Art students craft bike racks for downtown

By Jonathan McFadden

mcfaddenj@mytjnow.com

This carrot bike rack is one of the six that art students are designing for downtown Rock Hill. The project is part of an initiative to bring more public art to the area. Photo by Jonathan McFadden • mcfaddenj@mytjnow.comDowntown Rock Hill is ready to ride, and Winthrop art students and the city’s bike club are the reasons why. 

Students from the department of fine arts at Winthrop will make their mark on Rock Hill’s Main Street and surrounding hub when they design and sculpt bike racks that will be installed throughout the city’s downtown area. 

The project comes as phase two of the Downtown Arts Initiative, a union between Winthrop’s fine arts department, the Arts Council of York County and the Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation, designed to funnel more public art into downtown Rock Hill.

Now, the members of the Rock Hill Bicycle Club are getting their say.

Taking out two birds with one stone, Winthrop’s fine arts students will create six bike racks to help transform Rock Hill’s downtown area into a more viable core of art, culture and entertainment while helping the Rock Hill Bicycle Club promote cycling throughout the city.

Last semester, sculpture students built a series of sculptures that were installed throughout Main Street as a part of the initiative.

By May, the public art special topics class will be responsible for designing and creating four functional bike racks that will be placed in the downtown area and two bike racks that will be placed in the greater Rock Hill area, said Shaun Cassidy, associate professor of fine arts.

Cassidy, who is teaching the class, said the city of Rock Hill has identified sites needing bike racks, leaving it up to the art students to determine ideas and concepts that will be interesting and relational to areas where the racks will be located.

Some spots already chosen include the area in front of City Hall, the Center for the Arts and the Gettys Courtroom.

The bike rack venture represents collaboration between Rock Hill Parks, Recreation & Tourism, Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation, the city of Rock Hill, the Rock Hill Bicycle Club and Winthrop and has taken a year to even reach the idea stage, Cassidy said.

The project gives Winthrop’s fine arts students the chance to venture into public art, a form of art Cassidy said is competitive, yet profitable. 

For the design, students spent most of January examining the businesses and buildings where the racks would be located. 

“Their first goal is to do a lot of research, come up with designs; do a lot of designs and a lot of design development,” Cassidy said.

The students will also meet with the city, Rock Hill Bicycle Club and community members to discuss and glean ideas for their designs.

The racks will be constructed in steel for durability.

Part of making the bike racks unique to their areas is meeting with business owners and paying attention to interesting aspects of Rock Hill and the city’s history, Cassidy said.

“One bike rack is going in front of a hair salon, so the student designing this bike rack is meeting with the owner of the hair salon to see if there’s any information to glean; to see if there’s anything interesting to use in the design of a bike rack,” Cassidy said.

The project forces students to collaborate with each other and people in the community, something Cassidy said is different than a normal studio class.

Most importantly, students will receive valuable real-world work experience in public art.

“We’re trying to give students a real-world project in which a product will actually be placed in the community,” Cassidy said.

Money matters

Public art isn’t cheap.

Enter the Rock Hill Bicycle Club, which provided $4000 of funding for the project. 

George Davis, advocacy director for the Rock Hill Bicycle Club, said the club decided to give him money for this project after raising the funds from the club’s spring races last year. 

Davis, in turn, gave the $4000 check to Cassidy, who then distributed $600 to each student group.

Part of the real-world public art experience is working within the confines of a budget, Cassidy said. 

“They’re held accountable to the standards that would be applied to any professional artist working in the medium of public art,” Cassidy said. 

An additional challenge for students is that not only must these pieces be aesthetically appealing, but they have to be fully functional and ready for use, said Tom Bell, outdoor recreation program director for Rock Hill Parks, Recreation & Tourism.

Along with Donnie Messer, urban designer for the Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation, and Davis, Bell will look at the first round of models students submit and make sure they’re beautiful pieces of public art, but also working bike racks ready for use.

They work hard for the money 

That’s one concept Nikki Patrick and her classmates are working to perfect.

Assigned to develop a bike rack that will sit in front of City Hall, Patrick, the senior sculpture major responsible for the sculpture art in the DiGiorgio Campus Center, and her partners will have to work within the Bike Club’s allotted budget of $600.

Not too much of a problem for fledgling artists getting real-world experience.

“When you’re commissioned, you get a certain amount of money,” Patrick said. “Whatever’s left over, you get to keep.”

To make City Hall’s racks interesting and relevant, Patrick and her partners have discussed incorporating the origin of Rock Hill’s name by embedding flint rock into a rack or emphasizing the city’s rich textile history.

Another idea is making Vernon Grant, the Rock Hill illustrator who created Kellogg’s SNAP! CRACKLE! AND POP!, part of one of the racks’ designs.

“I think what we’re trying to do for that building is something that’s not too out there, but something that they [the community] can relate to,” Patrick said.

Once settled on a design, the students will have to meet with the city, Rock Hill Bicycle Club and community members so their designs can be assessed.

After getting feedback, the students will rework their designs, make a model, and the final product will be approved and will be constructed full-scale. 

The bike racks are expected to be approved and fabricated by April and installed downtown by May, Cassidy said. 

The racks will all contain plaques indicating their production by the Winthrop art students and funding from the Rock Hill Bicycle Club. 

The entire Downtown Arts Initiative falls under the umbrella-head of Winthrop’s ACE Projects, an initiative of the fine arts department that explores ways in which students can engage the community with their art, Cassidy said. 

Another project that has roots in ACE includes the woven stick sculptures made by artist Patrick Doughtery in downtown Rock Hill last spring, which has recently been torn down.