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| 7 Sep 2022 | |
| Committee News |
This story is part of a series featuring Asian Architects / Designers / Artists of Philly. We will be highlighting incredible murals that are a part of Mural Arts Philadelphia, urban street art that is part of Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection or other collections, urban spaces that embody Asian culture, and buildings designed by some of the most renowned architects from around the world. We will be featuring short blog posts written by members of Urban Design Committee, as well as guest posts by Committee on the Environment, Environmental Justice subcommittee and others. Stay tuned for more!
Blog entry by Kathleen Hogan
Before you walk up the stairs to enter the Rail Park (Philly's version of The High Line), be sure to visit Keiko Miyamori's sculpture “City Root” on the corner of 12th and Callowhill behind a chain-linked fence. This giant amber-red resin cube houses the root of a large oak tree that stood on the corner of Girard and 11th street where it became part of the demolition debris for the Cambridge Plaza Housing Project back in 2001. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were intertwined within the curled roots, holding on to the environmental surroundings to survive. Keiko was “absorbed by the strength of the tree that had once majestically stood with its complex root map and its overarching canopy” and to her, it “represented the energy of the city - the life of a tree in the city, and the life of the city in a tree.”
In 2004, Miyamori earned first prize at the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Competition for the development of “City Root”. The cube was initially measured to be 7' x 7' x 7', initially weighing 20,000 pounds, and was meant to reside at the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Garden in Grand Rapids, Michigan. However, during the process of preserving the root, the resin volume was less than required for the scale, and the sculpture began to form cracks, making the art too fragile to be presented in an outdoors garden according to Meijer Gardens (and yet the irony of it all is that it is currently being displayed outdoors locked behind a fence to prevent further damage). The final dimensions leave the piece at 7'-0” x 6'-5” x 5'-6” and weighing 17,000 pounds. This cracking was not seen as a setback for Miyamori as she thought the cracks were representing nature “breaking free from its artificial constraints”.
Keiko Miyamori (1964) was born in Yokohama, Japan and moved to the United States in 1998 residing in Philadelphia before moving to New York in 2011. Her works utilizes natural materials as the medium. Her goal is to encourage people to erase the boundaries of gender, age, race, religion, and country, and restore connections to nature and to each other, allowing the audience to feel and respect the connection between “individuals” and “elsewhere”.
Further Reading:
[1] https://www.philart.net/art/City_Root/1007.html
[2] http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2009/04/city-root-rootless.html
[3] http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2010/03/city-root-ten-months-later.html
