In 1978, Rockville, Maryland became of the first cities in the U.S. to adopt a public art program mandating 1% of municipal building budgets be spent on public art. One of the city’s first projects through this program was for the green space adjacent to Rockville Civic Center and Theater. A call for art was announced, and sixty-eight preliminary designs were voted by the general public. According to Abby Wasserman’s Washington Star profile on Calfee in late 1978, it came down to public’s 15 favorite designs and a handful chosen by a committee of city officials and arts leaders headed by Walter Hopps. Calfee’s design won out and so began a two year process of development, fabrication, and installation.
Calfee’s 1978 maquette
Throughout 1979 and 1980, Calfee finalized the design and worked with a local fabricator and foundry to execute the brass and bronze work. Calfee selected three familiar materials to work with: “sheet brass, enabling sufficiently large, perhaps dramatic shapes; bronze “shields,” contributing varied surfaces and close-up interest; and a red-brown granite, color closely related to weathering brass and bronze.”
Calfee says he aimed to create and an “organic ensemble, honoring tree trunks, but reverberating the roof line of the theater, and pointing toward the [Glenview] mansion.” The work combines the artist’s signature planar geometries with bronze cast in relief with allusion to ancient sculpture and the earliest recorded forms of written language. The designs of the cast bronze “shields” aligns closely with contemporaneous work of Calfee’s and speaks to his fascination with ancient cultures deepened by trips to Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Italy in the late 1970s.
Untitled, 1981, Photo by William E Mills
Untitled, 1981, Photo by William E Mills
