2 ACUMEN • SPRING 2023 common function of marking something in the site — a direction, a piece of history or a personal connection. The project is a departure from the industrial design classes he teaches. Although it leverages some of the same skills, “it’s really art,” he says. Partnering with artist Marek Walczak, it is Heiss’ third commissioned work for the city of Denver. “We like to work with communities where they are helping produce the content and contributing some element to the design in a significant way,” Heiss explains. “That’s a really crucial part of our collaborative practice. We’re trying to make something that actually does speak to the place in a meaningful way.” The first of the four new installations—a whimsical 16-foottall wayfinding sign with 37 different directional arrows—included a collaboration with the Bruce Randolph School in the Cole neighborhood. An assignment in art classes challenged students to design arrows pointing to something that they care about. The arrows selected for the installation point to diverse locations, near and far: downtown Denver; local playing fields; Germany; and the location of the Sand Creek massacre, some 252 miles away, an historic event marking the killing of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Some arrows reflect local lore. One points to Daddy Bruce’s Bar-B-Que, a nod to Daddy Bruce Randolph, the man for whom the school is named. To transform the students’ designs into metal, drawings were scanned into a CAD program and traced. Allentown-based DiBello’s Metal ART COMMUNITYFOCUSED ART A milelong park in Denver, Colo., has become a place where the past meets the present, reflected in four public art installations created by artist Wes Heiss. Filtered through the creative vision of Heiss, associate professor of product design in the department of art, architecture and design, the installations are helping to redefine the area in its new incarnation as a green space. The interactive installations reflect what the area has meant to current and past residents of the Clayton and Cole neighborhoods, where the park is located. Each work is distinctive, but all four feature a red-orange color that subtly unifies them. Heiss explains that they also share the Designs created stainless steel arrows that were powder coated in orange. All 37 are mounted on a single pole—a carefully engineered process allowing each to be visible amid the cluster. Other pieces in the installation capture the area’s history. A water tower sculpture captures Denver’s flood history and its impact on the neighborhoods. A third piece in the series is a nod toward another time in the location’s history. The remaining piece invites observers to examine and interact with it. Conversation consists of two 8-footlong metal horns. Positioned to face each other across a ravine, the two structures function as megaphones, allowing people positioned at each end to speak to one another, even at a whisper, across the space. ENGLISH THE DOOM OF THE GREAT CITY British author William Delisle Hay published The Doom of the Great City: Being the Narrative of a Survivor in 1880. The novella tells a tale about an apocalyptic fog of pollution that destroys London, yet no viable text exists in print. A new critical edition project by Michael Kramp and Sarita Mizin ’15G seeks to contextualize the novella with primary source appendices and resources to support scholarly and teaching conversations related to the story’s themes as they bring it back into circulation. Doom tells the story of a man who is the sole survivor of this destructive event. Retired to rural New Zealand, the author gives to his grandchildren a detailed recount, through which Hay connects this eradication to human greed and considers how it has led to massive inequities, failing public policies and severe ecological, health and economic crises that threaten the nation. “It’s one of the many late Victorian apocalyptic stories, but unlike so many of them, it’s really a story of urban apocalypse that isolates London,” Kramp says. “While London gets decimated and the whole population COURTESY OF WES HEISS An underside view of Flood. THE HBURMIEAFNSITIES
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