“Sue Samoviski took on that fundraising, and people stepped up very quickly,” Welch said. “It was probably one of our more successful fundraising campaigns, just because we got yeses so quickly.”
The money was all raised from private sources. Samoviski volunteers for various Hamilton arts initiatives and also is married to former City Manager Mike Samoviski.
As construction crews work to complete the Millville leg of the intersection reconfiguration, which created a large area that will be where the sculpture is located, artist Hunter Brown of Little Rock, Ark., and a crew of metal workers is creating the 25-foot-tall brushed stainless steel artwork in which two spiraling forms wrap around each other. The work will be called “Embrace.”
The intersection, in which the streets have been redirected so that they meet at 90-degree angles — for improved safety and traffic flow — is nearing completion, with new curbs and sidewalks, and a supporting base in place.
“This piece kind of winds around itself in different kinds of ways,” Brown told this media outlet. “The lines are going to kind of curve, and relate to one another, and from every angle, that’s always going to change.
“They said they wanted something big that would have a lot of impact, something kind of modern, and I took some of the parameters of what they had in mind, and went to the drawing board.”
In 2000, then-Gov. Bob Taft declared Hamilton as “The City of Sculpture.”
About the Author