Southern Loop ’21

Posted on April 18, 2021 by admin

Just returned today from a series of long drives totaling 2,610 miles that took me down the length of Illinois and through parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Dallas was the prime destination, where I visited Jay for the first time in well over a year.

I drove on crowded Interstates, nearly empty Interstates, U.S. highways, state and county roads, and urban streets, and logged a lot of miles on roads through farmland, forests and small towns. I crossed the Mississippi more than once, including on a bridge that felt so narrow that moving the slightest bit out of your lane would crash you into the side of the bridge or oncoming traffic. Rain poured sometimes, drizzle was common and there was plenty of evidence of a wet spring in the ubiquitous puddles and the lush greenery of the South.

On I-20 east of Shreveport, I spotted a small truck carrying mattresses that had stopped on the right shoulder ahead of me. Then I spotted the mattress he’d dropped in the middle of the road, a few seconds ahead of me. The truck was 50 feet or so further than the mattress; he’d probably stopped to pick it up, but fortunately hadn’t got out of his truck yet. To my left another car was just behind me, so I threaded the needle to the right of the mattress and left of the truck, missing both.

I left metro Chicago mid-morning on April 9, making my way to Carbondale in southern Illinois, and took a short afternoon hike to the Pomona Natural Bridge in Shawnee National Forest. Overnight an enormous thunderstorm passed over that part of the state, and intermittent rain continued the next day as I drove through the southernmost tip of Illinois, a slice of Missouri, the length of West Tennessee and into Mississippi, arriving in Clarksdale after dark.

En route I’d stopped for a couple of hours at Fort Pillow State Park and about half that long in downtown Memphis. Dinner that night was Chinese food from a Clarksdale takeout joint called Rice Bowl.

On the morning of April 11, I took a walk in downtown Clarksdale, then drove south — stopping to mail postcards in Alligator, Mississippi — and spent most of the afternoon at Vicksburg National Military Park.

As the afternoon grew late, I walked around downtown Vicksburg and one of its historic cemeteries. The next day I headed west across the Mississippi River into Louisiana, where I stopped at Poverty Point World Heritage Site, locale of an ancient Indian settlement much older than Cahokia, or the pyramids outside Mexico City for that matter.

I stayed in Dallas from the evening of April 12 to the morning of the 16th, mostly at Jay’s house, though I did visit my nephew Sam and his family, meeting their delightful two-year-old daughter, my grandniece, for the first time.

On the 16th I drove north from Dallas, spending a little time in Paris, Texas. In Oklahoma I headed on small roads to the Talimena Scenic Drive through Winding Stair Mountain National Recreation Area, where I followed its winding (as the name says), up and down two-lane path through near-mountainous terrain. In a thick fog. That was excitement enough for one day, but that didn’t stop me from visiting Heavener Runestone Park toward the end of the afternoon. I spent the night just outside Fort Smith, Arkansas.

The next morning I headed toward Fort Smith and chanced across the picturesque Main Street of Van Buren, a large suburb of Fort Smith, or maybe its mate in a small twin cities. I also looked around the Crawford County Courthouse before crossing the Arkansas River to Fort Smith proper, spending an hour or so at Fort Smith National Historic Site. From there a long and tiring drive took me to Belleville, Illinois for the last night of the trip, stopping only for gas, food and a quick look at the Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel.

The place I stayed in Belleville last night was an inexpensive motel at the end of the town’s downtown shopping and restaurant street. Up earlier than usual this morning, around 7, I took a walk in area’s handsome, near-empty streets and sidewalks. Before leaving town I stopped at the Cathedral of Saint Peter, and a few miles away, Our Lady of the Snows shrine.

That ought to be enough for any trip, I thought, till I saw that the world’s largest catsup bottle in nearby Collinsville as a point of interest on my paper map (I now use both paper and electronic, which complement each other). So I went to see that. Later heading north on I-55, I thought, that ought to be enough for any trip, till I saw the pink elephant.

That is, the Pink Elephant Antique Mall northeast of St. Louis, which I’ve driven by many times over the years, but never stopped at. This time I did and it became the cherry on the sundae of the trip.

Bradley University Walkabout

Posted on April 6, 2021 by admin

Before each Easter comes around, you don’t know whether you’ll get a pleasant early spring day or a chilly late winter one, at least at my latitude. This year, as if to echo the glory of the holiday, we enjoyed a flawless spring day.

