Linda Frenette, director of Cary Visual Art, hopes to take the organization in a new direction in public art.
'Community,' by Dawn Stetzel, is at Ashworth Drugs in Cary.BY LIZZIE MUNRO - Correspondent
CARY -- Over the past 13 years, this quiet suburban town has become a center of public art in the Triangle. Thanks to the nonprofit Cary Visual Art, dozens of pieces of freestanding sculpture and other works have appeared around town, far more than anywhere else. Only Chapel Hill comes close.
But now the arts organization, which began as a committee of the Chamber of Commerce in 1996, is taking a risk. Two months ago it hired a director who wants to move beyond the predictable and expose Cary to new trends in public art.
"I'm a little bit unconventional, and I'll be seeking the unusual," CVA director Linda Frenette said at a community meeting last month.
Frenette is familiar with the local arts scene, having been executive director of Raleigh's Visual Art Exchange for six years until 2005. Most recently she managed the Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra.
What she has in mind for Cary is interactive and participatory art, in which the entire community becomes involved in an artist's project. With that in mind, she began researching thousands of artists and chose one -- British artist Helen Marshall -- whose work stood out.
Last month, Cary Visual Art brought Marshall here for several days to get a feel for the place, and possibly to do a major piece of public art.
"Bringing Helen here is something that I dreamed about when I accepted the position," Frenette said when she introduced Marshall at the lecture at Cary Town Hall.
In describing Marshall's work, she told the audience, "It's creative, it's innovative, but it makes an impact .... Her coming to Cary is an opportunity for us to embark on a community-wide project that is creative, conceived by the community, implemented by the community, and ultimately owned and enjoyed ... by the community."
Marshall works primarily in Britain, but she has also worked in Japan, Germany, China and Africa. This would be her first commissioned project in the United States. Trained in both photography and fine arts, Marshall uses primarily lens-based media, though her work sometimes involves installation, digital editing, sound, or text.
"I'm an ideas artist," she said. "Although I have trained in specific mediums like photography, I also like to explore ideas and find the right mediums to use for the right project, so I usually start from ideas before I decide how I'm going to make something."
Much of Marshall's work has been based on collaboration with a community, such as her outdoor piece called "The Big Picture," the largest photo mosaic in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World records.
Comprised of 112,896 photographs that people submitted, it was assembled by volunteers and covered nearly 3,000 square feet on the ground in front of a science museum in Birmingham, England. Together, the photo images depicted a 1926 photograph of a 17-year-old training to box, which his grandchildren had submitted to Marshall.
Much of her work has been with children, including her latest, "The Story of Stratford." The two-year-old project explores how the development of a new metropolitan center in East London will change the lives of the children and their families who live there. The ongoing project is documented at www.storyofstratford.com.
While she was here, Marshall and Frenette visited Cary Academy, Cary High School and Meredith College, as well as the Teen Youth Council in Cary to speak to students about their ideas for a project.
"I think it's great that the young people are so enthusiastic because where I live in London they take a lot of their art and culture for granted," said Marshall. "The fact that they're so hungry for it, we can really make anything."
In her lecture, Marshall said the boundaries of public space, and where public art can be found, are beginning to change.
"Public art can be found in many places," she said. "When you think about it, what is a public space? We understand a public space to be where we might go for a walk, where we might walk our dog, maybe a municipal area, a park. These have become places where you might see a piece of public art, traditionally ... but for young people, and for many of us, public places are becoming more virtual."
As for what exactly the project will be, neither Marshall nor Frenette is entirely sure. One idea that Marshall mentioned was to give everyone disposable cameras so that they can, as she put it, "build a new archive of their community."
"It may be so that we're not looking at a traditional piece of public art here," Marshall said. "Sometimes a book, where a copy is distributed to everyone in Cary, could have a more lasting effect."
Over the course of Marshall's visit, she collected more than 300 note cards from people, each one containing ideas for a project. The ideas could be a word, a phrase, anything that could help determine a project concept. Marshall said that all of these ideas will be compiled into an online blog so that anyone in the community can take part.
Regardless of where a project ends up or what media are used to create it, Marshall said it's crucial to involve everyone.
"Too often you see sculpture, pieces of art that just landed there and no one really understands how they got there, who made them, why they're there, what the decision making process was," she said. "The process is just as important as the product."
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