Those crazy sculptors of ‘74
Next to the Willamette River in Eugene’s Alton Baker Park, seven whimsical figures cavort in a mysterious group, like space aliens frozen flat in concrete.
Most people in Eugene have no idea where they came from or that they’re work by a nationally known sculptor — Hugh Townley — as is a bunch of other outdoor sculpture in town.
In 1974, Jan Zach, an art professor at the University of Oregon, brought six world-class sculptors to Eugene for the first (and last) Oregon International Sculpture Symposium.
Those were heady days in Eugene. Public coffers were awash in timber tax money as logging companies cut their way through the last of the easy old growth in the nearby Cascades and Coast Range. The little university town, featured in Life magazine, saw itself as an art mecca.
The sculptors had fun — too much fun sometimes — and four of them created work that’s still displayed all over town.
Almost completely nonrepresentational, the art made here that summer is hard for a lot of people to like. None of the pieces looks like anything, nor are they meant to. They’re modern, stark, aloof, industrial and spare, just as their creators intended them to be, a snapshot of art in the late 20th century.
John Chamberlain’s idea never came to fruition. Chamberlain, who says he spent most of that summer drunk, proposed a giant cube of crushed cars, a “cubic acre,” as he described it, that would be displayed near the courthouse. The town fathers didn’t buy it, though, and Chamberlain went back to partying.
But you can still see the art the others left behind in Eugene. The works are:
- The seven abstract figures next to the Willamette River in Alton Baker Park are by Hugh Townley.
- A 10-foot-tall oxidized steel piece by New York sculptor Tony Rosenthal near the canoe rental hut in Alton Baker Park.
- “Big Red,” the bright red metal sculpture by Bruce Beasley next to the Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge just west of downtown Eugene.
- The basalt monoliths on the first floor terrace at the Lane County Public Service Building are by Harvard sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, who also left several basalt pieces in Alton Baker Park near the picnic shelter.