PANSTADIA & ARENA MANAGEMENT WINTER 2013/14 Urban history
In contrast, a look at the work of the celebrated American urban historian, architect and poet Dolores Haydon offers an alternative use of contemporary art in buildings. She creates ‘installations’ as an informative to help engender a sense of collective history around place. I fi rst came across her work in Los Angeles where she had been called in to assist in mitigating the adverse impact of the bulldozer as the constant process of urban renewal effectively expunged any collective sense of history or place.
There, at Spring Street, local planners with strong interests in architectural and urban history had invited Haydon and colleagues to propose an interpretive piece for a site undergoing major commercial re-development – something that would offer a sense of connection with place and its past.
Public art, usually in the form of sculptures had, of course, traditionally focused on great events, such as wars and political struggles: the history of elites. Indeed, statues, usually commemorating the life and achievements of white men, have constituted some of the most brilliant, recognisable and beloved works of public art that exist in the United States.
Against that norm enter Dolores Haydon whose starting point was to investigate deep into Spring Street’s history. Only to discover Biddy Mason (1818-1891), a southern slave who accompanied her ‘masters’ to California where she successfully petitioned for her freedom. Subsequently building a career in Los
Angeles as a nurse and midwife, she bought property, and ultimately became one of the wealthiest black women in the United States, as well as a notable philanthropist. Her midwifery services were in great demand by women of all classes. Evidently a latter-day saint, she nursed many people during the smallpox epidemic at considerable risk to her own life and helped found a day- care centre and orphanage.
Biddy owned that development site in what is now Spring Street and built her obstetrics clinic there – a clinic so successful that it served even the wealthiest amongst the white community of latter-day Los Angeles.
Doug Altken – Star (2008).
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http://www.publicartinla.com/ Downtown/Broadway/Biddy_Mason/)
As a result of Hayden’s work with associate artists, Biddy’s story is now deservedly writ large in an installation called ‘Time and Place’. It consists of an 81ft long, 8ft high black concrete wall divided into decades, each of which contain photographs, maps, and drawings in the form of images embossed into the base wall of the new building. They also include her midwife’s bag, various obstetrics instruments, a spool of thread, scissors, a cactus and wagon wheels which symbolise Biddy’s long walk behind her owner’s wagon from Mississippi to California. Her life is further described in the text written by Hayden, and etched into stone panels which depict her freedom papers and her deed to the property (the only surviving documents of her life). This recorded history is intended to “give legitimacy and meaning to the site” and perhaps even to a city which is notoriously lacking of any collective sense of itself and its past.
In a similar vein, rich pickings are also there for sports clubs such as Real Madrid who have already recognised the potent power of the busts, statues and other memorabilia in their ‘hall of fame’. But their’s is, in the end, only a museum piece. It is the potential for fusing the story of a great club’s history into an artistic piece which is in turn a part of the very architecture that really intrigues – something more than a plaque on the wall that merely states: “Zinedine Zidane once played here”.
26 SHOWCASE architecture
NORTH AMERICA SUPPLEMENT
Terry Haggerty – Two Minds (2009).
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