other council members as well as members of the arts commission, frustrated with the language of the ordinance, have been on a path toward revision in an effort to embrace a wide variety of art.
“There’s more to art than that, and we have a very active arts community here,” Gookin said.
Arts Commission Chairman Jennifer Drake said the commission’s goal from the start has been to promote art for art’s sake.
“The original intent of the commission was to support all sorts of art,” Drake said.
Lining up the ordinance to support performing arts in addition to physical art brings the commission’s reason to exist back into full focus.
Under the newly-worded ordinance, art will no longer be defined as only physical art, but will also include art education, art partnerships, visual and performing arts. The ordinance also calls for all public arts funds to be combined into one budget instead of being split into separate maintenance and purchasing budgets.
On a rainy Tuesday, the forks, repaired to the tune of $2,500, and painted a stony gray, accentuated a piece of the sidewalk on the 800 block of N. Fourth Street. Inside nearby Gizmo, a nonprofit makerspace, instructor Barbara Pleason-Mueller had her own take on the proposed changes to the city’s art ordinance.
The ordinance should be inclusive, she said.
“Art is art whether it is permanent or transitional,” Pleason-Mueller said. “It affects people in a positive way and gives them something to think about and relate to.”