Easter Monday and Easter Saturday were pretty nice, too, and on the latter of those two, Ann and I spent much of the afternoon in Peoria, Illinois. During this Vaccine Spring, appointments have proven hard to book close to Cook County, and so I’d found one for her at a pharmacy in Peoria, not far as it happened from the campus of Bradley University.

Since driving down to Peoria, getting the shot, and zipping right back seems like an opportunity wasted to me, we didn’t do that. Bradley was close at hand, so after the shot we took a walk in the springtime sunshine around campus.

Bradley isn’t the grandest or prettiest or most historic campus I’ve ever seen (UVA would contend for all of those, actually), but it had its interests, such as the Hayden-Clark Alumni Center, which fronts a wide lawn.

“Adjoining the circa-1897 Bradley Hall, the center welcomes alumni, students and visitors in a three-story, multi-use building for tours, meetings and special events,” Peoria magazine wrote of the building, which was completed in 2011. “The center’s Shaheen Hall of Pride has become a popular destination, featuring 22 display cases, dioramas and videos that chronicle the university’s growth and influential history.

“Designed by architectural/engineering firm Dewberry, the building incorporates elements of collegiate gothic architecture, such as arches, buttresses and a crenellated tower. The façade is constructed of Indiana limestone, like Bradley Hall and other historic campus buildings.

“Four hand-carved limestone gargoyles sit atop the center. In a gesture of appreciation to the past, two of them are replicas of existing gargoyles on Bradley Hall. The other two are original, overlooking a new view to the west. Technically, they are ‘grotesques,’ rather than gargoyles. Gargoyles are functional — usually as waterspouts and drains — but these are ornamental.”

I have to appreciate a 21st-century building that bothers with gargoyles. Elsewhere, there’s a bronze of Lydia Moss Bradley (1816-1908) in her later years.She founded Bradley Polytechnic Institute in 1897, later to become a university. The statue was erected for the centennial of the school in 1997.

Other campus details that caught my eye follow. A small sampling.
That last one is another bit of Bradley art, “Split Figure: Woman,” by Nita K. Sunderland, an art professor at the university who died only last year.

SoCal Snaps From An Age Ago

Posted on February 21, 2021 by admin

Slightly warmer this weekend, but not enough to melt much snow. That may start happening this week, though I expect the last traces of February snow to linger well into March.

It’s been a year since I went anywhere by airplane. Much of the nation can probably say the same. A year ago, I went to southern California and Texas. Seems like an age ago.

At the apex of the Los Angeles Central Library, there’s a small sculpture depicting a handheld torch. That’s the light of knowledge, I’ve read. Guess knowledge can be a flickering thing, rather than a steady shine. The one on top of the building now is a replacement for the original, which is in an alcove in the Cook Rotunda.

From one exit of the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, you can see a sizable mural of Anthony Quinn.

Artist Eloy Torrez did the work, known as the “Pope of Broadway,” in 1985 and restored it a few years ago.

Grand Park in downtown LA, looking toward City Hall. When we visited the area in 2001, we got closer to the building, but its observation deck was closed.

A Wells Fargo bank in Azusa, California.

In Palm Springs, the “Agua Caliente Women” sculptures, created by Doug Hyde in 1994.

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians have had a long history in the area, very much down to the present. The tribe and its members currently represent the largest single land owner in Palm Springs, according to the tribe’s web site.

Sinclair Dinosaur, Eastern Iowa, 2001

Posted on February 7, 2021 by admin

Here we are in the Mariana Trench of winter. A little later than usual, but well within the scope of a normal winter.

The headline above pretty much says it all. Twenty years ago this month, when we visited eastern Iowa for a long weekend, I spotted a Sinclair dinosaur in that part of the state.

I’d have said at the time that as advertising, the heyday of the Sinclair dinosaur was long over. But I would have been wrong. It’s just that I didn’t see them around much in the Chicago area, so that when I spotted one out of town, it struck me as a novelty, or maybe something left over from an earlier decade. That’s probably why I bothered to take a picture.

