Outcry Over Temporary Art Installation
A swath of plastic, tulle and tarp is now “gone with the wind,” as one local phrased it.
Following its installation in Warsaw Memorial Park on Thursday last week, a new art piece, funded by a grant awarded by the Arts Council for Wyoming County (ACWC), has been dismantled.
Public outcry and a slew of phone calls which began pouring into the ACWC on Thursday evening made sure of that.
“We had to take it down because there was major public outcry,” said Jacqueline Hoyt, executive director of the ACWC, during a Monday afternoon call. “We had just some really nasty comments – people wanted it out of there before the Fourth of July.”
Community members like Crystal Hilton, who said that a weekend visit to Yummies, with the fence in plain view, left her feeling like “yuck,” were appalled by the piece.
“I was like... why is there garbage plastic bags blown all over?” Hilton commented. “And I wondered why it never got cleaned up.”
Others, like Charles Goulet, couldn’t believe anyone had the audacity to call it “art.”
“As you drive by, this looks like plastic bags blown onto a barbed wire fence near some farmer’s garbage pit,” Goulet said. “Who in their right mind would figure this, or any similar piece, need be 300 feet long? It is most certainly an eyesore.”
He was not alone in his assessment.
“As someone who has endured 60-plus years of our winters, this installation doesn’t reflect my winter experience,” Ken Wisz, of Attica, added via email. “I used to drive a tractor trailer hauling municipal garbage to the landfill. That’s what I get the feeling of – garbage blown into the landfill’s fence line on a windy day.”
Some even went so far as to deem the piece “disrespectful” – and Hoyt hopes the community knows that was never, ever the ACWC’s intention.
“There’s just a lack of understanding of abstract art,” Hoyt said. “But Warsaw is part of a community we serve, and we wanted to be respectful of that based on the outcry. We were not trying to be disrespectful. That’s why it’s not there anymore.”
And so officials and volunteers with the ACWC spent an “upsetting weekend” removing the abstract piece, which would have remained in place until the second week of July, as they stripped away 100 feet of materials meant to represent brutal winter winds, agrarian society and traversing the harsh, snowcovered landscape known to all who call Wyoming County home.
“People were driving by cheering and giving high fives that it was being taken down,” Hoyt said. “It was just an upsetting weekend.”
But it has shed some light on a larger topic – that of community engagement as it relates to the arts. And for that, at the very least, Hoyt is thankful.
“Thank you to the individuals who took the time to visit the piece, call or email the ACWC with [their] comments,” Hoyt said. “It was good to see this active engagement regarding a piece of art.