New sculptures at Conference Center
MONTEREY >> A trio of bronze plaques sculpted by two local artists have been installed in the Monterey Conference Center honoring Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers, who often wrote about the natural world and humans’ role in it.
The three works are bas-relief — rising off the background plane — and created by Will Pettee and Carol Matranga Courtney, of Monterey and Pacific Grove, respectively. The creations were a gift to the city of Monterey’s public art collection.
The $29,000 cost was raised by the trustees of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation.
“The new bronzes at Jeffers Plaza bring life to this stark architectural setting,” said Conference Center General Manager Doug Phillips. “It gives the area a sense of place. The garden plaque, with its textured background, reminds me of an old leather book, inviting the viewer to read the poem.”
Jeffers (1887-1962) was an icon of the early environmental movement whose foretelling poem “The Ice Caps are Melting” included lines like “the mountain glaciers drip into rivers” and “tides ebb and flow, but every year a little higher.” Even more remarkable was that the poem was written in 1960 when scientists were just beginning to understand a climate shift was beginning.
Pettee’s large bronze portrait of Jeffers is fixed upon a wall by the entrance to Jeffers Plaza. Beneath the portrait is Jeffers’ signature taken from a book of his poetry sculpted in bronze. Matranga Courtney’s sculpture, installed in a garden planter at the entrance to the plaza, features a portrait along with lines from the Jeffers poem “The Answer.”
Perched atop Matranga Courtney’s piece is a bronze red-tailed hawk, a symbol that is seen in Jeffers’ work.
“The hawk was his totem animal,” said Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, president of the Tor House Foundation’s board of trustees.
Both Matranga Courtney and Pettee were inspired by celebrated photographer Edward Weston’s photos of Jeffers standing in front of Hawk Tower at Tor House in 1929.
After inviting a number of proposals, Amy Essick, vice president of the Tor House Foundation board of trustees and a Carmel art appraiser, decided on
Pettee and Matranga Courtney. Ruchowitz-Roberts credits Essick with leading the project from beginning to end.
Monterey had previously established Jeffers Plaza, while at the same time the Tor House had wanted to feature public art honoring Jeffers. So the Tor House Foundation approached the city to gauge its interest. The board looked around at what COVID-19 was doing to the region, with food insecurity and people struggling to pay rent, and decided to fund the project themselves rather than soliciting donations.
The Tor House and Tor Tower (torhouse.org) were built by Jeffers In 1914, when he and his wife, Una, first witnessed the beauty of the Carmel/Big Sur coast, Ruchowitz-Roberts said.
The foundation, which is affiliated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is a nonprofit organization of volunteer members established in 1978 to acquire, maintain and provide for public access to Tor House, Hawk Tower and the surrounding gardens.