Just do a Google image search and plenty of fairly recent green fiberglass dinosaurs appear. Wiki asserts that many of the dinosaur-sporting Sinclair stations are along I-80 in our time, and while I’m not quite sure where in Iowa I took the picture, we weren’t far from that road.

“Sinclair Oil began using an Apatosaurus (then called a Brontosaurus) in its advertising, sales promotions and product labels in 1930. Children loved it,” the blog of the American Oil & Gas Historic Society says, also noting the popular notion at the time that dinosaurs decayed into the oil that mankind had found.

Of course, Sinclair Oil itself has a lot to say about its brontosaurus. I particularly recommend the short video at the Sinclair site about Sinclair at the World’s Fair in 1964.

As a small child, I had a green plastic brontosaurus bank, into whose slot I put pennies, nickels and less frequently other coins. I suspect my mother got it as a premium for buying gas from Sinclair.

The coins in that bank taught me, among other things, that some of the older ones were silver, while the newer ones — not nearly as satisfying as coins — were some weird mix of copper and nickel. I’m fairly sure I actually learned about silver and non-silver coinage from one of my brothers. But having the coins probably promoted me to ask them questions in the first place, such as, why are these different from the others?

Downtown Naperville

Posted on January 21, 2021 by admin

Naperville counts as an edge city, in as much as I understand the term. At about 148,000 people, it could stand alone as a small city — third largest in Illinois, as it happens — and it has a mixed economy: the usual large employers such as the local schools and a hospital, but also Nokia, BP, BMO Harris and North Central College.

For a suburb, Naperville has a remarkably robust downtown core, including retail, office space, and public buildings. After we walked near the river on Saturday, we wandered over to Naperville’s downtown, which isn’t far from the riverwalk.

One reason that downtown has been able to grow, I’ve read, is that long ago the village made sure that the area has a lot of free parking. Want people to drive to your relatively dense town, stop and spend money? Provide free parking. Is that sustainable? I don’t know. Maybe it won’t really be until we all drive electric cars. But for now that brings people in, and encourages them to linger. No worries about feeding the meter.

So simple, so hard for towns who see parking as a revenue stream to understand. I’ll bet whatever revenue Naperville would have gotten from parking fees is vastly outpaced by property tax and sales tax revenue generated by its robust downtown.

Of course, it probably isn’t that simple. Except I have a hunch that it is.

Robust, but not everything’s good, as you’d expect. These are hard times.
There was (to me) a surprising amount of public art downtown, the legacy of a recent public art initiative. For instance, there’s an alley off S. Main St., “Rubin’s Way,” that sports long, twin murals.
One seems to depict idealized modern Naperville.
The other an idealized past Naperville.
“The mural is part of the nonprofit Naperville Century Walk public art initiative and depicts a crowd watching a parade go by. One of the artists, Diosdado ‘Dodie’ Mondero, told the Naperville Sun in 2012 the work is ‘Normal Rockwell-inspired,’ ” the Chicago Tribune reports. Yep.

“At the time of its installation [beginning in 2011], businesses paid $1,000 or more to have their business name on a sign included in the mural, the Sun story said. The cost was $1,000 for a full adult figure, $600 for an adult head and $3,000 for families or groups to be in the scene.”

There’s a petition, with nearly 50,000 signatures now, to add more people of color to the modern wing of the mural.

Not far away, also off Main St., is a mural honoring the Masons, including George Washington and Joseph Naper (1798–1862), founder of Naperville.
Seems Naper was a mason, too. And much else besides — a real 19th-century CV, to quote Wiki: “early Illinois pioneer, ship captain, shipbuilder, businessman, surveyor, state militia officer, soldier, politician, and city planner.”

“Chartered October 2, 1849, Euclid Lodge No. 65 A. F. & A. M. has had a presence throughout downtown Naperville for 170 years, noted Paul Felstrup for the Freemasons during the recent celebration that began with a re-dedication of the Century Walk Masonic Mural ‘Faith, Hope & Charity,’ ” says a site called Pos!tively Naperville.

“Back in 2011, the mural was designed and painted by Naperville artist Marianne Lisson-Kuhn. Formerly gracing the wall at Main and Jefferson outside of Russell’s Dry Cleaners, the mural was relocated to the exterior wall near the intersection of Main Street at Jackson Avenue.”

