Politics & Government

Titanic Sculptor from England Among Bidders for City's Centennial Legacy Project

Tony Stallard is the only foreign entrant seeking $125,000 public art assignment in The Village.

A British sculptor who hung a giant illuminated Titanic model at the site of its original shipyard is among four dozen bidders for the Centennial Legacy Project—public art for The Village.

“It references the industrial heritage of the [Belfast shipyard] area and can be seen as a reverie of the past—to create nostalgia of what was once heroic,” Tony Stallard of Essex said of his $300,000 artwork, which stands 44 feet high.

The chief executive of the Titanic Quarter hailed the sculpture as “magnificent” in an October 2009 interview in the Belfast Telegraph.

With a week and a half left to the deadline for submitting their qualifications, Stallard, 53, is the only international bidder for La Mesa’s public art project expected to cost between $100,000 and $125,000.

Twenty-five bidders listed on the city’s website (click on prospective bidders) are from San Diego County. Fifteen are from elsewhere in California. And 13 artists or groups from outside the state have entered the competition to leave a mark downtown celebrating the centennial of La Mesa cityhood.

Sculptors, landscape artists and muralists from as far way as Massachusetts, Miami Beach, Brooklyn and Minneapolis have registered as bidders to erect their work in 2013.

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La Mesa entrants listed as bidders include Wall-It Graphics on Normandie Place, D. Lynn Reeves of Sierra Vista Avenue, Fonsecas Design Shop of Parkway Drive,  Thomas Creative of Blackton Drive and architect Kent Coston of South Tropico Drive.

Among San Diego County artists seeking the work is Paul Hobson, who designed a concrete, steel, glass and neon “gateway sculpture” at the El Cajon Boulevard Transit Plaza over Interstate 15. Other works of his include a 120-foot-long bike bridge over the Los Angeles River.

Another bidder is James T. Hubbell of Santa Ysabel, who has designed distinctive buildings for area nature centers.

From Watertown, MA, comes mosaic artist Mike Mandel, whose 4-by-7 1/2-foot portrait of Barack Obama, assembled before his election, included 4,320 tiles—which he called “tiny” by his previous standards.

“The one I did for the Atlanta Federal Center was 30 feet tall and 130 feet long,” Mandel told a local newspaper.

That one, built in 2001, “illustrates the sit-in by African-Americans at Rich’s Department Store, which used to be located where the Federal Center sits now. It depicts, in part, Martin Luther King Jr. being led away by police after leading the sit-in at the department store’s lunch counter,” said a 2008 report.

The story continued: “Though conceding the political overtones to that piece, Mandel said most of his public art needs to not be too in-your-face. ‘It has to have a quieter kind of existence, so that people will be able to live with it.’ ”

Other prominent artists entered include Michael Clapper Studios of Denver; Jonathan Bonner of Providence, RI; humor sculptor James Simon of Pittsburgh, PA; and Howard Kalish of Brooklyn, famed for large geometric works. 

The close of bidding is 4 p.m. Oct. 21, the city says.

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