Brian Miller
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Since SAM's acclaimed $85 million Olympic Sculpture Park opened two years ago, more than a million tourists and local artgoers have flocked to the ramped, terraced site, dotted with works by prominent international artists. But all the attention lavished on SAM's outdoor space, gloriously situated against sound and mountains, may give you the impression that this sanctioned preserve, patrolled by security guards and with a store/cafe in the PACCAR Pavilion, is the only place in the city where good art can be found al fresco and on the cheap.
Au contraire.
There's a wealth of accessible, interesting, and sometimes even important public art far beyond the border of SAM's waterfront compound (or even right next to it). No single collector or institution governs these far-flung sites and installations, which include freely viewable art sitting on private land.
So set your Google waypoints en route as we tour some of the best pieces of public art (plus a few lost, overlooked oddballs) in and around Seattle, some of which are so undersung they don't even have a placard identifying them. All are open for viewing 24 hours a day, unless otherwise noted.
Adjacent, Against, Upon
Myrtle Edwards Park
The Olympic Sculpture Park has somehow eclipsed and subsumed the identity of Myrtle Edwards Park, which was established (with a different name) back in 1964, when SAM was still a small institution confined to Capitol Hill. The narrow old shoreline park was renamed in 1976 for the pioneering city councilmember (1894–1969), and public art has been added at various junctures. Walk north of the OSP and you'll find Michael Heizer's Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976), which creates a grammar among three giant concrete slabs, obviously manmade, and three corresponding granite boulders (quarried from the Cascades and delivered by barge). The work is a series of prepositions running south to north, a delicate dance of heavyweights that tip the scales between 30 and 50 tons. Back in '76, when the project was funded by the NEA, City Light, Virginia Wright, and the Seattle Arts Commission (established in 1971), it was "initially controversial," according to the city Web site. It's easy to imagine what might be called the Richard Serra Effect—it's too big, too unfriendly, too invasive; it's not a statue with a noble or smiling face (remember that patriotic bicentennial year). Three decades later, surrounded by well-tended gravel, the installation holds up remarkably well. Visitors canoodle, picnic, and shoot photos upon the rocks (or adjacent, or against): Unlike your snooty OSP, there's no prohibition against touching or climbing on the things. Each smooth slab is a foundation. Each roughhewn boulder lies in a position of order or disorder, depending on which direction you walk past it. The work either illustrates entropy or acts despite it. It was also reportedly the first public commission for Heizer, then 32, who for the past few decades has been remaking a big patch of Nevada desert into City, already considered one of America's most significant examples of environmental art. (He's continuing the tradition of his late friend and colleague Robert Smithson, famed for Spiral Jetty.) Adjacent, Against, Upon is a comparatively small-scale work in Heizer's catalog; if it once seemed massive to Seattle pedestrians, it now reminds us how much larger the city has grown.
The Wall of Death
Beneath the University Bridge
Installed in 1993, The Wall of Death may occupy, after the Fremont Troll, the worst site for public art in Seattle. It gets almost no sun and is only visible to those on the Burke-Gilman Trail and UW students and staffers traversing down to the Portage Bay side of campus. Was it put there because people hated it? Because it was controversial or cost too much, a case of benefactors' remorse? Yes and no. Canadian sculptor Mowry Baden and his architect son, Colin Baden, signed off on the location after a long battle with the Seattle Arts Commission (which put up $100,000 for their proposal). After several rejected ideas, they built what they wanted. The city put it where it wanted. Then everyone washed their hands of the project. Today, the forlorn orange ring is delicately balanced on 10 metal spires to somewhat mysterious purpose. Though boldly identified to passersby, only older trail users are likely to know what that screaming signage, "The Wall of Death," and the shape signify. Once, long before cage-fighting and Evil Knievel's canyon-jumping, barnstorming motorcyclists were the extreme-sports daredevils of their day—chiefly the '20s and '30s. They'd race into a circular wooden ring and achieve enough speed to stick to the vertical inner wall with centrifugal force; then the bottom would drop out, or the ring rise, to the awe of circus onlookers. It was high-octane, no-health-care, reckless badassery of the highest and finest order. And now, in a perhaps fitting sense, the sculpture is a hidden relic, a signifier of forgotten times and sports. Back in '93, parked and abandoned cars littered the site; the under-bridge area was more of a vehicular wasteland. Now it's surrounded by new office space and UW labs. Bicycle ridership on the BGT is way up. In a way, Wall of Death is like Cadillac Ranch in Texas—a monument to internal-combustion dinosaurs, whose bones are all that remains of their rule on Earth.