Also on Main St.
A plaque next it says in part:

HEARTLAND HARVEST 1997

Honoring the soybean, oat, wheat, corn and butterfly-filled landscapes that once dominated the area, this Italian glass tile mosaic pays homage to the historic contributions of Naperville’s family farms…

A block to the east on S. Washington St. is an unusual plaque. Developers don’t get much memorializing, but there is one to Norman Rubin (1929-2010).
It’s at the entrance to a building called Washington Place, a small retail development of Rubin’s that currently includes Athleta, Banana Republic and Ulta as tenants. Just one of a number of local developments for him, since he was instrumental in making downtown Naperville what it is. Him and free parking.

Now I’ve Been to Havana

Posted on November 4, 2020 by admin

Through the marvel that is Google Maps, I located Chinatown. That’s a restaurant in Havana, and we got food to go there for lunch on October 17. Havana, Illinois, of course, a town of about 3,000 on the east bank of the Illinois River.

The streetscapes along the north side of Main Street, including the restaurant. It runs east-west, so has a terminus at the river.
The former Mason County Bank. Now it seems to be partly occupied at least by World of Color, a painting service. Havana is in Mason County, and in fact is the county seat.
Formerly handsome, now dowdy. Ghost lettering is toward the bottom, but I can only make out BROS.

A sign below that, not visible in my pic, says Apple Ducklings Preschool, which I suspect isn’t a going concern anymore.

On the other side of Main is the former Havana National Bank building, repurposed as Havana City Hall.
Waiting for lunch, I had time to walk up and down Main, while Yuriko visited some of the uncrowded antique shops on the street. Crowding, I suspect, is seldom an issue in this Havana.

I took a quick look at the Old Havana Water Tower, uphill from where I started outside Chinatown.
Dating from the late 19th century, the brick water tower is not only on the National Register of Historic Places — detail here — but also is an American Water Landmark, a list I’d never heard of before. Old it may be, but apparently it’s still a functioning part of the local water system.

Not far from the water tower is the Mason County Courthouse.
By my way of thinking, that isn’t a courthouse. It’s an office building for minor bureaucrats. But probably not faceless bureaucrats, since most everyone knows most everyone else around here.

At least there are a handful of memorials on the grounds. One for the Civil War.
The World War.
One for Lincoln. If Lincoln so much as passed through a town in Illinois, stopping only to get a new feedbag for his horse and use the outhouse, there’s going to be a 20th-century marker acknowledging the event.
Downhill from my starting point is Riverside Park. It includes a large bluff overlooking a bit of green space next to the river. According to a plaque, the bluff is called the Havana Mound.
I won’t quote all of the plaque. Enough to say that it says the mound was the site of Mississippian and later Indian “activities,” as well as the first white settlement in Mason County. In the 1830s, a four-story hotel was built there, which also served as a trading post and post office. Of course, Lincoln used to visit. But it didn’t last long, since the building burned down in 1849.

The odd thing about that plaque is the language at the end: Erected in 1984 by Havana Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That’s the first Mormon plaque I think I’ve ever seen.

In case you’re arriving by river, the town has put out a sign.
We sat at a picnic table in the park at the bottom of the bluff, and ate our Chinese food. The park has nice views of the river.
Havana used to be an important river town, back when that was an important mode of transport, but these days it mostly sees barges and tugs.

New Harmony, Indiana, Part 1

Posted on October 28, 2020 by admin

Almost all of our Columbus Day weekend trip — Italian Food Day, as Ann calls it — was spent in Illinois, but on October 12 as we drove north toward home, we crossed into Indiana for a visit to the town of New Harmony on the Wabash River, just across from Illinois.

The Harmony Society, originally from Württemberg, moved to the Indiana Territory in 1814 from Pennsylvania and founded the town. You could call the group utopian, but my impression (from only a dollop of reading) is that they were Lutheran separatists and chiliasts. Or you could call them Indiana Territory communists, since they held all of their property in common, before that meant being reds.

Even so, they made a go of it, prospering before selling the site and moving back to Pennsylvania in 1825 at the direction of their leader, George Rapp. “They produced quality products including textiles, rope, barrels, tin ware, leather goods, candles, bricks and much more using the latest machinery and technology available,” the Visit New Harmony web site says.

