Artist Email: doug@awaka-inc.com
Artist Statement
For over 10 years I have created site-specific public artworks that are visually compelling, engage the community, and communicate on multiple levels. I bring a wealth of experience, not only as a public artist, but also as a former landscape architect and fine artist who has shown in museums and galleries throughout the country.
My work has focuses on the signs and symbols our society uses to communicate. Icons are a reflection of cultural values, attitudes and beliefs. In the past symbolic imagery was handmade and crafted with precious materials. These early icons portrayed the intangible, demonstrated power, and inspired awe. My work returns cultural symbols to their place in our society as touchstones of wonder and power, as focal points that inspire civic discourse and explore our collective yearning for individuality and community.
In July 2015 I installed a work in San Antonio, TX dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King. The 32 foot steel sculpture is located in a park that is the terminus of the annual Martin Luther King day march. Each year over one hundred thousand people attend this event. The city wanted an iconic sculpture that would symbolize Dr King, his philosophy and provide a focal point for those entering the park at the end of their march. The upraised arm with its open hand symbolizes King’s non-violent philosophy. The open circle in the palm further shows this as a non-violent gesture. Finally, as people duck thru the opening at the bottom of the work they instinctively steady themselves by placing their open hand on the stainless steel ring. This gesture links them to the sculpture and symbolically to Dr. King.
In 2013 I completed a large and complex sculpture installation for the City of New Orleans. The $200,000 project is made up of seventeen identical iconic figures sited in every neighborhood of the city. Each fourteen-foot sculpture is an abstracted figure posed as if it is hailing a cab. Each serves as a way finding iconic marker where people will gather for transportation out of the city in case of mandatory emergency evacuation. In addition to working with fabricators, engineers, and a local contractor to develop and install these sculptures I had to work and coordinate with neighborhood groups, city and state agencies, as well as Federal Homeland Security. Each sculpture site had a unique constituency that had its own concerns and questions that needed to be addressed at countless meetings. I’m proud to say each sculpture has been “adopted” by its neighborhood and with great enthusiasm. The project received enormous press including an article in the New York Times. In addition, each of the 300 Regional Transit Authority drivers in New Orleans has been given a pin I designed in the shape of the sculpture. I worked with the transit union and the city to make it an official part of their uniform. Mayor Landrieu has proclaimed the Evacuspot sculptures official symbols of the City of New Orleans.
I am passionate about including the public in the public art process, and when possible I engage local residents in the planning and implementation of my projects. In Boston, MA I recently completed a two-year process of interaction and discovery with the Hyde Square community, that culminated in a large sculpture designed specifically for their community neighborhood park. The process included a blog, workshops with local students, and frequent meetings with the community, all documented on a website I designed for the project. (www.mozartpark.org)
To each undertaking I bring years of experience as a landscape architect at Sasaki Associates, where I worked on projects as small as a pocket park in New York City and as large as 12 kilometers of the coastline in Kuwait. I have earned outstanding recommendations for successfully engineering and building large-scale projects within budget and on time. Finally my work has won national recognition as one of the best examples of public art in the United States by Americans for the Arts.