Giant concrete sculpture in City Park to be moved

One City Park sculpture to be moved; two sculptures to be removed; two removed already

For four months Peter Lundberg's 210,000-pound sculpture "Mississippi Gateway" has lain on its face in the field beside the New Orleans Museum of Art like an enormous abstract wino. The 30-ft. concrete and steel sculpture refused to remain upright when it was craned into place on May 16. In 2006 Lundberg co-founded "Sculpture for New Orleans," an ambitious post-Katrina project that has brought 40 outdoor artworks to the Crescent City, with sculptor and sculpture park designer Michael Manjarris.

Manjarris said that plans are underway to stand Lundberg's behemoth upright at a spot on Golf Drive in the park a short distance form its current resting place, perhaps within a month.

Earlier in May, Lundberg and Manjarris installed three angular steel abstractions by German artist Jorg Plickat to the east of Roosevelt Mall in City Park. The aquatic member of the trio "Dialectics and Metamorphosis" is still bobbing merrily atop its raft in nearby Little Lake. But the terrestrial sculptures "Encounter" and "Memento of Desire," that were placed picturesquely in the former golf course, have disappeared.

According to City Park representative John Hopper, Lundberg and Manjarris had been granted permission to install the floating sculpture, but not the other two. So the park removed them.

Manjarris said he wouldn't argue that proper permission had not been granted. "The two pieces were not included in the step-by-step procedure," he said. Manjarris said that the pair of sculptures was originally intended for the University of New Orleans campus. He said he hopes to raise the money to move them from storage in City Park to UNO in the future. Manjarris said that Lundberg is in China attending a sculpture symposium.

Time is running out to see two of the finest artworks produced for the Arts Council's $750,000 "Art in Public Places" project, paid for by a grant for m the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Shannon Landis Hansen's "Still Standing" and Michel Varisco's "Fragile Land: Rotunda" are scheduled to be removed from their City Park sites by October.

Say goodbye to Hansen's poetic ceramic-encrusted doorway on Bayou Metairie near the corner of City Park Avenue and Marconi Drive. Varisco's poignant photo banners can be found surrounding Popps fountain near Marconi Drive and Zachary Taylor Drive.