Location: 38th Street Station
Title: Urban Circle
Artist: Cliff Garten
Material: Cast and fabricated bronze with patina.
A series of cast and fabricated bronze houses, buildings and roadway with cars on it attached inside the ceiling of the station. The roadway rolls and loops around itself like a ribbon and all the pieces have a patina.
Each house in this piece, located in the rafters of 38th Street Station, is a type of house selected from the Sears and Roebuck House Catalog, circa 1920's - 1930's. The sculpture is an image of urbanism defined by an urban grid of house blocks common to this neighborhood. Yet, this urbanism is in flux, with a ribbon of street floating out of the city, suggesting the suburbs and the reason why the homes of this neighborhood and their history are once again a valuable part of the American domestic fabric.
Cliff Garten is an internationally recognized sculptor and founder of Cliff Garten Studio in Venice, California.
By connecting people to places and infrastructure through sculptural material, social history and ecology, Garten's work locates the latent potential in every public place and situation to become more than the specific functions it appears to perform. Sculpture and landscape, function and form, like public and private experiences are never distinct, but exchange places throughout the day. Sculpture defines our interaction and movement by creating energy between things, generating interest in public activity, reframing our private lives and creating a sense of place within public and private realms.
Garten received a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
38th Street Station, and five other stations, originally had paver designs on the platforms created by artist Richard Elliott. Each platform was inspired by artifacts or architectural details found in the Minneapolis/St. Paul communities and were developed by working with museums, community members and curators. The specific designs selected as inspirational starting points were picked for their cultural and historical importance and fall into three groups; native motif, immigrant fabrics, and the culture that has developed in Minneapolis as expressed through its architecture. Each platform design stands on its own, but together they make a unified statement about the cultural history of Minneapolis.
Collectively, the artwork is titled, Then Till Now: A History and Culture Based Portrait Of Minneapolis As Expressed Through Six Geometric Platform Designs and originally appeared at Cedar-Riverside, Franklin, 38th Street, 46th Street, VA Medical Center and American Boulevard stations.
Unfortunately, the paver bricks did not hold up well with the severe Minnesota winters and the heavy foot traffic of a transit system. The only remaining paver design exists at American Boulevard Station.
This image: To represent domestic life, Elliott drew inspiration from The Prairie School of architecture for 38th Street Station. A chair designed by William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie in 1912-13 influences the main portion of the platform. The ramps and center designs are inspired by the front doors of the Redeemer Missionary Baptist Church, designed by Purcell and Elmslie. 200’ x 16’