Newport News Public Art Foundation

Forty years of sculpture

swiltgen — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:55:03 +0000

Gunther Stilling’s forty years as a sculptor are being celebrated in a major retrospective throughout the city of Florence, Italy. Eighty of Stilling’s bronze, aluminum, and marble works will be shown at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi and in various outdoor spaces throughout the city. Terra Incognita opens May 2, 2013, and will run through May 28, showcasing work that explores the hidden interior dimensions of each of us. Stilling’s work Handshake can be seen in Newport News at City Center.

From creation to construction

swiltgen — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:45:01 +0000

Romolo Del Deo has been selected to create the Provincetown Fishermen’s Memorial, a public monument honoring the long fishing tradition in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In this video, Del Deo describes the process of creating any public sculpture, including his Melpomene in Newport News, from the initial stages of drawing out ideas to managing the construction of a lasting public monument.

An outdoor art gallery for all

swiltgen — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:24:16 +0000

Carol Capó, Executive Director of the Newport News Public Art Foundation, makes the case for how the community benefits from the wide variety of public art that the Foundation has brought to the city in this op-ed piece published in the Daily Press.

Debut of a landmark

swiltgen — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:00:55 +0000

Gunther Stilling's Handshake, a striking new landmark for the Peninsula's "central business district," was unveiled Thursday, March 28, 2013, at the traffic circle on Thimble Shoals Boulevard at the entrance to City Center and followed by a reception at Virginia Company Bank. Read the Daily Press article about the unveiling and watch the 13News story.

Getting into place

swiltgen — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:15:54 +0000

Handshake, by Gunther Stilling, was installed on a blustery Monday for its unveiling on Thursday, March 28th, 2013. Watch the Newport News Public Art Foundation’s chairman Bobby Freeman talk about the eight year process of bringing the hands to the traffic circle at City Center in this Daily Press video, and read the article here.

Visiting our collection

swiltgen — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:43:02 +0000

The Daily Press introduced our collection of fourteen installed sculptures in this full-page spread in anticipation of the unveiling of our latest addition, Handshake, on March 28, 2013. Get basic facts about each sculpture and use the map to guide your visit to the various locations. Visit our Take a Tour page for more detailed information and access to the Foundation's audio tour where you can hear the sculptors speak about their work.

Sculptor at school

swiltgen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:25:31 +0000

When sculptor María Gamundí visited Newport News in the fall of 2012 to scout out Kettle Pond as the site for her new creation Selene, she also spent time with sculpture students at Christopher Newport University, the LifeLong Learning Society at CNU, and art and Spanish classes at Hampton Roads Academy. An article about her visit to HRA appears in the recently published Winter 2012/2013 issue of HRA’s magazine Navigator.

Intersections of art and science

swiltgen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:41:56 +0000

25 international artists, including Inger Sannes, sculptor of Elements in Newport News, and 15 researchers from the Oskar Klein Institute at Stockholm University brought together the scientific method and the artistic process to explore how 50 years of research has fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe – from one galaxy in a constant universe to an ever-expanding, changing universe of billions of galaxies. How can we understand and interpret this new knowledge? How can art provide perspective on this new universe? The artistic results of these collaborations will be exhibited at the Edsvik Konsthall Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden from March 23-April 14, 2013.

It’s about Time

swiltgen — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:38:53 +0000

Workers installed Lee Tribe’s abstract creation on Warwick Boulevard; the wide median between Yates Elementary and Peninsula Memorial Park is a good place for a piece that gives the intangible of time a three-dimensional presence, with sweeping arcs, busy intervals, and a shape with no beginning and no end. Making it happen required a lot of partners, so thanks to Advex Corporation, Hampton Roads Crane & Rigging, Cable Associates, engineer George Cornwell, Peninsula Memorial Park, Advanced Electrical, Stan Cairns and John Cryer Concrete for their help. While this newest piece of public art is located on public land, it is funded by private donations. Read more about the process of bringing Time to Newport News in this article by the Daily Press.

The language of beauty

swiltgen — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:24:42 +0000

The remarkable fruit of four decades spent creating and speaking through beauty will be celebrated at Messenger of the Spirit, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Helaine Blumenfeld OBE opening April 13, 2013, at Salisbury Cathedral in England. Blumenfeld’s Spirit of Life in Newport News is a stunning illustration of both the artistic gifts that made Blumenfeld one of the foremost contemporary sculptors and her long quest to communicate “through the visual, imaginative, tactile and at an emotional level,” as the exhibition’s release explains. The exhibition runs through September 8, 2013.