Ugly Monuments
My son's elementary school has some of the ugliest public art I've ever seen at a public school. The best ones I've seen let the kids design clay tiles and install mosaics on the walls, which works well, because it lets the kids have a dominant voice in how the project works, and it's almost always cheerful and colorful. It also reflects the very communal nature of public school, and I think it lets kids feel that they have somehow sidestepped the authority figures. But this school, yuck, there's this big black bronze boogie man mounted on lava rocks out in the recess yard, and it pretty much looks the thing in my drawing here. I'm not really exaggerating. The bronze figure is only about five feet high and on the stone pedestal it's only about another two or three feet, so it isn't very imposing either. One of my son's teachers told me that it's supposed to be a respresentation of a character from a Hawaiian petroglyph, which is fine, but I've seen those petroglyphs, and their beautiful. This thing is just a sloppy, ugly hunk of bronze, and I can't say the casting was well done either. It's head looks like a football with a hole torn open for the mouth. There's also this beaten wallmounted copper thing over by the office which is much worse, and it's the color of shit. It's supposed to be an american flag with the hands of children somehow pushing up under the material, and a combat helmet sticking out of the upper left corner, the thing is ridged along the stripes of the flag but the welds along the top of the ridges are big and gloppy and it doesnt look like the artist put much of an effort to grind down those welds. The hands are beaten out from the other side, but when you're beating a metal you have to keep heating it as it hardens from all that hammering, otherwise it just becomes unworkable, and they look like she stopped halfway through all of them probably realizing that the piece of copper she was working with was too thick for that idea. The end result is four or five tiny warty frog hands randomly placed around the edges of the sculpture. Just yucky...
My son's elementary school has some of the ugliest public art I've ever seen at a public school. The best ones I've seen let the kids design clay tiles and install mosaics on the walls, which works well, because it lets the kids have a dominant voice in how the project works, and it's almost always cheerful and colorful. It also reflects the very communal nature of public school, and I think it lets kids feel that they have somehow sidestepped the authority figures. But this school, yuck, there's this big black bronze boogie man mounted on lava rocks out in the recess yard, and it pretty much looks the thing in my drawing here. I'm not really exaggerating. The bronze figure is only about five feet high and on the stone pedestal it's only about another two or three feet, so it isn't very imposing either. One of my son's teachers told me that it's supposed to be a respresentation of a character from a Hawaiian petroglyph, which is fine, but I've seen those petroglyphs, and their beautiful. This thing is just a sloppy, ugly hunk of bronze, and I can't say the casting was well done either. It's head looks like a football with a hole torn open for the mouth. There's also this beaten wallmounted copper thing over by the office which is much worse, and it's the color of shit. It's supposed to be an american flag with the hands of children somehow pushing up under the material, and a combat helmet sticking out of the upper left corner, the thing is ridged along the stripes of the flag but the welds along the top of the ridges are big and gloppy and it doesnt look like the artist put much of an effort to grind down those welds. The hands are beaten out from the other side, but when you're beating a metal you have to keep heating it as it hardens from all that hammering, otherwise it just becomes unworkable, and they look like she stopped halfway through all of them probably realizing that the piece of copper she was working with was too thick for that idea. The end result is four or five tiny warty frog hands randomly placed around the edges of the sculpture. Just yucky... 
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