Syracuse, N.Y. – Located between two major art hubs, the Delavan Center and the Gear Factory, is Lipe Art Park. The park is a community art project established to support artists and create opportunities.
In July, Lipe Art Park’s Art Extravaganza unveiled many new works of art, including murals, flag art and a new sculpture called “Tenacity” by Sydney Schultz.
Held together with tension and pressure, without fasteners, Schultz’s sculpture represents the dialogue between nature and industry. It’s a woven structure crafted from shrub willow branches and saplings.
It intertwines with Brandon Rose’s existing sculpture “The Ark,” made of cement, wood and iron. Schultz wanted to use Rose’s sculpture because of the stark contrast between the two.
“All of this is freestanding, it doesn’t need this steel and the metal sculpture to hold it up,” she said. “I just thought it was really interesting — this rigid industrial steel and concrete juxtaposed with something very organic and flowing and interwoven throughout.”
Schultz is a New York-based artist, and creates installation sculptures that embody the ephemeral, using natural resources and materials.
Lauren Baker, an art exhibition operations coordinator for Syracuse University and member of the Friends of Lipe Art Park group, said the piece also reflects Schultz’s personality.
“The title of her piece is ‘Tenacity’ — there’s tenacity in the work itself, but there’s also tenacity in her,” Baker said. “In some ways, it’s almost like an abstract sculpture of who she is.”
The visual conversation of the intertwined sculptures challenges perspectives on nature versus industrial in the environment.
Rose’s sculpture is almost permanent, but Schultz’s will ultimately decay. Schultz wanted to represent how nature is tenacious because her natural sculpture will engulf Rose’s industrial one, but in the end Rose’s will stay.
The collaboration came together quickly. In a conversation with Baker earlier this year, Schultz shared her desire to do another installation weaving sculpture like she’d done in the past. It was kismet because of the upcoming Art Extravaganza event, and the two got right to work getting the right permissions.
“It was serendipitous,” Baker said. “It moved really fast.”
The timeline between when Schultz was approved for the sculpture and when she started working on it was a little over a month. She often worked seven days a week, from sunrise to sunset, in the beginning.
“It’s such a testament of time because I’m doing it during the summer, working with a material that dries out quickly and becomes brittle,” Schultz said. “I’m battling that. I’m putting in all this work for something that is eventually just going away. Which is unique when it comes to art, because people want permanence.”
Permanence isn’t the way of Lipe; after a year has passed, Baker said they will start sending out open calls for new artists to apply and begin the whole process again.
“It keeps things fresh and allows more people to have these opportunities to be in the public eye and to have this really nice spotlight on them,” Baker said.
The willow used for “Tenacity” came from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and was originally grown for the Woody Biomass project to produce biofuel.
But because the project was defunded, the school had an excess amount of willow that hadn’t been harvested for a while.
“In a weird way, I had this symbiotic relationship with them,” Schultz said. “I’m helping them out, they’re helping me out. It was the perfect circumstance.”
Schultz has been connected with nature for as long as she can remember. Her grandmother, a master gardener, plants a tree whenever a family member is married or has a child. Watching her own tree grow alongside her through the years left Schultz with an early and lasting bond to the natural world.
She believes when it comes to art, every person can draw their own conclusions and opinions.
Her sculpture invites countless interpretations, and because of its natural materials it will change and evolve with the elements over time.
“This material, it’s natural … I can manipulate it, but there’s some rigidity to it. Like after a certain point, a stick is going to snap,” Schultz said. “It’s kind of like a massive puzzle piece. I’m figuring everything out as I’m going.”
Cypris Wilkinson is a graduate student studying arts journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communications.
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