If I Was In Charge of… City Life Sculptures in Dayton

By on July 2, 2008 in MARKETING

For the sec­ond year in a row the City of Day­ton, along with the Down­town Day­ton Part­ner­ship, has brought in 20 of the mag­nif­i­cent bronze sculp­tures sculp­tures of J. Seward John­son.  The sculp­tures are extremely life­like.  They depict peo­ple, some­times accom­pa­nied by ani­mals and props, going about daily life in the city.  The detail is amaz­ing — caus­ing peo­ple to dou­ble take as they pass just to make sure that it really is a statue.  They have been widely suc­cess­ful in attract­ing atten­tion and draw­ing peo­ple to visit down­town Day­ton to check them out.  The city started a photo con­test around the sculp­tures, which I think is brilliant.

Still, if I was in charge of the City Life Sculp­tures the first thing I would do would be to cre­ate a blog for each of them.  On each blog, the story of the per­son depicted in the statue would be told day by day.  This could be done as a cre­ative writ­ing project, where stu­dents from Day­ton Pub­lic Schools could com­pete to earn the right to tell the fic­tional story of one statue.   The writ­ings could focus on a dif­fer­ent area of life each week, cre­at­ing a frame­work for the project.  This could start with bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about where they grew up, where they live and work, what they see every­day, how they inter­pret it based on who they are, and what they hope to see in the future.  This would be a won­der­ful exer­cise in char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and imag­i­na­tion.  By plac­ing it in the con­text of a blog, read­ers could engage with the stat­ues in con­ver­sa­tion — truly bring­ing them to life.   This would be sort of a Can­ter­bury Tales meets the Inter­net.  Each statue has a story, and each win­ner gets to tell it.   I think this would be an amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity to show­case young, cre­ative tal­ent, while simul­ta­ne­ously attract­ing addi­tional atten­tion to this amaz­ing exhibit.

What would you do first if you were in charge of the City Life Sculp­tures in Dayton?

Down­town Day­ton Partnership

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2 Responses to If I Was In Charge of… City Life Sculptures in Dayton

  1. Rick Cartwright July 4, 2008 at 11:54 am #

    David,
    What a won­der­ful idea. I par­tic­u­larly like the idea of involv­ing stu­dents. Per­haps there would also be some way to take this to the younger stu­dents to help them under­stand the his­tory and so froth.

    Rick

  2. Holly July 13, 2008 at 9:59 pm #

    Hi David,

    I too have dreams of being in charge of [insert com­pany or pro­gram here].

    As for the sculp­tures, I would try to find a way to use them to draw in peo­ple from the sub­urbs. Out where I live (Germantown/Farmersville), Day­ton is still largely seen as a strange and scary place. A place to ven­ture to only for gov­ern­ment ser­vices, jury duty, and the annual trip to the theater.

    Wouldn’t it be great if the sculp­tures’ sto­ries were con­nected to the his­tory of local sub­urbs, per­haps lur­ing more peo­ple to ven­ture down­town to visit “their” sculpture.

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