BOULDER — The installation of a downtown treehouse — presumably the most conspicuous in Boulder’s slew of upcoming public art projects — was set to take place in September but has been pushed back to next April, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art said last week.
BMoCA is still seeking a permit from the city to construct the “Tree Office,” conceptualized by engineer and neuroscientist Natalie Jeremijenko and funded largely by a portion of the $25,000 grant awarded in May by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“The Tree Office is not going to be done anytime soon,” said BMoCA director David Dodone. “We’re still needing to raise some additional money, and we’re trying to keep it within a reasonable budget of around $15,000 or $20,000.”
The structure will sit high in the canopy of a tree across the street from the museum, in Central Park at the northwest corner of 13th Street and Arapahoe Avenue. Dodone and Jeremijenko envision an unconventional public meeting space that accommodates six people. But how folks will access the treehouse remains to be seen. A University of Colorado architecture class led by environmental design instructor Marcel de Lange has been enlisted to help.
“The class is going to be taught all around this project,” Dodone said. “We felt it was much better collaboration to engage the university and CU students instead of just doing it on our own.”
But even with the delay of the treehouse, as well as two other public art pieces set to be produced by Jeremijenko in Boulder, the museum and the city are mobilizing to install a set of new pro- jects in downtown and beyond.
For one, BMoCA curator Mardee Goff said, the giant wooden sculpture resembling a whale’s tongue that sits between the museum and the Dushanbe Teahouse will come down by February.
Replacing the whale tongue: “Think of an old Roman sculpture,” Goff said. “Marble, kind of Statue of David-looking, but upside-down with graffiti dripping down it.
“It’s kind of this idea of defacing public art. …. I guess it could be controversial, but it’s testing this idea of sculpture in the public space.”
Goff said the Roman-style sculpture probably will inspire additional graffiti from community members, and, she added, “We’re kind of OK with that.”
Matt Chasansky, arts manager for Boulder, said the city is on board with BMoCA’s plans, including the treehouse delay. But Boulder has its own set of projects coming down the pike, most notably out of the Community Cultural Plan process, which has been ongoing for about a year now. After consulting about 2,000 citizens, the city arts staff drafted a series of priorities and strategies for future public projects.
“We learned that the community wants individual cultural organizations to be supported,” Chasansky said. “Our No. 1 priority is going to be to create the conditions where these organizations can thrive.”
Additionally, the city has identified a roster of 11 artists who work in social practice, and who will produce a set of projects throughout town.
“The idea is to do innovative, interesting, short-term events that play with public space and with people’s interaction with art,” Chasansky said.
Those upcoming pieces, which will debut early next year and run through mid-2017, follow the failed launch of the proposed “YES!” installment at the Boulder Public Library’s main branch downtown.
“In the response to YES!, there was a series of meetings, and people really wanted to have a conversation about this,” Chasansky said. “We thought it would be a great idea to mobilize some projects that are conversation pieces.”
Many of those projects will appear in the Civic Area downtown, but city arts officials say they’re also eyeing sites on University Hill, as well as some “siteless projects” spread throughout the city.
