Mac Love was on a treasure hunt. Yesterday afternoon, he walked around downtown, cell phone in hand. The day was sunny and in the 50s and extremely windy, but no gale could dampen Love’s attitude. It was February in Ohio, and he was outside. “It’s just fun and refreshing to be out and to see people,” he said.
The treasures he was hunting? Public art. Love is on a mission to digitally catalog every piece of public art in Akron. That includes art on public land and art that is publicly funded. The Akron Public Art Commission selected Art x Love, the creative agency owned by Love and his wife Allyse, to spearhead the project.
“We’re surrounded by all of this beauty, all these creative assets, things that could be the backdrop for your wedding pictures or just a night on the town,” Love said. “And I want to raise awareness of these assets and also to protect them.”
Cataloging the city’s public art collection is no small feat. As Summer Hall, cultural engagement coordinator for the City of Akron explained, this is the first inventory of public art the city has undertaken.
The main goal of the project is to create an online database using GIS (geographic information system) maps that the public can utilize. Hall said the goal is to have all the art cataloged by mid-summer but that it will take longer to create the public database.
“The completion of everything may not be done until next year sometime,” she said.
The second goal of the project is to evaluate the condition of the art. “It’s assessing every inch of the art pieces,” Hall said. “If you look at the frog in Highland Square at the library … some of the green is gone. Some of it has rust. So just kind of breaking down each piece of art just to make sure that OK, yes, it’s still appropriate to stay where it’s at. Or no, this is in hazardous condition, or it needs to come down.”
Love said the city provided them with maps of every city-owned building and parcel to inventory for public art assets. They have also found city-owned art on non-city parcels. They’re cataloging those pieces as well.
Yesterday afternoon, Love cataloged several pieces of art. He started at Cascade Plaza, photographing the sculpture in front of the 1 Cascade Plaza building – the one with the “PNC” sign at the top – and the large-scale piece by Don Drumm in the center of the plaza. He then made his way to the sweeping colorful mural by Jessica Lofthus on a Quaker Street parking garage, before moving on to a pedestrian bridge on the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail where Shane Wynn’s portrait series “Overlooked” is displayed.
Love cataloged each piece of art in an app he and Allyse created called Public Art Inventory Collector. At each stop he photographed the art from several angles and added in as many details as he could including location, artist, accessibility, ward number, dimensions and materials. He then rated the condition of each piece on a scale of one to five, with one being “damaged” and five being “excellent.”
Love said they will then do “desk research” to fill in any information gaps, such as who owns the art, who funded it, and in some cases, who created it. So far they’ve cataloged 38 public art sites with more than 140 individual art pieces.
For Love, the process is a way for him to learn more about the city he calls home and to share that knowledge with others. “I’ve just found treasure everywhere in Akron,” he said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize how much of it there is. That’s kind of what we’re here to do with this: Celebrate that so visitors or other people realize there’s a lot of world-class stuff here.”
