Summit Public Art

Summit Public ArtSummit Public Art

Bringing Art to Public Spaces in Summit

2022

Star and Spheres

Star and Spheres
2018
dichroic laminated safety glass and stainless steel
Location: City Hall
Ray King has been called “The Sun King” because of the way his glass sculptures interact with light. By creating dynamic interactions with the sun and refracting light into colors—rainbow-like emanations that shift and change as the viewer moves or as the light source changes—King creates an environment that appeals to viewers’ sense of wonderment and delight.
Using advanced technology, King designs three-dimensional shapes and patterns that are inspired by forms found in nature. These forms are astoundingly complex, simple yet elegant, primitive yet futuristic, as we see in this trio of works displayed in the courtyard at Summit City Hall.
Based north of Philadelphia in Stockton, NJ, King began working with stained glass in the early 1970s, and has exhibited his work internationally since 1976, including exhibitions in Italy, Japan, England, Spain and France. Major permanent installations of his work have been commissioned throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and can be found in numerous universities, municipalities, corporations, and private collections.

Time Travelers (“Andromeda Exp.”, “Cassiopeia Exp.”, “Cepheus Exp.”)  

Time Travelers (“Andromeda Exp.”, “Cassiopeia Exp.”, “Cepheus Exp.”)  

Artist: Emil Alzamora

2022

concrete and steel

Location: (Lyric Pocket Park, Summit Promenade, Kaus Way)

 

Time Travelers is a group of six life-size figures who appear to be visiting and observing our world from another dimension or another period in time, most likely the future. Though recognizable, they seem out of step with their surroundings. Watching them watch us, we begin to see our world as they do: as a whole new universe to be explored.

 

Emil Alzamora was born in Lima, Peru and grew up in Florida and Spain. After earning a degree in Fine Arts from Florida State University, he started his sculpting career in the Hudson Valley of New York working with Polich Tallix. Since then he has shown his work regularly throughout the world at a number of institutions, including The Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, the United Nations Building, Pepsico World Headquarters, and The Queens Museum of Art. This is his third installation with Summit Public Art. He currently lives and works in Beacon, NY.

 

Alzamora harnesses a wide range of materials and techniques to deliver unexpected interpretations of the sculpted human figure. He often distorts, elongates, deconstructs, or encases his forms to reveal an emotional or physical situation, or to tell a story.

 

The figures in Time Travelers are divided into three pairs—“Andromeda, Exp,” “Cassiopeia, Exp,” and “Cephus, Exp” (“Exp” being an abbreviation for explorer, perhaps)—their names derived from the constellations but also from classical mythology, a frequent source of inspiration for Alzamora, whose previously exhibited works in Summit include Hector’s Return and Andromache, both named after characters from Homer’s epic The Illiad. 

Cave Painting

Cave Painting

Donna Conklin King

2021

fiberglass reinforced concrete, concrete stain, silver leaf, phosphorescent paint

Location: Village Green (where Broad St. meets Elm St.) 

 

This large-scale mural of clouds and sky explores the possibilities of concrete as a medium while addressing the relationship between nature, architecture, and the inevitable ruins of civilization. Celebrating the object’s history by emphasizing its imperfections with silver leaf, the sculpture itself becomes an artifact, highlighting the notions of resiliency, history, and archeology. On the reverse side are lines from Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” in phosphorescent painted letters. 

 

As a girl growing up next to the woods in New Jersey, Donna Conklin King built forts from scavenged wood, and learned clay and stone carving from local artists before studying Lithography and Sculpture at Skidmore College. After an apprenticeship at the Johnson Atelier Fine Art Foundry, where she learned welding and lost wax bronze casting, she attended the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University where she received an MFA in Sculpture. A recipient of a Fellowship in Sculpture from the NJ State Council on the Arts, King has exhibited her works throughout the U.S. and was included in the NJ Arts Annual in 2020 and 2021. She maintains a studio at Manufacturer’s Village in East Orange and her public art can be seen nearby at both the Wildflower Sculpture Center and the Turtleback Zoo. 

