SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – It would be the tallest structure in the Caribbean and among the tallest statues in the world, a monument to Christopher Columbus in a region where he has not been regarded highly for many years.

So far, though, the nearly 300-foot bronze likeness of The Great Explorer just seems like a monumental morass or perhaps a colossal joke. Originally intended to grace the skies of a major U.S. city, it has been shuffled from one locale to another and lies in pieces as a businessman and the mayor of the small Puerto Rican town of Arecibo try to finally erect it overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on the island’s north coast.

But this still may not be the final chapter in what has so far been a 20-year saga. The statue’s final resting place is far from certain: Its backers must gather a long list of permits, including from the Federal Aviation Administration, to install a monument so tall it could interfere with air traffic. And now, Puerto Rican officials are competing to bring it to their parts of the island as a lure to tourists.

Then there is the fact that the roughly 600-ton statue, like many other large-scale public works, inspires more criticism than awe, especially since Columbus is commonly viewed now as the harbinger of genocide rather than the discoverer of the New World.

“To be honest, it’s a monstrosity,” says Cristina Rivera, a longtime activist against the creation of private beaches in Arecibo who has been vocal about her opposition to erecting a giant Columbus in her town. “Why do we have to bring such an exaggerated piece of work here?”

It’s just that kind of reaction that has doomed the project in the past and could do so again.

Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli, 77, built the statue in 1991 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 arrival in the Western Hemisphere. The artist is internationally renowned for giant, expensive and sometimes unwanted works. But his pieces have found a home in the U.S. before, including in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, and he remains confident his rendition of the Great Explorer will eventually reach a destination.

Tsereteli, in an email interview with The Associated Press, notes that even the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower faced criticism and challenges.

“Now they are symbols,” he said. “Without those symbols, those places would be unimaginable.”

During a visit to Russia in 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush stopped by Tsereteli’s studio in Moscow and picked one Columbus model out of three presented to him. In September 1994, Tsereteli traveled to the U.S. with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and presented the chosen model to President Bill Clinton.

South Florida was one of the first proposed locations for the statue, which features Columbus with shoulder-length hair, an unusually sharp and straight nose and large and slightly protruding eyes reminiscent of a Cubist painting.

One county commissioner joked it would make a good artificial reef while another suggested they could just display the head and not bother with the rest of the statue. Some also worried about erecting something that would pay homage to a person associated with slave trading and brutal colonization.

The statue then made its rounds through New York, Ohio and Maryland, with no success.

“Various private organizations said they would put it up,” said Emily Madoff, Tsereteli’s spokeswoman. “Then they realize what’s involved in something so big. … You just don’t plunk it on top of the land.”

In 1998, Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rosello accepted it as a gift and spent $2.4 million in public funds to bring it to the island. Then the mayor of Catano, a suburb of San Juan that draws thousands of tourists to its Bacardi rum distillery, requested the statue.

But the plan ran into trouble when aviation authorities said the proposed location would interfere with flight paths, and residents whose homes would have to be demolished to make way for the statue protested the plans. Then Columbus went into storage. “It was awful, really awful,” Madoff said. “It just sat there.”

In 2008, a port management company, Holland Group Ports Investments, agreed to take the statue and store it in the western coastal city of Mayaguez, where it remains. A Russian crew recently flew there and ensured that most of the 2,700 pieces still fit together as plans seemed to move forward in Arecibo.

Arecibo Mayor Lemuel Soto says the statue would add to the allure of the town, which draws people to its limestone caves and one of the world’s largest telescopes. Madoff says funding should not pose a problem, that investors have the $20 million it would take to erect the statue.

But now that the permit process is under way, a new threat has emerged. Puerto Rican Rep. David Bonilla has begun lobbying to put up the statue to lure tourists to the western corner of the U.S. territory, perhaps on the island of Desecheo, which is uninhabited except for the occasional errant Dominican migrant trying to escape the U.S. Border Patrol.

San Juan Mayor Jorge Santini, an influential figure on the island, also has weighed in, saying he wants Columbus in the capital. Santini envisions it near a popular lagoon or even atop an old landfill.

The artist’s spokeswoman insists it’s too late to start looking for a new site and that Columbus will rise in Arecibo.

