African American Bikerack Sculpture

In the spring of 2008 the Bike Trails Committee in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, issued a call for entries to artists who were interested in building a sculptural bikerack. There were 6 or 7 locations to choose from and the bikerack for each location was supposed to follow the general theme of where it was to be located. I chose to design one for the Riverside Park skateboard area.

 At the last minute I decided to knock out another design, just in case the first one wasn’t chosen. It was to be located in Maseryk Park, named in honor of Tomas Maseryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia.

As it turns out, they didn’t select my skateboard design but did select the one for Maseryk Park. I can’t say I thought it was my best effort and I would much rather have built the skateboard, but it didn’t happen that way.

There was a meeting of all the designers with the committee. It turned out that some of the people who submitted designs and were chosen, were not fabricators. During the discussion I volunteered to make the design for the African American Museum and that proposal was accepted.

A few months later, the worst flood in Cedar Rapids history devastated a large portion of the town along the Cedar River. Most of the bikerack locations were in this floodway so the project was put on hold, for years.

Finally the projects started again but two of the locations had had some vandalism after the flood, one was mine at Masaryk and another was the skate park. It was decided that these two would not be built after all.

I still had the African American Museum project to work on. Early on, the designer of the bikerack concept, Ashley Fulton and I got together and did some web research to see what sort of inspiration we could get. Her design was of the Primordial Couple and we found a very good example from the Dogon tribe in Mali. It looked like it would lend itself to fabrication from steel so we showed it to the Bike Committee and they gave us the go ahead. Bicycles would be locked to the tall, four columned base beneath the actual artwork.

But, as luck would have it, I had my knees replaced in January of 2011 and I faced several months of recuperation. Even after that, I could only work for a few hours at a time and it was very difficult to get anything done in the cold months since my shop doesn’t have a heater. The project dragged on.

Finally by the fall of 2012 I was finished and called my contacts to let them know. It was late in the season and it was decided to wait till Spring when the weather was warmer to install the concrete pad to mount the structure to. All through 2013 we waited for word that it was time to install the piece, but priorities were higher for other projects and it wasn’t till a week or two ago that we got the go ahead. On October 18th I delivered the sculpture and it was installed. Hooray!