The Seattle Public Library board of trustees has selected artist Linda Haworth to design artwork for the expanded Lake City Library. The Library Board unanimously confirmed the Portland artist at its Sept. 26 meeting.
The Lake City Art Advisory Panel - made up of Library staff, a community member, and representatives of the Library's design team and the Seattle Arts Commission - recommended Haworth for the job.
"Linda's work is truly based in the community, which is critical for the Lake City expansion," Douglas Bailey, the Library's project manager for the Lake City expansion, told the board.
Bailey said Haworth told the panel that for a commission in Oregon, she persuaded neighbors to donate space in their garages, then temporarily set up kilns inside to encourage residents to create tiles for a public art project.
"Lake City is such a diverse and diffuse community, we felt we needed someone who would go out and aggressively engage the community," Bailey said.
Lake City is the Library's first branch art project launched under an innovative program called Art Partners in which an artist will be paired with a skilled community artist who has little or no experience in public art. The program was created to encourage participation by local artists working in traditional or non-visual art forms, such as Hmong embroiderers or African storytellers. The community artist for Lake City has not yet been selected.
Haworth's degree is in ceramics, but she also works in metal, stone and glass. Her current commission with the city of Tempe, Ariz., is in sculpted granite and metal, and she also has designed, fabricated and installed artwork in earth, metal, glass, stone, concrete, ceramic, mosaics and reflected light in an environmental setting.
"I feel a life-long and heartfelt commitment to the work of random acts of beauty in public settings," Haworth said. She has a history of neighborhood-based projects that incorporate and reflect the community through personal and traditional imagery.
Her projects include a transit shelter and bus stop seating wall in Tempe, Ariz.; glass mosaic panels for a pedestrian underpass in Arizona; multiple pieces of public art for Tri-Met Westside Light Rail in Portland, Ore.; and an earthscape piece with the Pima County Flood Control Department in Santa Cruz River Park in Tucson, Ariz.
Haworth's artwork will be incorporated into the library expansion, which is scheduled to open in 2002.
The panel recommended Haworth after interviewing three artists from a roster of public artists that the Arts Commission compiled specially for branch library projects. The commission, a city agency formed in 1971 to increase public awareness of and support for the arts, is managing the library's public art program.
The art budget for the library is $33,957.
The $2.9 million expansion will feature an updated collection, more seats, a meeting room, upgraded technology and more space for books. The expansion will add nearly 6,000 square feet to the current 9,013-square-foot facility.
The project is part of the $196.4 million "Libraries for All" bond measure that Seattle voters passed in 1998 to upgrade the Library's 109-year-old system. The plan calls for improving or replacing all 22 branch libraries, building three new branches and building a new central library.
For more information about Libraries for All, visit the Library's Web site at www.spl.org and select "Libraries for All capital projects."
(For more information, call Mary Hamilton, Arts Commission public art project manager, 206-615-1878, or Caroline Young Ullmann, Library communications assistant, 206-615-1627.)
See also Expanding the Lake City library
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Content modified: 3 Octobere 2000
12/30/2005
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