History says otherwise.

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – Tucked away above the Ninth Street bustle and within earshot of the strains of saxophone-playing outside Lakota Coffee is Melissa Williams’ art gallery. The dealer—part of a Midwest minority—shares her penchant for 19th- and 20th-century American art with experience, modesty and aplomb, running the understated jewel of a gallery in conjunction with antique dealer Douglas Solliday. Paintings of fascinating origin and varied style grace the walls as Solliday’s furniture, and historical ephemera anchor the two-dimensional art. The two have sold at art and antique shows together since 1981 and have shared a business space since 1995.

Williams grew up in Columbia and studied art history at the University of Missouri. “The two art forms that really please me are paintings and—this sounds funny—the art of small business,” she said. “I love being downtown, where there are all these single-owner small businesses.” Her establishment is part of that group of healthy small-market endeavors around downtown. But the wealth of history begging to be unearthed in her search for high-quality fine art, she said, also has been a draw to stay in Mid-Missouri over the years.

Mary Pixley, associate curator at MU’s Museum of Art and Archaeology, respects Williams immensely, she said in an email. “Gallery owners of Melissa’s quality rarely choose to set up shop in out-of-the-way places like Columbia. The fact that she shares her expertise with Columbia, Missouri, is a statement about how much she cares about art and the city of Columbia.”

Williams’ gallery is open Fridays. Her relentless pursuit of art leads her around–and at times outside—the community. “We have to get out and buy each object individually,” she said. “People like to ask us, ‘Where do you find your things?’ as though there’s a store. We just have to say, ‘No, you could find them, too.’” It is simply a matter of a dogged tracking-down of particular works and artists, she added.

She not only sells art to Missourians but also on the coasts; this summer, for example, she sold art in Newport, R.I., to which collectors from Nantucket often travel. “The Midwest—with with certain pockets—is still the least expensive place to buy antiques,” she said. “There’s really much more interest everywhere in the country about regional things … I think as we get more international, everybody is looking for the roots of the places they live in.”

Several books have been written about the material culture of states such as California, Pennsylvania and Texas, Williams said, but no prominent books have been written about how to collect artifacts and art from Missouri. That keeps the prices low. “I think Missourians” might be tempted to buy into “the East Coast view of our cultural heritage, that there really isn’t anything to our cultural history,” she said. “Which is so totally wrong.”

An art dealer at a coastal show once asked her to name one Missouri-based work of art that is an American icon. She immediately rattled off Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, an 1845 painting by the renowned George Caleb Bingham, now possessed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He looked at me, and he just said, ‘You can’t count that,’” she remembered.

But Williams is expectant that as Missourians and out-of-state visitors continue to discover the unparalleled art inside the Capitol at Jefferson City, and rediscover historically renowned artists from St. Louis and the colony of Ste. Genevieve, appropriate appreciation for Missouri art and its material culture will flourish.

At the core of Williams’ passion lies an impulse to find art by Midwesterners who once were well-known but have been forgotten by today’s art world. She consistently looks for art by those who painted massive lunettes inside the Capitol, including the likes of Thomas Barnett and Frank Nuderscher. In the 19th and 20th centuries, she explained, artists would work with a dealer, who would often have a large body of work to represent. After artists passed away, dealers stopped representing them, “and so, a great painter becomes forgotten,” Williams said. Afterward, there is “this gap where nobody is paying any attention—and then it comes back.”

“I sell to a lot of people who couldn’t care less about how old it is, but they want something that is very different,” she added. “They haven’t seen anything like this before, and so they’ll search in the past. They’re just fascinated by the innovation that the artist brought.”

Williams sells to many collectors who initially buy a painting for its aesthetic and later become enticed by its history. “I think people will sometimes buy a painting from me as decoration. And then two or three years later, they’ll call me and say, ‘I lost that biography. Tell me about this artist because I keep wondering: Who is this artist whose painting I look at every day?’

“It’s a learning of not just what you like but what you’re fascinated by that can be a portal to you to all sorts of discovery within yourself or learning about the artist or learning about the era that it was painted in,” she said. “There’s so much more than just the word ‘like.’”

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Information from: Columbia Daily Tribune, http://www.columbiatribune.com

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

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