Park Play

If First Friday art openings in the Crossroads are popular for singles to meet and hook up, then Saturday-morning art openings in Leawood are trendy for people who have settled down and begun to reproduce.

Next to a pond near the Leawood City Park entrance, a three-piece jazz combo played underneath a picnic shelter for the dedication of Kansas City artist Nate Fors’ 40-foot-tall sculpture “Lllooppi. “ Instead of wine and cheese, there were cookies, soda and hot dogs. A group of mothers (one in a Winnie the Pooh fleece top) discussed the pros and cons of various local orthodontists while pushing strollers and keeping their eyes on the kids in the sidewalk chalk-drawing contest. Many of the children were drawing their own renditions of “Lllooppi”; all of them were competing for the medals and plastic cups full of Jolly Ranchers awarded to the top three chalk artists. A Leawood Parks and Recreation Department employee walked around handing out lollipops while minivans and SUVs slowed down to check out “Lllooppi” on their way to unload kids at tennis matches and soccer games.

The sculpture consists of a white steel pole; bolted to it are seven aluminum disks with holes in the middle. The disks look like gigantic washers, painted in splotchy-patterned, fluorescent blues, oranges, pinks, yellows and greens. A long cord of fiber-optic lights loops around the top of the structure; during the day, it’s a simple white cord, but at night the fiber optics emit the same curvy, trailing-light effect that you get from twirling a sparkler around really fast on the Fourth of July. Depending on the viewer’s location and whether he or she is standing, jogging past on the adjacent trail or driving by, “Lllooppi” looks different, with some disks hidden and others jutting out at various angles.

“Lllooppi” doesn’t feel like something that belongs in the stereotypical version of Leawood. Its color scheme is too Miami Vice, the coil of fiber-optic rope too wild and out-of-control. But the people celebrating at the dedication seemed proud of their new sculpture, as if they understood that it was increasing the suburb’s hipness quotient.

In reality, though, Leawood’s planning and funding efforts make it one of the metro area’s most progressive cities for public art. “Leawood has a forward-thinking approach to building a budget for a public art program and administering it in a valuable way,” Fors says. The city has a master plan for public art: Leawood dedicates five dollars a year per resident to the arts, and its arts council receives 10 cents a square foot for every new commercial building in the city. Six new site proposals are in the works.

By comparison, Kansas City, Missouri, adopted its 1 Percent for Arts ordinance in 1986, requiring that any new city building or renovation project devote 1 percent of its estimated design and construction costs to a work of public art. Unlike Leawood, though, Kansas City receives no money from nongovernmental construction. Instead, it relies heavily on outside donations to fund public art programs such as the highly successful but temporary Avenue of the Arts. City funding for that program will run out after this year.

Often, public officials think that if they are going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a work of art, they should bring in a big-name artist to do it. “In this case, we thought we wanted a piece from someone who was very well-known,” says Ann Kenney, chairwoman of the Leawood Public Art Committee. “As is our procedure, we brought in three really internationally acclaimed public artists who gave us proposals.” But in the end, Kenney says, the committee chose Fors because they found his work to be the most appropriate for the park setting. The committee wanted, she says, “something more fun and fantasy-oriented and kind of whimsical.”

Nonetheless, Fors says, “It took a whole year to get to the formal sign-off by City Hall. It took me less time to make it.”

Fors adds that Bruce Hartman (director of Johnson County Community College’s art gallery) and Louis Nerman (benefactor of JCCC’s future Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art) encouraged Fors to submit a sculpture proposal to Leawood’s public art organizations back in September 2002. He had to obtain approval from the Leawood Public Art Committee’s Selection Committee, the Public Art Committee itself, the Leawood Arts Council, the Leawood City Planning Department and the Parks and Recreation Department. Then the City Council had to agree to his plans. “It’s a serious bureaucratic motion,” Fors says.

City officials told Fors he could put his sculpture anywhere inside the park, but he chose the area outside of the gates because that was where the most people could see it. One city councilman worried that the brightly colored abstract sculpture would clash with the traditional-style iron and brick gates at the park’s entrance, but no one else on the council seemed to share that concern.

“This place allows me to get anybody who turns their head over here,” Fors explains. Passing motorists can see “Lllooppi” from Tomahawk Creek Parkway, Lee Boulevard — even Interstate 435. “In the winter, when there are no leaves on any of these trees and it’s dark at five o’clock and there’s people who are slowing down because 435 is a horrible place to drive, they are going to be looking at my sculpture,” Fors says. “And I like that! I don’t know what they will think of it, but I wanted to make sure you couldn’t miss it.”

But Fors, whose previous public art experience includes a temporary sculpture in the 2000 Avenue of the Arts, recognizes that exposure is one the best things about public art.

The day after “Lllooppi” was installed, Fors sat in his car in the parking lot not far down the road from the sculpture. He had just finished taking digital pictures of his piece and videotaping it, and he watched it through the windshield of his ’87 Volvo as drops of rain began to collect. A melancholy Louis Armstrong song was playing on the car stereo, and the sculpture’s bright colors began to shimmy in time to the music as the raindrops trickled down the glass.

A serious collector of rock and jazz records, Fors had 45s in mind when he came up with his design for “Lllooppi.” Music has always been important to him — he talks nonchalantly about meeting the Sex Pistols in a hotel in New York City and being invited backstage at a Frank Zappa concert at Memorial Hall one night after he brought the musician a pumpkin. Lately Fors has been going to concerts with his 15-year-old son — they’ve seen the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Hives and the Vines.

Not everybody gets the piece’s 45-rpm reference, but that’s OK with Fors, who encourages viewers to decide for themselves what the sculpture represents. One day during the sculpture’s installation, he says, a group of bicyclists rode by. Each of them had a different suggestion for what the aluminum disks at the top were supposed to be — doughnuts, records, LifeSavers. Fors told them they were all correct, but the cyclists decided that the life-preserver angle was pretty cool, considering that “Lllooppi” sits across the street from the Leawood Aquatic Center. They told Fors they liked the sculpture and pedaled off.

“My first review was not bad! And it was from innocent citizens,” Fors says.