Metal sculptors’ pieces to greet visitors to city in eastern Ohio
In every cardinal direction heading into Akron, a towering metal sculpture will soon greet motorists.
Four steel installations celebrating Akron’s musical heritage, its connections to nature, industry and its global ties will begin to appear on sidewalks along four major roads Friday — to be installed by their creators with help from the city.
The pieces, some weighing hundreds of pounds and all standing at or above 10 feet, are the work of local artists John Comunale and Michael Marras. For much of the past 15 months, using cranes and industrial equipment, the two have designed, welded, stamped, torched, shaped, punched, bolted and unbolted massive pieces of stainless steel, aluminum and iron into Akron-centric themes.
Comunale’s creations pay homage to the city’s rubber past and global future. Marras celebrates its music and natural spaces.
At the private viewing Wednesday in their studio on the sixth floor of Canal Place, overlooking what was once the largest rubber-making industrial park in the world, Mayor Dan Horrigan mingled with guests and congratulated the artists on their work.
The city commissioned the pieces for $50,000. ArtsNow, a local nonprofit, and AMP Strategy, a marketing firm, also donated $12,500 of time and labor for the project. Pieces like these are typically worth much more, the city figured.
For his part, Horrigan did not want to tell the artists what to create. “Let them dream,” Horrigan said. “This is about supporting public art.”
Inviting the world
“When I think of Akron,” Comunale, 67, said, “I think of looking up in the air and seeing the blimp.”
Sitting atop an arched steel scaffold, the frame of Comunale’s first piece hoists the bowed frame of a metal blimp that reads in red, white and blue: “WELCOME TO AKRON.”
Standard on each piece are the greetings, the font — gotham black — and the current mayor’s name.
Drivers headed south from Cuyahoga Falls will be able to crane their necks ever so slightly to see Comunale’s metal balloon leaning in the rain or the sunshine over Main Street. His other piece, a hollow globe with the Earth’s watery surfaces represented in empty spaces, will commemorate the city’s worldly melting pot of newly arriving immigrants and those who built the city, as well as its aspirations of being a gracious host of global businesses. Atop a metal pedestal, the stainless steel globe will appear on Canton Road for motorists heading north.
Comunale, an Akron native and cousin of local politician Frank Comunale, used to work on movie props, traveling the country in the 1970s and 1980s.
Finally fed up, his last job was on the set of The Last of the Mohicans.
He returned to family in Akron and heard an ad on WKSU about renting space in an old rubber factory. Twenty-six years later, he’s walled himself up in a corner on the sixth floor, where Marras now rents his own room.
An artist returns
Marras, 34, sought to celebrate the city’s musicians and place on the doorstep of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, its green spaces crisscrossing a canal that stretches north and south like a backbone.
A Firestone Park native, Marras moved away after high school. He traveled with art and music festivals before studying computer design at Full Sail University in Orlando, Fla. There, he took an apprenticeship with a master metal sculptor, learning to convert his digital creations into something sturdy “you can kick and feel,” he said.
But something always beckoned him home to Akron’s industrial heritage and its enduring spirit to make and fill empty spaces with life.