Link Light Rail | Northgate to Lynnwood
Of the four stations, only one would merit visiting just to see the art: Lynnwood City Center. Both Claudia Fitch’s sparkling steel hummingbird and Preston Singletary’s technicolor glass panels are museum-worthy, a high compliment.
Claudia Fitch is known for creating monumental sculptures deploying a wide variety of materials, and here she puts that experience to good use with her giant metal bird towering over the ground-level station plaza. It would be easy to imagine a kitsch version of a bird based on – as Fitch’s piece is – the highway signs along Route 99, home of motels, bars, and strip malls. The brilliance of City Hummingbird is how it transcends its commercial sources. Fitch twists and shapes sheets of steel and aluminum into a series of brightly colored sections that suggest the various complex textures of her avian subject. Neon tubes and light bulbs are nestled throughout to add glow at night, and the flapping creature seems poised for takeoff, wings spread, tail extended. It’s the artist’s best piece to date.
At the Shoreline South Station, Seattle public art veteran Buster Simpson has chosen to address the parking structure rather than the station itself. It’s all a bit wonky, a sort of giant Tinkertoy system for diverting the water from the roof to two blue steel pipes, stretching far overhead. Each pipe ends at an off-kilter concrete pillar, like a rock cairn about to fall over, very eye-catching and rather kinetic. One assumes the constructions would be much more interesting when it rains, where one pillar serves as a fountain, while the other supports a link in a wall-mounted irrigation system.
Unlike Simpson, Shoreline North artist Mary Lucking addresses the station platform, as well as creating sculptures for the station entrances, and designing the metal screens that enclose the parking structure. Without reading the helpful panel that describes the artwork, a viewer might not recognize all the art as being by the same artist.
The most appealing works are the squiggly metallic plants that sprout from various walls at the borders of the station. Their twisty bright yellow-green forms look like a fern that’s been plugged into an electric socket. The metal screens vaguely suggest grasses in the wind, but there isn’t enough variety to activate the pattern over the large area they cover. The platform art is nothing that would make a commuter’s workday more appealing: a set of repetitive amoeba-like green blobs set in glass panels, without the sort of color or shape invention that rewards our attention.
The most vexing installation is the metal panels by Los Angeles artist Kipp Kobayashi. Something major got lost in the transition between the artist’s conception and the final product. Kobayashi began with a rather lovely, if commonplace, idea of visualizing the station support structures as inhabited by giant tree forms, as though the old growth of yore had burst forth to inhabit the new architecture. It’s easy to see a committee being impressed by his proposal, where ghostly trees make a bold visual statement.
Only it doesn’t. Try as I might, walking around and around the supporting station structures, I saw only the vaguest semblance of tree forms, nothing that would be noticed by a busy traveler, let alone an effect that would justify the scale and expense of the art.
The 1% for Art program, with 1% of the capital budget devoted to public art, inspired a surge in public works. But all the stars have to align – artist, client, budget, technique – to end up with a significant and memorable result. When they do, as with the Lynwood City Center station, the result is a permanent, public amenity that transcends the ordinary and enriches our shared environment.