Gerth: ‘What the ...?’ Artists want to know why city removed their art, didn’t tell them

William Duffy hadn’t seen the walking sticks he designed for the city of Louisville for about two years — not until I wrote about them a couple of weeks ago and took a picture of them.

They were the ones that were visible, with the hoops that tied the three sticks together to make them into tree guards all bent and mangled, when I visited a scrapyard — oops, Metro storage facility — on Lexington Road.

One day last week I got a text message from famed sculptor Ed Hamilton saying he and Duffy were going to see if they could see Duffy’s walking sticks in person.

“Up for a field trip?” Hamilton asked.

I threw on some shoes, hopped into the truck and headed for Hamilton’s art studio in Phoenix Hill.

Many of the artists who made the sticks — some two dozen of them — have known that the tree guards had disappeared from in front of businesses along Main Street some time ago.

But they didn’t know why.

Duffy’s sticks had an abstract horse head at the top of each stick with a car where the horse’s mane should have been. It had been in front of the old Fulton Conway and Co. headquarters — which back in the day sold carriage parts and transitioned into automobile parts later.

Hamilton’s walking sticks were in front of the old John Bull pharmacy. His sticks were topped by an old-fashioned medicine bottle and had plants creeping up the stick, since many of the elixirs back then were made from plant extracts.

Hamilton said he first realized his sticks were gone a couple of years ago when he took friends from out of town to see them and was stunned when he couldn't find the tree guard he designed.

“I was like, 'What the …?'" he said. “Then I started looking around, thinking maybe I’m at the wrong tree.”

When he asked public art officials what had happened to them, he never got any answers.

It's disrespectful how Hamilton and the other artists have been treated.

What happened is that the city removed the bronze tree guards and the cast iron grates to which they were attached when they decided to plant new trees. The workers pulled them up — sometimes without even removing them from the grates they were screwed to — and tossed them in the back of a truck.

They were unceremoniously dumped in the scrapyard — er, Metro storage facility.

Most of them have been moved out of sight. Duffy’s sticks remain where they were. Or at least they did a couple of weeks ago.

There are two gates on city property at the scrapyard.

One goes into the scrapyard and one goes into a parking lot beside a city street maintenance garage.

The gate into the scrapyard is almost always locked. The one next to the garage isn’t — or wasn’t — and had been left open during working hours. That was before my first trip there a couple of weeks ago. It was from there that I saw Duffy's walking sticks.

When Hamilton, Duffy, Courier Journal photographer Jeff Faughender and I arrived last week, that gate was closed too.

We walked to the scrapyard gate and peered in for a minute or two.

We couldn’t see Duffy’s sticks from there — if they hadn’t been moved, they were maybe 30 yards away and behind a large weed and next to a big orange dumpster that was in the photo I had taken.

“There’s the infamous dumpster, Duff,” Hamilton said as we peered through the chain link fence.

By the time we walked back to our cars, which were near the other gate, someone had come out of the garage and locked it with a chain and padlock.

Hamilton, Duffy, Faughender and I were a scary bunch.

If only city leaders acted as quickly to protect our public art.

What bothers Duffy as much as anything is that city officials never told the artists what was going on — even after Hamilton, Louisville’s most acclaimed and well-known sculptor whose works grace everything from Louisville parks to the National Mall in Washington D.C. – asked the simple question, “What’s up?”

“It sure is a mystery to me that they would do that and not tell the artists,” Duffy, who specializes in abstract art, said.

Hamilton has done massive, monumental-sized sculptures like the sculpture of York at the Belvedere and the even larger Abraham Lincoln statue at Waterfront Park. He’s done a massive statue of boxer Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber” that’s installed outside of Cobo Arena in Detroit, and his Spirit of America sculpture in the nation’s Capitol.

The walking sticks don’t compare in magnitude.

“It don’t matter how big or how small,” Hamilton said. “A small piece is as important as the big pieces.”

Hamilton and Duffy aren’t the only artists upset about what has happened to their walking sticks.

Mike Farmer, a folk artist from Portland who made walking sticks with a hammer head on top that went in front of what had been a hardware store, is proud of his only work that was on permanent public display.

He used to take his grandchildren and take their photos in front of the sticks — for his oldest grandson, who is 27 now, those walking sticks served as sort of a growth chart.

“I’ve got a picture of him no taller than that stick,” he said. “And I’ve got pictures as he got taller.”

Farmer said he often is on Main Street and thinks he noticed the sticks were gone almost as soon as they disappeared. He assumed they had simply been moved to a more prominent location. He’s bothered by the way the city treated the artists.

“I’m astonished they took it down without publishing that something was going to happen,” he said.

Kevin Trager, a spokesman for Mayor Craig Greenberg, said the city is trying to restore the tree guards to their original locations, but Caitlin Bowling, a spokeswoman for the city’s art commission, said there is no timeline or cost estimate for doing that.

If and when that happens, Farmer said he’ll take his 11-year-old granddaughter to see his walking stick. “I’ve never gotten her picture there,” he said.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville artists upset city dumped walking sticks, didn't tell them