Works by 12 sculptors will add to the attraction of the Oak Park Arts District on Harrison Street during the sixth annual Oak Park Sculpture Walk, May 12-Sept 5.
“There will be sculptures sprinkled throughout the arts district,” said Camille Wilson White, executive director of the Oak Park Area Arts Council which organizes the event. The sculptures were selected by a jury of the Public Arts Committee of the Arts Council.
“There are no restrictions on people who want to apply to the Sculpture Walk,” Wilson White said. “We have large pieces, we have smaller pieces. We have pieces that are made out of all different kinds of materials.”
Presenting sculptors are from Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, Chicago and downstate Illinois. Local sculptors whose work is featured are Margot McMahon of Oak Park and Shencheng Xu of Wilmette.
McMahon’s concern for the environment is reflected in her interactive piece, “Ecosystem No. 1.” A sign reading, “Please Feed Me Water Only” is on a plant stand holding a blue cone-shaped bowl. A sedum garden is at the top of the stand with figures of two bright blue dancers above it. A solar panel is mounted on one leg of the stand.
“What I wanted to do was make it a symbol of the ecosystem. People and nature have to work together,” McMahon explained. “So, in this sculpture there is a request for people to add water to the blue cone. If there’s water in the blue cone, when the sun passes by the solar panel, it pumps the water up and then the wind spins the spinners around and that drops water onto a sedum garden.”
The sculptor’s secondary goal with this sculpture is showing the “beauty of sedum,” she added. “There’s a drought-resistant plant that is absolutely spectacular in its diversity, its color, its flowers.”
McMahon noted that sedum is widely used on rooftop gardens. “I wanted to bring the beauty of a rooftop garden down to eye level,” she said.
McMahon has sculptures in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chicago Botanic Garden, among many others.
“The commonality of my sculptures is they’re all based on lifeforms,” she said. “My ongoing theme is that we are all connected to nature and interrelated with nature.”
Three brightly-colored caterpillars with human faces seem to crawl along in Xu’s playful sculpture, “Catch Up.”
Xu, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, has had five solo exhibitions and has public sculptures in numerous Chicago area locations as well as in Beijing, China.
The sculptor reported that he always tries to create sculptures that will impact his audience. He thought that young children would enjoy “kind of playing” with “Catch Up.” “I’m not recommended that they climb on it,” he laughingly added, although the painted fiberglass pieces, which have a steel frame inside, are very sturdy.
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“I use happy faces on a lot of my sculpture pieces,” Xu said. “I hope my audience gets a surprise when they look at it. I like to combine the human form and the organic form together, kind of like ‘Alice in Wonderland.'”
Oak Park Sculpture Walk
When: May 12-Sept. 5
Where: Harrison Street between Austin Boulevard and Ridgeland Avenue
Information: www.oakparkareaartscouncil.org