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 council woman (1894-1969), and public art has been added at various junctures. Walk north of the OSP and youll find Michael Heizers Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976) which creates a grammar between 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 pronouns 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 Seattle Arts Commission (established in 1971), it was initially controversial according to the city Web site. Its easy to imagine what might be called the Richard Serra Effectits too big, too unfriendly, too invasive; its 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, theres no prohibition against touching or climbing on the things. Each smooth slab is a foundation. Each rough-hewn boulder lies in a position of order, or disorder, depending on which direction you walk past. The work either illustrates entropy or acts despite it. It was also reportedly the first public commission for Heizer (then 32), who for the last few decades has been remaking a big patch of Nevada desert into City, already considered one of Americas most significant examples of environmental art. (Hes 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 Heizers catalog; if it once seemed massive to Seattle pedestrians, it now reminds how much larger the city has grown.
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. Read Brian Miller's entire story.