“Because beverages were in demand [I’ll bet] in neighboring and river towns, wine, whiskey and beer were produced in large quantities. The daily production of whiskey was about 32 gallons and 500 gallons of beer were brewed every other day.”

Welch industrialist Robert Owen bought the place in the 1820s, all 2,000 acres of it, with his own utopian experience in mind. His was a more straightforward failure.

“Owen’s ‘Community of Equality,’ as the experiment was known, dissolved by 1827, ravaged by personal conflicts and the inadequacies of the community in the areas of labor and agriculture,” the University of Southern Indiana explains.

Yet the history of the town didn’t stop when the second experiment did. Scientific and other intellectual activity continued in New Harmony through much of the 19th century, and structures unusual in a Hoosier town rose throughout much of the 20th century. In our time, the restored 19th-century structures and the modernist touches of the 20th century make for an interesting amalgam.

We parked in the lot near the New Harmony Atheneum and started our walk around town.

“Clad in white porcelain panels and glass attached to a steel frame, the structure was the first major commission for the now internationally acclaimed architect Richard Meier,” Indiana Landmarks says.

“Built as a visitors’ center for the town [in 1979], the structure is designed to guide visitors along a specific route through the building, with overlaying grids offering frequent views of the surrounding buildings and countryside. From a spacious deck on the roof, visitors can look out over the town and take in views of the Wabash River.”

We would have done all that, but the Atheneum was closed — for Monday, not the pandemic. So on we went, a few leafy blocks to the Roofless Church.

The Roofless Church is behind this wall, one of four brick walls forming a rectangle.

Inside the walls.

The structure was erected by the Robert Lee Blaffer Trust, according to a plaque. Jane Blaffer Owen, Humble Oil heiress, founded the organization in honor of her oilman father, and she and her husband, Kenneth Owen, a descendant of Robert Owen, proved instrumental in reinventing New Harmony in the 20th century (she died in 2010, he in 2002).

“Further down North Street and through a gap in a brick wall there is hidden a modernist masterpiece by the architect Philip Johnson, completed in 1960,” says Atlas Obscura.

“It is called the Roofless Church and it says something about how much we expect our building to have roofs, that when people see the shingled structure in the images, they often say, ‘that’s silly, that’s a roof right there.’

“But the church is not simply that space, it is a city block sized footprint of which only a part is enclosed. The curved parabola dome is actually a protective cover for a beautiful sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz.”

Elsewhere within the perimeter of the Roofless Church are trees and benches and small gardens. The east wall has a gate.

We walked around a pond not far from the Roofless Church.

Near its edge is the Chapel of the Little Portion, built by the New Harmony Inn and Franciscan Brothers, and dedicated to St. Francis.

There’s a statue of St. Francis by the pond as well. I keep running into him. Actually, Francis and the Angel of the Sixth Seal by David Kocka.

New Harmony isn’t very large, so we wandered from the pond — past the MacLeod Barn Abbey — into the main commercial part of the town in a few minutes. There you can find some handsome restored buildings, such as the Johnson United Methodist Church.

The Opera House.

A commercial building, at least part of which dates from 1910.

A private house (I assume) with Asian design elements.

Rappite Community House No. 2, erected 1816-22.

If you own everything in common, you’re going to live in communal housing.

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, Carbondale

Posted on October 19, 2020 by admin

During the early planning for our recent trip, I didn’t give Carbondale, Illinois, much thought as a possible destination, but then Ann mentioned a park there she’d heard about from a friend who used to live in the area. After a little further investigation, I worked Carbondale, especially the park, into our plans.

“A vocal fan of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, Jeremy ‘Boo’ Rochman was tragically killed in a car accident at the young age of 19,” Atlas Obscura says. “To honor his memory, his father bought a parcel of land across the street from their home in order to build a memorial park. His late son’s passion was for the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, so his father decided to turn the park into a fantasy land that his son would have been proud of.”

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park is on the outskirts of Carbondale. When you arrive, various painted concrete creatures greet you.

Including an enormous dragon, good for climbing, if you’re agile enough.
The “castle” — the whole place is sometimes called Castle Park or Boo Castle Park — is a wood and stone structure with an elaborate set of passageways and stairs for kids to climb around.

With plenty of figures of its own.

The park wasn’t overrun with people, but we did notice a birthday party off in one corner.If ever there were a good place for a children’s birthday, this is it.

