With riverfront development construction underway in Fort Wayne, the City and the parks department are left to decide on the promenade’s aesthetics. During a meeting of the parks board on Thursday, a sculpture was chosen to serve as the promenade’s centerpiece.
Alec Johnson is the landscape architect of the Fort Wayne parks department. In searching for the sculpture design to use, he says the only guidance the City gave was to focus on the history of Fort Wayne’s rivers.
“But after that, we wanted the artist to sort of take that information and view their own ethos and own thoughts about what that means and how it relates to their art,” Johnson said.
Of the submissions, five were selected as finalists. Johnson says that while all of them were worthy of consideration, it was “Convergence” by Linda Howard that was selected.
Howard lives in Florida, and has 34 sculptures across 18 different states. She said the sculpture was always intended to be large at full scale and do the best justice it could to the rivers.
“I just took three elements of geometrically progressed rectangles and created a form that went into kind of a flow, like the rivers, that would be a nice area to walk around, look up at, catch in light and shadow,” Howard says.
The City hopes the sculpture will be completed for the promenade’s grand opening, which is projected for spring 2019.
