Public Lecture: Erika Doss with Andrew Leicester

Minneapolis-based artist Andrew Leicester has designed public art projects since the 1970s for parks, plazas, and gardens in the United States, Australia, and England. Cincinnati residents know him best for Cincinnati Gateway, the historically themed sculptural entrance to Sawyer Point Park that he designed for the city’s bicentennial in 1988. Initially contentious, Cincinnati Gateway is a beloved public asset today, its flying pigs the mascots of the city’s annual marathon. This lecture surveys Leicester’s public art career and his longstanding interests in drawing on geographic, historical, and social elements to define—and disrupt—the meaning of place.

Public Lecture with Erika Doss, Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN.

Please join us at 21c Museum Hotel across the street from the Weston Art Gallery on Walnut Street. Admission is FREE and open to the public.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Cincinnati Gateway sculpture created as the entry to Cincinnati’s Bicentennial Commons in 1988, award-winning artist and sculptor Andrew Leicester (Minneapolis, MN) returns to create a new work that revisits the once controversial public sculpture that went on to launch a million flying pigs. Leicester’s new installation will be complemented by photo documentation of the Gateway project along with earlier and later public projects (both completed and unrealized) that he proposed in the United States and abroad. Noted art historian Erika Doss, who has written extensively about public sculpture and its unique presence, will present a lecture addressing Leicester and other artists’ approaches to public art and public space.