Resistance. And Then . . .
DATE: November 2024
LOCATION: Del Rio Trail, Sacramento, CA
CLIENT: The City of Sacramento / Cal Trans
As a poetic symbol, the feather is timeless and universal. Since the dawn of human consciousness, feathers have scribed the edges of the mundane and the magical.
“Resistance. And Then…” is an extension of a larger ongoing inquiry of Stephen Glassman Studio. Entitled “Hope is a thing of feathers…” the intention is to create a universal spatial language through an architecturally scaled sculptural calligraphy that can echo and reference forces larger than ourselves — a global tumbling swarm of feathers in a single wind.
At the Del Rio Trail’s northernmost entry is “And Then. . .” — a shimmering eighteen-foot feather floating nearly forty-five feet above the park, taking one’s eye to the sky. It is a gesture of radical hope forever embedded in the civic landscape.
A kilometer south, a giant boulder rests defiantly upon the decommissioned track, a feather burnished into its surface like a contemporary petroglyph. Entitled “Resistance”, the piece marks the termination of the old rail line and its return to the earth.
Together, the two pieces frame this north trail section as a single sitework and journey – a connection of sky to ground, the end of one era and the beginning of another . . . always.
PROJECT CREDITS
Artist: Stephen Glassman
Project Director: Aaron Slavin
Studio Design Associates: Freesia Torres, Gavin Laughlin
Owner | Developer: Arts Commission of Sacramento/Caltrans
Structural Engineers: SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)
Fabrication: Milgo/Bufkin NYC