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Visiting Art: Best be quick if you expect to see Sleepwalker
Journal Photo by Walt Unks
People waiting for a bus check out the sculpture.
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Published: November 15, 2009
So, a man wearing a sleeping bag over his head walks into a bus station …
What, you haven't seen him? Downtown Winston-Salem, leaning up against a pillar, just outside the terminal.
No?
Well. Go to the corner of Fifth and Trade streets. Walk past the buses, practically to the glass windows of the lobby. Look for the blue sleeping bag, the khaki-covered ankles, the brown shoes. Shake your head and laugh, maybe pull out your camera, and snap a picture to post on Facebook. The people hanging out at the bus station, they know what's going on. They'll jump at the chance to tell you: You've been duped.
"You know," one informed woman told a gawker Friday morning, "that's a mannequin, honey."
Jenkins-ed again.
It's public art, and it was supposed to be one of a series of works by Mark Jenkins, an international street artist whose work has been shown from the United States to Poland to Brazil. But a collision between art and bureaucracy has left two of those works in storage.
Ellen Wallace, a spokeswoman for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which commissioned Jenkins' work, paid for the commission using grants from the James G. Hanes Fund and the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.
She said the amount paid to Jenkins is protected from public disclosure by SECCA's contract with him.
Jenkins started out a guerrilla artist in Washington, positioning his works around the city at night and posting photographs of his creations on his Web site.
His popularity grew and commissions started coming. SECCA falls under the umbrella of the North Carolina Museum of Art and the authority of the state Department of Cultural Resources, which meant that, before Jenkins' work could be displayed here, SECCA had to unravel a tangle of bureaucratic red tape. There were permissions to be gained from city hall and the state government and liability insurances to buy.
Martha Wheelock, an assistant Winston-Salem city manager, has been working with SECCA to prevent the public art displays from creating a public risk or burdening public tax dollars.
When the Liberty Street billboard mannequin went up, some worried passers-by called 911. The "cocoon girl" outside Reynolda House prompted at least one emergency call.
City officials also were concerned about public safety.
In the summer of 2008, they removed four sculptures -- not by Jenkins -- from Winston Square Park after one of the sculptures fell on a 6-year-old while she was playing on it. In the end, SECCA paid for insurance to protect the city from being liable for the pieces.
SECCA also attached "Sleepwalker" to a nearby pillar in an attempt to keep the piece from falling.
"There's been a couple comments that the city is trying to censor art," Wheelock said. "That is not our goal at all. Our goal was to address potential cost to taxpayers from 911 calls… and something had to happen to address risk and indemnification issues."
As a result, two more of Jenkins' displays are still in SECCA storage.
Steven Matijcio, SECCA's curator of contemporary art, said at least one of those displays is "kind of indefinitely postponed right now."
Still, he said the works that made it to the Winston-Salem streets achieved their goal: SECCA brought the works to get people talking about art and the city.
"Sleepwalker" is the latest Jenkins art exhibit to go up in Winston-Salem this fall. Only this one has been allowed to stay up. The first, a mannequin positioned atop a billboard on Liberty Street, caused so much consternation that within 20 minutes the police had asked SECCA to take it down.
Besides the bus station "Sleepwalker" and the billboard mannequin, there's been a girl wrapped in a cocoon in a magnolia tree outside Reynolda House and a "flower girl" at Tanglewood Park. If you want to see "Sleepwalker," you should hurry: The exhibit could come down today.
Jenkins' works are usually three-dimensional replicas of people or animals. The replicas are almost always displayed in unexpected positions or places -- who would ever expect to see a girl in a plastic cocoon up in a tree?
"It was really neat the way he activated parts of the city that had just become so familiar that we don't recognize them anymore, the parts that just kind of fade into the background," Matijcio said.
lgraff@wsjournal.com | 727-7279
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