pink public art display brightens eastman reading garden at downtown library

The ordinary spaces that we walk through every day without noticing form, details or color can very often be transformed with simple changes that cause us to stop and look more closely at our surroundings.

Like pink. And lots of it.

A new art installation in the Eastman Reading Garden of the downtown Cleveland Public Library aims to transform viewers' perception of this quiet, reflective space by adding bold pink chairs and pink window coverings throughout the space. The art project was designed by Cleveland artist Scott Stibich and funded by the Lockwood Thompson Endowment Fund of the Cleveland Public Library.

The 100 moveable pink chairs are part of the See Also program, which brings temporary works of public art to the Eastman Reading Garden. See Also is a partnership between Cleveland Public Library and LAND Studio. Visitors will interact with and become a part of Stibich's artwork as they move the painted chairs around to find their own comfortable place to sit, read and eat lunch.

"My goal was to disrupt the architecture just enough to displace the viewer," says Stibich. "The garden is a space where everyone comes to talk or just reflect and get lost in their day. I carried the pop-up color into the architecture, too."

The colorful window banners were assembled by designer Katie Parland.


Source: LAND Studio, Cleveland Public Library, Scott Stibich
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Lee Chilcote
Lee Chilcote

About the Author: Lee Chilcote

Lee Chilcote is founder and editor of The Land. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks The Shape of Home and How to Live in Ruins. His writing has been published by Vanity Fair, Next City, Belt and many literary journals as well as in The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook, The Cleveland Anthology and A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City. He is a founder and former executive director of Literary Cleveland. He lives in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland with his family.