 

“Concrete is an ancient and versatile material and I am fascinated with the possibilities of casting, forming, and coloring it,” says King. “I often cast concrete forms out of food containers, tin ceiling tiles and fabric molds,” she says, “sometimes integrating doilies, found porcelain objects or 24K gold leaf. An ever-present vein in my work is the concept of Kintsugi, an ancient Japanese technique that celebrates an object’s history by emphasizing its imperfections with gold leaf instead of disguising them. Conceptually, it suggests that we repair something that has given us many years of love and service, but restore it so that it is more beautiful than it was before. For me, this concept resembles a life well loved. We humans are a constantly changing landscape of fracture, repair and growth.”

Pleiades

Pleiades

Artist: Ray King

2022

dichroic laminated safety glass and stainless steel

Location: Summit Promenade Fountain 

Installed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Promenade Fountain—and the 20th anniversary of Summit Public Art—this dynamic glass sculpture both reflects and projects an ever-changing array of light and colors. Its triangulated panels align along planes that resemble mountain peaks and summits. At its center, a composition of small stainless steel spheres references the constellation “Pleiades,” named after the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. 

Based in Philadelphia, Ray King began working with stained glass in the early 1970s, and has exhibited his work internationally since 1976, including exhibitions in Italy, Japan, England, Spain and France. Major permanent installations of his work have been commissioned throughout the United States and abroad. All are site-specific and inspired by the surrounding space and landscape to create a unique sense of place and identity. 

King has been called “The Sun King” because of the way his glass sculptures interact with the light. By creating dynamic interactions with the sun and refracting light into colors—rainbow-like emanations that shift and change as the viewer moves or as the light source changes—King creates an environment that appeals to viewers’ sense of wonderment and delight. As King says, “I’m playing with the sun as a partner.” 

Using advanced technology, King designs three-dimensional shapes and patterns that are inspired by forms found in nature. These forms are astoundingly complex, yet simple and elegant, primitive, yet futuristic. The dichroic glass used to construct Pleiades is coated with a special high-tech metallic-film coating developed by NASA that splits white light into complementary colors. The color changes depending on the angle of the light source and the viewpoint of the spectator. 

At the same time, King is also interested and inspired by how ancient cultures used light in their rituals and monuments, and how they used mathematics in their artwork to understand planetary movement and their relation to the universe. Hence his inspiration for Pleiades, named and modeled after the constellation of the same name. 

The result is a sculpture that, situated here in the fountain to take full advantage of the interplay of light and color and the rushing water, functions not just as a work of visual beauty but a “breathing body of art.”

This project is the culmination of a years-long collaboration between the City of Summit, Summit Downtown, Inc., and Summit Public Art, in particular Fountain Committee Co-Chairs Estelle Fournier and Vivian Furman Rubin, who first proposed the project, headed the committee that selected the artist, oversaw every step of the installation, and led the fountain’s fundraising campaign.
Thanks to City Engineer Aaron Schrager, Superintendent of Public Works Michael Caputo, Foreman Pat Priore, Warren Wolfe, and the Department of Public Works, without whose cooperation and expertise the transformation of the fountain would not have been possible. And a very special thanks to Ray King, Mayor Nora Radest, the City of Summit, Summit Downtown, Inc., and to all of our sponsors whose generous support made it possible to bring this extraordinary work of art to Summit:
Cheryl Barr and Tom O’Flynn
The Co-Co
Marie and Roy Cohen
Annette and Terry Dwyer
Linda and Robert Flanagan
Estelle Fournier and Alberto Lopez-Silvero
Marjorie Fox and Jeff Naiman
Suzanne and Jordan Glatt
Anne and R. J. Grissinger
Leslie Herman
Vani Krishnamurthy
David Naidu and Andrea Stein
Overlook Medical Center
The Pardo Family
Richard and Kayla Pechter
Nora and Rob Radest
Vivian Furman Rubin and Julian Rubin
Suzanne and Rob Rubino
Ann and Mel Schaffer
Lois Schneider Realtor
Debi and Fred Schwarzmann
Barbara Sherman
Theatre Circle
Deepa and Rick Whipple

Between Flagships

Between Flagships

Artist: Ronen Gamil

2022

fabric, steel, concrete

Location: Village Green (where Broad St. meets Elm St.)

