BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Frederick -- Public Art: Community Bridge ("Mural Bridge") @ Carroll Creek Park

MD -- Frederick -- Public Art: Community Bridge ("Mural Bridge") @ Carroll Creek Park:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. BRIDGE_121122_177.JPG: The Story of Community Bridge: In early 1993, artist William M. Cochran suggested to the City of Frederick that the Carroll Street Bridge, a plain concrete structure, could be transformed with paint, imagination and public participation into a work of art. His goal was to make Community Bridge a creative collaboration between audience and artist in a process he called co-creation. He sought to ask all 175,000 area residents: "What object represents the spirit of community to you?" A hundred volunteers repeated this question through the public and private schools, TV, radio and newspapers, posters, electronic highway signs, sidewalk chalk murals, and countless face-to-face contacts. Thousands of answers were contributed by people of all ages and backgrounds. Later, ideas arrived from all over the world via the Community Bridge world wide web site (http://bridge.skyline.net) . [Personal note: The web site doesn't exist anymore.] As people answered this question, the artist included their ideas as painted "carvings" in the bridge. These are the keys to the artwork's meaning, representing the ideas of more than a thousand individuals. In most cases, the viewer cannot tell who suggested a given symbol, whether they were young or old, male or female, black or white, rich or poor. Together, these ideas yield a new perspective on the human condition. A Shift in Perspective: The unusual painting in the circle to your right on the bridge is called Archangel. It is an anamorphic projection, a special type of artist's perspective made to be seen from a sharp angle. If the image is viewed from the correct spot (within the gallery window of The Delaplaine Visual Arts Center), it is transformed (see photo to left). This image represents the shift in perspective the bridge invites: to see through illusions of difference and separation. The title Archangel refers to the tremendous power of such a shift. Fooled by Appearances: Community Bridge is painted in the trompe l'oeil style, which is a French term meaning "that which fools the eye." Trompe l'oeil creates the illusion of 3-dimensional reality on a flat surface. The artist said, "How easily paint can fool the eye is a metaphor for how easily we are deceived by surface differences in people, like attitude, looks, age, race, or language. These lock us into stereotypes of who were should connect with. We all want to be connected with others, but sometimes we feel we are the only ones really trying. Community Bridge shows that everyone values connection. This is the common ground beneath the apparent differences. We always have a choice to find a bridge, build a bridge, walk across a bridge." Bridge Facts: * The mural covers about 3,000 square feet with more than 3,000 stones and more than 180 "carved" symbols representing the perspectives of a thousand different people. * Work began in early 1993 and the mural was completed on September 12, 1998. * Keim silicate paint from Germany was used. Unlike the paints traditionally available in the USA, Keim chemically bonds with the concrete surface and remains lightfast for decades.
2. BRIDGE_121122_184.JPG: Community Bridge: Symbols and Features
3. BRIDGE_121122_191.JPG: The Forgotten Song: The Forgotten Song weaves the ideas of 100+ people into a fountain and a "circle of life," both of which suggest the living, nourishing, renewing character of community. We are all linked to a larger community, the biosphere. The fruits of our labor and imagination are meaningless without the fruits of the earth that support our existence.
4. BRIDGE_121122_195.JPG: The Light Within: The sculpture this painting is based on is The Woman of Samarta, by William Henry Rinehart, one of America's finest neoclassic sculptors. He was born a Frederick County farm boy. Rinehart based this piece on the Biblical story of a Samaritan woman who met a tired, thirsty Jesus at a well. She offered him water, he offered her "living water." They were enemies by race and religion, and she was thought inferior by gender and reputation. Yet at that well, those two people found some common ground. The Light Within expresses the idea found in many community responses of the intrinsic worth of every individual, regardless of superficial differences.
5. BRIDGE_121122_201.JPG: The Unfound Door: As the artist added people's ideas to the bridge, he noticed they all had one thing in common: circles. Almost every idea was linked by that common motif. Like the interlinked circles or the stones in a bridge, we are all interconnected. Perhaps within these connections lies an unfound door.
6. BRIDGE_121122_206.JPG: Archangel: Archangel is an anamorphic projection, a type of perspective meant to be seen from an angle. Our preconceived notion that we have the correct viewpoint makes it appear distorted. The true perspective is from the window of The Delaplaine Visual Arts Center. Cochran created it to show what he learned on this project: Where you stand determines what you see.
7. BRIDGE_121122_299.JPG: The discarded bike in the canal seemed artistic to me for some reason
8. BRIDGE_121122_645.JPG: Note the "duck" by the column
Description of Subject Matter: The Community Bridge in Frederick, Maryland was the idea of William Cochran. In 1993, he proposed taking a plain concrete bridge, called the Carroll Street Bridge, and turning it into a work of art. He surveyed the city to find out what sort of symbols they'd like to see. He took their ideas and incorporated them as "carvings" painted into the bridge. It's a technique called "trompe l'oeil" ("deceive the eye"). It's a really neat effect since it's art pretending it's stone work. Of course they have their own Web site at http://bridge.skyline.net which not only describes all of the images but even tells you who suggested them.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].