It has been said that public art is a reflection of how we see the world — the artist’s response to our time and place. One Rhode Island artist has combined those concepts — literally — and his works surround us.
For tens of thousands of drivers who travel every day on Interstate 95 in Providence, you can’t miss the mischievous worker about to roll a clock right off the roof of the former Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Company. “Foundry Clock Man” is just one of the whimsical works of modern, metal art created by contemporary sculptor Peter Diepenbrock.
“This piece is sort of (a) metaphor of, ‘Why is time so dominating in our lives?’ Time is totally dominating,” he says. “You think about how we are obsessed with time of day, seasons, retirement, there’s all these ways of dividing life up into time chunks It’s a rejection of that.”
Diepenbrock constructs most of his stainless steel pieces in his home studio in Jamestown. His most recent piece of public art is an almost 10-foot-tall rabbit springing to life at the playground on Peacedale’s village green. He describes it as “a skating kind of flying bunny, which is sort of inspiring, hopefully to young people to live lightly in your own life.”
“Life is so serious right now,” Diepenbrock adds. “The world is in such crisis, it seems like everywhere you look that we could use a little more humor and a little less dark subject matter.”
Constructing these structures has allowed him to be the architect of his own career, Diepenbrock says.
“So there’s a way to be a bit of a philosopher, a crafts person, a designer, an engineer, and then a maker,” he says. “At the core of it is I love making stuff. And so it’s kind of like, ‘Well, what could I make today?’”
A native Californian, Diepenbrock graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-1980s and has been successfully self-employed ever since. He has a cottage industry of metal, tabletop giftware, all with humorous personalities. But in 2002, Diepenbrock says his art took a serious turn.
“A friend stopped by and said, ‘Peter, do you know about the 9/11 Memorial Competition?’ And I applied to that and won the competition,” he says. “And that is what started the public art practice.”
As you first enter the Rhode Island State House, you pass right by Diepenbrock’s prestigious commission. He had only five months to design, create and install this sole 9/11 Memorial. It’s gold leaf on glass, stark and steeped in symbolism. Diepenbrock says, “The reference was so 9/11, so there’s nine layers of glass, and then the 11 is represented by what looks like the towers. But if you just see them graphically, there’s a 9/11 embedded three-dimensionally.
“It was going to weigh 4,000 pounds and they had to reinforce the structure of the State House from below. So they had to hire a state fabricator to come in and build a whole steel armature down below. It was intense. I mean, I can’t even tell you how intense it was.”
Another of Diepenbrock’s heavy metal sculptures can be found at the University of Rhode Island. Torsion III is part of the “One Percent for Public Art” program, which mandates a portion of all state funding for construction be spent on artwork to create an atmosphere of beauty and civic pride as well as community accessibility.
Diepenbrock says it’s important because, “As an artist, it’s great to have work in a museum but to have it out in the public environment is better because everyone can see it for free — you don’t have to go in to see the artwork.”
“It enhances the environment and expresses some symbolism, some values,” he adds.
One of Diepenbrock’s recent works is drawing the public’s eye in a new direction. An aerial mobile is the centerpiece of the lobby at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. He calls it abstract construction.
“There’s 160 discs of glass, dichroic glass. There are four sizes and four colors, and they shift their color depending on your view, your angle view,” he says. “So the idea was to kind of create this arrangement of floating discs of glass and color that would turn and project those colors all around the room in slow motion. And the idea being recognizing that it’s a high-stress environment.
“So kids are coming in, they’re scared, their parents are coming in nervous, the staff highly stressed environment. So I was thinking we need to create something that is calming, that is soothing. If there’s a metaphor there, it would be like, ‘What would healing look like?’”
Outside Diepenbrock’s studio are sculptures privately commissioned, or just free-form pieces for his own enjoyment. Each has a story to tell that can bring a community together. Since our story was published, one lawn sculpture bunny titled “Big B and the Looking Glass” recently sold for $95,000. Diepenbrock says it was a record for a non-commissioned piece of his artwork. The benefactors then donated the sculpture to the Waterfire Arts Center and recently it was displayed at some of the Waterfire events in downtown Providence.
Diepenbrock says the hope is his artwork will surround the community for a very long time.
“I think what I do love about public art as a category is it demands the whole spectrum,” he says. “So you have to be able to write about it, you have to be able to speak about it, you have to be able to represent it and model.
“You have to transition it, you have to translate it, engineer it, actually build it, it as a complete piece that’s going to last for a couple hundred years.”
