RALEIGH -- Next weekend's Raleigh Wide Open arts and entertainment festival will leave behind more than the fleeting pagentry of food and music. After all the tents and stages are packed away, several additions to downtown's public art scene will remain.
The most significant additions will be the unveiling of two new pieces of interactive art and the launching of three new sculptures in City Plaza, all along Fayetteville Street. In addition, a gallery will open in one of the four new pavilions in the new plaza and the latest round of art on the sides of city buses will be exhibited.
The interactive art projects address the region's cultures of art and technology, mixed in with a newly bustling scene in Raleigh's urban center. The sculptures join the four metal towers created by sculptor Jim Gallucci that were erected in the plaza this summer.
"It's all about integrating art into the vision of downtown," said June Guralnick, executive director of the Raleigh Arts Commission. "Together, it draws a really great picture."
The arts commission will unveil the interactive public art projects, "Horizon Line" and "Zoom Raleigh," from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday at the Urban Design Center and Fish Market Gallery building at 133 Fayetteville St.
"Horizon Line" will be a permanent piece, delivering the electronic light display that was always anticipated to be a part of whatever art ended up at City Plaza. (It was a popular concept left over from artist Jaume Plensa's unpopular idea for a monumental light and water extravaganza there.)
This is not a simple light show. The project was designed by a pair of noteworthy conceptual artists, UNC-Chapel Hill art faculty members Susan Harbage Page and Juan Logan. Earlier this year the married couple collaborated on an installation that received a lot of attention at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, S.C. They also did a series of bus shelters in Charlotte this year, and Logan recently designed the plaza in front of the new Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art and Culture in Charlotte.
"Zoom Raleigh" -- more interactive design than art -- will be a temporary window installation at the design center that offers passers-by the chance to manipulate a touch-screen three-dimensional model that explores downtown's history and present through pictures, texts, archives and interviews.
It was developed under the direction of Patrick FitzGerald, director of the advanced media lab at N.C. State University.
Three artists with extensive exhibition resumes have been chosen to exhibit the sculptures for one year on the plaza. The sculptors are William Donnan of Franklinville (Randolph County), Hanna Jubran of Grimesland (Pitt County), and Adam Wells of Red Springs (Robeson County).
The Collectors Gallery, owned by longtime players in the Raleigh art world Rory Parnell and Megg Rader, moves from City Market to the plaza with a new identity: North Carolina fine craft. Its new home is one of the four glass pavilions on the plaza.
