State-Funded CARE/Crawley Art Project Will Be Installed in November

The state-funded art project that won the competition to be placed near the entrance to the UC College of Medicine’s CARE/Crawley Building will be installed in November.

The project by Alice Aycock, a New York sculptor known for her large-scale public works, is named "Super Twister.” It involves ribbons of brushed aluminum wrapping around each other in a sculpture about 20 feet high and 20 feet in diameter, with an adjacent circular piece about 7 feet high.

The sculpture will be located in the upper plaza area to the left of the main entrance, according to Ghazal Bhatia, a planner in the Office of Planning + Design + Construction. Work is scheduled for the second half of November. A dedication event will be held at a later date.

Contractors will be onsite soon to start the process of installing the foundation. The work area will be contained within construction barricades until the sculpture is installed. Entrances to the CARE/Crawley Building will remain open, and pedestrian access will be maintained.

The CARE/Crawley Building, which opened in August 2008 as Phase I of the Medical Sciences Building (MSB) Rehabilitation Project, qualified for a state-funded art project under Ohio’s Percent for Art legislation. The legislation requires that 1 percent of the total capital appropriation for new or renovated public buildings costing more than $4 million be provided for the acquisition, commissioning and installation of works of public art. In the case of the CARE/Crawley Building, $278,000 was allocated. 

Seventy artists applied for the CARE/Crawley competition, administered by the Ohio Arts Council. Aycock was one of three finalists who made presentations to UC’s Percent for Art Committee, which was charged with selecting the artist.

Aycock told the committee the ribbons create a sense of movement and excitement, symbolic of a whirlwind of intellectual energy and inquiry and suggesting a dynamo of scientific innovation. The CARE/Crawley Building houses six floors of laboratories used by graduate students, faculty and researchers.

Aycock, a graduate of Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., with a master of arts from Hunter College in the City University of New York, is a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has created installations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and outside the United States including Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Japan.

Since Ohio’s Percent for Art legislation went into effect in 1990, more than 100 projects have been completed. Several are in place at UC, including ''Belief,'' the large bronze leaf located west of the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies. The artist is Terry Allen of Santa Fe, N.M.