Location: 46th Street Station
Title: 3D
Artist: JoAnn Verburg
Material: Glass, colored glass and glass silk-screened with photographic images
Description: Four wind screens made of clear glass panels alternating with colored glass panels and panels silk-screened with photographic images of trees, eight skylights of colored glass in the four canopies of the platforms. Wind screen pieces no longer exist.
The turtle is a symbol of Mother Earth. The water is an allusion to the nearby Minnehaha Creek and the history of travels in this corridor. Both turtles travel the direction of the train on the track in front of their platform and toward each other to complete a circle of unity. Each turtle has a pine tree and its roots etched on their backs, representing the Confederacy of Iroquois Nations which Hiawatha worked to form. Hiawatha was the original name of this light-rail line and the name of the road that the line parallels. Although, it should be noted that Hiawatha Avenue and the nearby Minnehaha Creek are named after fictional characters from Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, while the Hiawatha that helped form the Confederacy of Iroquois Nations is not the Hiawatha of the poem.
JoAnn Verburg is an American photographer who uses large format cameras to shoot life-size portraits, still life's and landscapes. Verburg’s images create narrative sequences that generate a state of prolonged experience; not a state of motion, but, rather, how we view images, as in mirroring the eye’s movement during the act of looking.
She made a name for herself in the late 1970s with “The Rephotographic Survey Project,” a collaborative exhibition and book that recreated more than 120 images of largely uninhabited Western landscapes in the 19th century. Using cameras, lenses and film that approximated the technology of their 19th-century predecessors, they waited for weather conditions that replicated the light in the original photographs, then rephotographed each place. The resulting then-and-now comparisons showed what the passage of time had done to those vistas. Surprisingly, what endured — the same trees, boulders and riverbeds — was often just as poignant as the changes to the landscape over time.
Verburg studied at Ohio Wesleyan University, earning her Bachelor’s of Arts in Sociology. She earned her Masters of Fine Art in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Photography, New York. Verburg moved to Minnesota in 1981 where she was an artist-in-residence at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She splits her time between St. Paul, Minnesota and Spoleto, Italy.
46th 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 on the northbound platform: To represent commerce, the artist used patterns from the 1901 Grain Exchange, designed by Minneapolis Architects Kees and Colburn at 46th Street Station. 200’ x 9’
This image on the southbound platform: A northern European native costume brought over by a Scandinavian immigrant inspired 46th Street Station. 200’ x 9’