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Sketchbook: Discovering Ohio's Outdoor Sculptures

Scattered across Ohio are hundreds of outdoor sculptures just waiting to be discovered. Everything from Soldiers and Sailors and Moses Cleveland to the Wind Wave in Marion.

Read the script:

[David] The Sculpture Center of Cleveland started Ohio Outdoor Sculpture to identify and record Ohio's outdoor figures and make the data available online.

- And it was put together with an appreciation of the fact that sculpture around the country was not being properly maintained and conserved. But rather it was suffering various forms of decay.

[David] The Sculpture Center of Cleveland organized hundreds of maps, photos, articles and information into an online searchable database of nearly 1500 objects. It's one of the few repositories of its kind in the country.

[Bill] You go into the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture inventory you will see, one or more photographs of the sculpture in question. A title, a description, where it's located. There'll be a map with a little dot on it showing where it is, and then there'll be other information about its composition and who made it and a number of other important things. So, it becomes a real good resource for studying outdoor sculpture in Ohio.

[David] Recently, Ohio Outdoor Sculpture has worked to expand the number of sculptures on their website by sending interns from Kent State University's Library and Science Information Program in search of new works of art.

[Bill] We have had other individual interns at various times around the state working on this. But it was this semester, really that we took it on as a major project with the Kent iSchool. They call it, the library school at Kent State University. And these five individuals who are finishing their graduate studies in Library Science came together as a team.

[Megan] Most of us started off initially just getting on Google and trying to do some just general searches getting just basically, these basic ideas and then building off of those from there.

[David] Uncovering lesser known sculptures meant traveling to rural parts of Ohio. - Once we got, kind of a list of some leads- Okay, I've got enough things. I think it's worth a drive out there to check these out. When you go there, you've got you know, five items on your list and you run into 10 more. And so, that's kind of how the rest of them get on the list when you just bump into them. When you're out there getting pictures of the things that you do know about.

[David] In discovering additional pieces of art they've also discovered just how strong a connection a city can have to their outdoor sculptures.

[Megan] I think outdoor sculptures, more so than a lot of other different kinds of art have a real symbolic and community sort of power to them. They're almost representing us in some way. Representing our past and our future. It's important to keep track of them and make sure that they are maintained.