FAST Fiberglass

Posted on September 17, 2020 by admin

Also not far out of Sparta, Wisconsin, is property belonging to FAST Fiberglass, until recently known as FAST Corp., which specializes in fabricating fiberglass statues.

Or, as its web site puts it [all sic]: “The next time you see a life size elephant at a gas station, 8 foot high cheese mouse at the store, 6 foot frog water slide, 20 foot high flamingo, or 3-story eyeball you can bet the piece originated in Sparta Wisconsin at FAST Fiberglass.”

This concerns me how? Turns out that the property is also an informal tourist destination. As a fairly informal tourist, the prospect of visiting the place intrigued me. Not the manufacturing facilities themselves, but rather the large patch of land where the company stashes the molds it uses to make statues.
A large sign welcomes visitors, but warns them as well.
We heeded those warnings and didn’t climb the molds or disturb bee or wasp colonies. We merely looked around the weedy dumping ground, and were well rewarded by the whimsy of it all.Look! A Big Boy. I explained to Ann what that was.
More oddities.

A muffler man? Maybe.
Old Scratch.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do?
Also, the field sported a large number of animal casts.

Including animal shapes made into slides — the kind you see at kiddie pools.

FAST Fiberglass was our last destination for our recent Labor Day weekend jaunt, and I’d say we ended things on an odd but satisfying high note.

Paul & Matilda Wegner Grotto County Park

Posted on September 16, 2020 by admin

Less than 10 miles from Sparta, Wisconsin, along a state highway, is the Paul & Matilda Wegner Grotto County Park, the county being Monroe, whose seat is Sparta. We arrived there early in the afternoon of September 6. Here’s the entrance to the grotto.
It isn’t a grotto in the sense of being a natural or artificial cave, or any other sense that I know of. Call it a sculpture garden? The Wegners didn’t sculpt, except in the sense of creating distinct three-dimensional shapes from raw materials. Anyway, the grounds feature naïve works created by German immigrant farmers, mostly made of concrete and shards of glass and other shiny bits.

Note the texture of one of their works up close. Look but don’t touch, unless you want a wound.
The Kohler Foundation tells the story: “In the summer of 1929 on their farm, [the Wegners] began building fences, and within a year their first sculpture: a twelve-foot concrete facsimile of the celebrated Bremen ocean liner.

“The building continued from 1929 until after 1936, primarily during the summer months; however, many pieces, including the walls of the church, were created in Bangor [Wis.] during the winter and then transported to the farm for installation. The extraordinary sculpture environment slowly grew over these years to include a fanciful American flag, a giant reproduction of the Wegners’ 50th anniversary cake, and a glass-encrusted birdhouse.

“Other constructions were religious in nature. The magnificent Prayer Garden, Glass Church, and Peace Monument once served as places for quiet reflection, wedding ceremonies, public preaching, family picnics, and community gatherings. Still surrounding the yard is an ornate fence with a concrete archway, which spells out the word ‘Home’ in crushed black glass.”

Here’s the Bremen, inspired by a postcard picture.
The Glass Church.
People get married there from time to time, according to the plaque (in front of the structure would be my guess), and Paul Wegner’s funeral was held there as well. The back of the Glass Church:
More structures. First is “Jabob’s Well.”

A sign outside the grotto said that a cemetery with glass-and-stone memorials wasn’t far away. So it was: a spare little rural cemetery.

Glass is part of the Wegners’ memorial.
Along with a few others. Guess they liked the style.
What does the Kohler Foundation have to do with the site where old German farmers deciding to create glass-and-stone shapes? Kohler is plumbing money and based in Wisconsin. At some point in its existence, the foundation decided to find and preserve outsider art installations such as the Wegner Grotto which, in fact, was one of its conservation projects.

“Since the late 1970s, the preservation of folk architecture and art environments has been a major thrust of Kohler Foundation,” the foundation explains, including a list of sites on the page. Many but not all are in Wisconsin.

“After a site has been either acquired by or gifted to us, local and expert partners selected by Kohler Foundation employ museum-quality conservation techniques to preserve the site. The site is then gifted to a museum, municipality, university, or other nonprofit institution for the education and enjoyment of the public. We then work with the recipient and local community to ensure the future success of the project.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Public Art