 

This colorful textile installation celebrates the individual paths taken to a central meeting place. Drawing on current census data, the artist chose colors, shapes, and patterns from twenty flags corresponding to the ancestry of Summit residents whose families migrated to the United States, some several generations ago, others more recently. Each panel incorporates features drawn from two or more flags to reference how our shared identities become blended over time and through generations.

 

A Brooklyn native, Ronen Gamil was raised in Israel and has lived and traveled extensively in Italy, Spain, and South America. Trained in art and architecture, he earned a BA and Master of Urban Planning from the City College of New York. His work has been exhibited at FiveMyles and Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. He currently works as a Gardener-Curator at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and was recently named a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Art.

 

Gamil says he is driven to create “immersive, contemplative” works like “Between Flagships” that engage the viewer’s senses while drawing attention to the experiences of underrepresented groups like migrants and the issue of class inequity.

 

Each of the three paths in “Between Flagships” is bound on both sides by three panels of sewn fabrics connected to a thin metal grid. Some are taller and some shorter so that their height “intentionally limits views outwards in relation to ideas about being seen by others, seeing others, and being in between on several levels physically and socially.” This effect is meant to evoke an experience common to all migrants—the feeling of being between two worlds.

Your Water, My Sky

Your Water, My Sky

Artist: Nancy Cohen

Vinyl banners

Location: Village Green across from the post office (where Broad St. meets Maple St.)

 

Your Water, My Sky is an investigation into place and our experience of it. Each image comes from the artist’s personal experience of waterways impacted by climate change. Banners juxtapose glimpses of two different sites, reflecting their individualities and commonalities. These pairings are metaphors for our human relationships, providing visual connections that bring unity to the Village Green and unite us with our surroundings.

 

Raised in Queens and the suburbs of New York, Nancy Cohen has lived and worked in Jersey City, NJ for almost three decades. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and is in the permanent collections of The Montclair Museum, The Newark Public Library, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and The Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University. Solo exhibits include recent shows in New York, Princeton, and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit.

 

“I have been making things for as long as I can remember and serious about studying and looking at art since high school,” says Cohen. “My mother and grandmother were always making things–knitting, quilting, painting and were both serious gardeners so using my hands and bringing visual things to fruition was an obvious way to spend time.”

 

About her process, she says: “I am always looking for new materials to challenge me and to open up my vocabulary. A friend and studio neighbor describes my studio process as being somewhat like a mad scientist – because I am always mixing something new up and trying to see how I can get materials to speak.”

 

For this particular work, Cohen created paper collages made from digital images of her handmade paper works, each collage containing fragments of larger works juxtaposed against each other. These were later recreated and enlarged digitally in photoshop and then printed onto banners.

 

“My inspiration is varied,” says Cohen. “Often it comes from the work I made before – seeing the unrealized possibilities in one piece pushed to the next.”

 

Look closely and you’ll see similar patterns and colors repeated across a number of the banners, a fragment of one here, another fragment there. Notice too how the banners vary in size, the smallest being at the center of this quadrant of the Green, the largest at the top of the curving sidewalk near the train station. The fact that the banners have two sides also ensures that the appearance of the work changes throughout the day, as sunlight is reflected on one side in the morning and on the other side in the afternoon, so that the work you see changes depending on the time of day that you visit. 

 

The result is a work that might be more accurately described as a “visual experience” or exploration that, like much of Cohen’s work, defies easy categorization. Critics have noted her work’s “radiantly hued surfaces,” “translucent colorations and contours,” and images that are often “suffused with a sense of circulation.” These complex images reflect Cohen’s ongoing interest in the confluence of our natural and manmade environments, particularly the waterways of New Jersey and New York, and the beauty and fragility of our own transient, tide-like existence.