“It looks like it’s going to fall," another woman in a small crowd of observers told sculptor Hunter Brown, who is based in Little Rock, Ark., and made the 650-mile journey this week to oversee the installation onto a concrete block.
“That’s our favorite part of it,” Brown said. “That makes it fun.”
In person, the shiny, brushed-stainless-steel, 25-foot-tall artwork called Embrace definitely looked more dramatic than it did in earlier images that had been made public, observers said.
"We really love making works that are kind of more abstract, where everybody can kind of interpret it how they want," Brown said.
“We’re so happy to have it standing up. My heart rate’s still trying to get back down.”
Because of physical distancing recommended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials do not plan a dedication ceremony for the sculpture until probably next year, said Taylor Stone-Welch, vice president of the non-profit City of Sculpture organization, which raised money for the sculpture privately.
The sculpture, one of the city’s few in non-park areas on Hamilton’s West Side, was commissioned to celebrate the 20th year of when then-Gov. Bob Taft declared Hamilton to be a City of Sculpture.
Brown said he’s looking forward to when the future grassy area is landscaped around the nearly 8,000-pound artwork. The small island of land east of the intersection was created when construction crews altered the angles of the intersection,, changing what were sharp angles that contributed to large numbers of crashes, into a 90-degree crossing that officials say should be much safer.
Because of the safety factors involved, the Ohio Department of Transportation contributed 90 percent of the intersection-alteration’s costs — not the sculpture — to get it done.
The state contributed similar amounts to making the intersection of High Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard safer. It also made similar arrangements with the city for the now-under-construction interchange of Main Street, McKinley Avenue, Western Avenue, Haldimand Avenue and Cereal Avenue, which was a tangle of nearby streets and dangerous angles.
Brown said his sculpture is “cool to look at from far away, and it also has a presence in the space with how big it is, but it also helps you want to walk around underneath it and look at how the different intersections (of curving steel) happen, and the negative space in there.”
“It’s literally changing from every angle you look at it,” Brown said. “You’ll get a whole different feel from over here. You go over there, it looks even more cantilevered back.”
Brown said he put his “favorite angles” the sculpture should be seen from in directions where most people are likely to see it from,
Jeff Bauer of Fort Wright, Ky.;, who has been a crane operator since 1991, said he has installed and moved a variety of sculptures through the years, in the Hamilton area and elsewhere.
The trickiest part was figuring out where to place the nylon lifting straps to hoist the curving, interwined steel pieces so it would lift properly, he said.
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