Lipe Art Park in the New Times
From the 8/15 - 8/22/2007 New Times:
Although it's surrounded by the blocky warehouses of West Fayette Street, Lipe Art Park has been turning the artistically minded on to the prospect of recycling a patch of grass a little larger than a football field into an art oasis. However, as of now, the park is a temporary installment that depends upon the auspices of the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency, which owns the land. SIDA granted a group of art advocates free reign through this year to turn the spot into an artistic garden.
That group includes property owner Rick Destito; Kate Clark, newly hired public arts coordinator for the city; representatives from the oh-so-hip social advocacy group 40 Below; and local artists. They all got together at the end of 2006 to put Destito's concept of building an outdoor hangout for artists to task. "I think a lot of people might have just thought my ideas would be good and when other people got involved, they got better," Destito said. "It's really just trying to take a lot of what everybody wants to see and putting it in one spot." The park was named for Charles E. Lipe, a Victorian-era inventor who owned a machine shop in the area during the final decades of the 19th century. Lipe had concocted a cigar-rolling machine, varieties of equipment to be used in the burgeoning motion picture industry, a broom winder and other notable technologies, and also attracted other inventors and creators to his shop to create a sort of real-life version of Raphael's "School of Athens."
Perhaps as a visual shout-out to Lipe, one of the park's featured sculptures is a variety of gears and mechanical parts assembled into a tower that calls to mind the conflation of art and invention for which Leonardo daVinci is so remembered (see photo at left). However, other works on display demonstrate the contemporary intimations of Syracuse artists, such as blocks of concrete in the parking lot with black-and-white painted faces, and a hammer-like semi-abstract.
Perhaps the park's most dramatic feature is a Victorian garden that was the result of the part 40 Below played in working on the park. Steve Kearney, a representative from the organization, said 40 Below considered the fact that the entire park was essentially on loan from SIDA. "We didn't want to do a garden that was anything but temporary, so we went back to a Victorian bedding scheme, a strolling garden, essentially going with the idea that that type of garden was probably the 19th-century style," noted Kearney.
Destito, who owns the so-called "White Warehouse" just up the road from the park at the corner of South Geddes and West Fayette streets, feels that the park will enhance a plan he's been championing since he bought the building two years ago: to turn the area surrounding the park into a district for artists. Instead of just adding to the group of galleries throughout the so-called Warehouse District, however, Destito hopes to turn his warehouse into something a bit more elaborate. "There's gallery space all around here, so instead of just making our studios gallery space, it would double as working galleries."
In the meantime, park developers will have to face the challenge of securing the land again next summer in hopes of bigger and better things. Clark, whose newly created city position includes serving as a liaison between those with civic arts plans and city officials, said it will largely depend on who wants to step up to the plate to serve as the park's masthead. As Clark explained, "I'm sure there are other groups who will want to do programming there, but it's so hard because we're all volunteers and we're trying to create some sort of sustainability for it."
For more information on Lipe Art Park, visit www.myspace. com/lipeartpark.
-- Matt Mumau
This item was published on 08/15/2007
