Installation Underway for CARE/Crawley Sculpture

Installation has begun for "Super Twister,” the state-funded art project that won the competition to be placed near the entrance to the College of Medicine’s CARE/Crawley Building.

Installation began Tuesday for the project by Alice Aycock, a New York sculptor known for her large-scale public works. 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.

Aycock was at the sculpture site, the upper plaza area to the left of the main entrance, as workers installed the sculpture in a procedure expected to take several days. Ghazal Bhatia, a planner in the Office of Planning + Design + Construction, said a dedication event will be held at a later date.

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.