Christening Post: Sculpture Fairies.

The first day I ever stepped foot on Brenau's campus, I was enamored. I drove through sorority circle with my mother, and at that moment I had decided. This is where I belong.

That was Winter Weekend 2009. Ever since, WW has been very special to me.

So you can imagine my surprise when one day, while walking to class, I discovered something horrible. Something so incredibly bad I thought it was... well I wasn't sure at all what I was thinking. But I took a picture!



Seriously. What the hell is this! This atrocity is one of four unnecessary statues added to the campus... just in time for Winter Weekend.

Students were outraged, including myself. The lovely Donna Gibson, who sends out "This Week At Brenau" was given the horrendous task of being the messenger for this ludacris email:

Visit from the Sculpture Faeries

After witnessing a flurry of workman-like construction activity Thursday morning, students, faculty and staff on the Gainesville campus awoke Friday to the sudden appearance of four giant metal sculptures at strategic locations, all courtesy of Andrew Crawford, the metal-working Atlanta sculptor who had crafted the “Violin” piece in front of the Burd Center 10 years ago. The pieces, which already have generated some spirited discussions on campus, all have interesting histories, including appearances in other museums and art shows around the Southeast. Crawford loaned three of the pieces to the university on a “year lease” and sold the fourth to Brenau “at a very good price,” he said, “Because I really feel I am part of the university and I love being involved with the school.” He’d just started his career, he explained, when Brenau commissioned the piece to adorn the front lawn at the Burd Center. Against the backdrop of the building’s stain glass window, it is part of one of the iconic images of the campus now and one of the most-photographed spots in Gainesville. “That commission was very important to me,” he said. “It really launched my career.”

The university acquired “Pure Americana,” or the oil can with wings for we who are sculpture-impaired, which now sits outside Simmons Visual Arts Center. He built the model for it in his shop one day when he decided the oilcan on his work bench looked like a bird. The big piece he later built from the model to open an exhibit at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Ala. It’s been around to exhibits in other museums including the past two years in Chattanooga – so the piece has nothing to do with soaring gas prices or the BP spill last summer that covered thousands of birds with oil. Nor is the “Battleship” standing on end some kind of anti-war statement. Crawford’s work, he says, isn’t about imagery and symbolism as much as it is about objects, “looking at stuff” from a variety of perspectives. Thus a broken ball peen hammer, with a few minor changes becomes a “Bull” and another becomes almost a cartoonish rocket in a piece called “Launch.”

Are we five? What the hell is this!? I can barely grasp the major BS that this email is coated in.

Luckily, three of the statues are on loan. Unluckily, they are loaned to use for a year. That's right, instead of donating actual money to help our debt, we got statues in inconvenient places. In fact, we were dumb enough to pay for one of those statues. I don't care if it was for a very good price. Unless it was free, we didn't have the budget for that. And if we did, I would love to see a copy of Brenau's annual budget.

Seriously, where are my tuition dollars going? I would love for them to actually go to my education. Like restoring the building we have classes in, like the historic Owens Student Center (fka Butler Hall) that flooded last semester. Obviously the plumbing needs some help. How about restoring the buildings we live in? I recall a hall this year that had a rat infestation... and a flood.

So please, hear my cry alums who wish to donate, SPECIFY where your donations belong. Please do not let them run rampant. And please do not write your check out to "The Brenau Sculpture Fairies" (Unless of course, you are paying them to remove such travesties.)