WSU sculpture singing again

The wind sings   Following is a guest essay by Richard H. Miller, Center for Distance and Professional Education   Miller The wind sings when I’m trying to work.   It’s given voice by Doug Hollis’ kinetic sculpture “Persona,” four sound-generating weather vanes that spin outside my window at WSU’s Van Doren Hall. The vanes are mounted in a circle, held together by a mesh ring showing the points of the compass.   The sound shifts with the wind. Sometimes it’s a person blowing into a bottle, or the call of a whale. Sometimes, a man plays a saw. The vanes move. A ghost moans. I imagine a gauze-clad woman come to avenge her death.   Why “Persona”? Is Hollis saying we’re weather vanes, our beliefs changing with the wind? Or is the sculpture the persona, inhaling wind and exhaling sound? Perhaps the sound is the persona, spun into life from metal and air.   I check out Hollis on the Internet. He has made rain fall through the center of a building, turned beach chairs into harps, planted 950 wind vanes at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He created a foggy beach, complete with boulders and 486 “fog nozzles” in front of the San Jose Civic Center. In other words, he turns civic landscapes into works of art that send people into a reverie. He makes us wonder when we should be working.   “Persona” is mounted on top of Terrell Library. It’s named after Glenn Terrell, the University president from 1967 to 1985. By all accounts, he was an excellent president, sometimes called the “Students’ President,” partly because he stopped to chat with everyone as he walked to work from his home on the west side of campus to his office on the east side. A scholarship is named for him, as is the Terrell Friendship Mall. The records from Terrell’s presidential years take 39 feet of shelf space in the WSU archives, a long shadow to cast, even if it is made of paper.   My own Van Doren Hall is named after Nancy Van Doren, college librarian and English professor here from 1892 from 1905. The hall turned 100 last year. It shares its centennial with the Model T, and the last time that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.   A century can seem like forever – especially to Cubs fans – but it’s a blip in time compared to wind music, which dates to 6 B.C. Back then, ancient Greeks lay around on the lawn and grooved to the sound of Aeolian wind harps, much like the WSU students who sometimes loaf in the sun near “Persona.”   Clearly, the wind is to blame for this lassitude. We try to stay on-task, but the wind shifts, the vanes turn, and the archaic song continues afresh.

“Persona,” WSU’s metal kinetic wind sculpture, is singing again.

Since its installation on Terrell Library plaza in 2000, the slightest breeze or the strongest wind has caused the sculpture to “sing” by capturing wind and sending it through metal tubes.

This summer, however, the sculpture lost its voice. Severe wind storms in June left two of the sculpture’s metal fins “hanging by a thread and they were deemed dangerous” to those on the plaza and those on Rogers Field outside next to the library, said Keith Wells, WSU Museum of Art curator of exhibitions/collections manager. A fence was put around the sculpture and it sat silent.

Fabrication Specialties Limited spent about four weeks repairing the damaged fins in its Seattle shop. On Sept. 9, Trace Taft and Bill Hicks of the firm reinstalled the fins, said Terry Baxter-Potter, a WSU Capital Planning & Development project manager.

“Persona” is one of several sculptures on the university’s campus commissioned by the WSU Campus Arts Committee through the Washington State Arts Commission’s Art in Public Places program. Funds from the commission paid for the repairs.

Nationally know sculptor Doug Hollis of the San Francisco Bay Area created “Persona.” His works include at least three others in the state, A Sound Garden and Water Works, both in Seattle, and A Tidal Park in Port Townsend.

Wells and Baxter-Potter say they are happy the sculpture is back in action.

“Thanks to all who were concerned and told us the sculpture needed repairs and those who called with concerns as it was being repaired to check on its progress,” Wells said. “People being attached to the sculpture enough to get involved, illustrates the importance of campus art.”