A floating sculpture planned for Bangor, Maine, would be “a wound to the heart of the city,” charges Fritz Spencer of Old Town, Maine, the former editor of the Christian Civic League Record, in a commentary published by the Bangor Daily News on Jan. 22.
He’s complaining about “Buoy,” a temporary project that artist Anna Hepler of Eastport, Maine, aims to install next summer.
“I propose to make a monumental fiberglass buoy-like floating sculpture to be anchored in the Kenduskeag Stream as it passes by the University of Maine Museum of Art in downtown Bangor,” she writes in a cultural grant application to the city. “This ‘Buoy’ will measure approximately 8 x 9 x 10 feet, and will appear and disappear from ground level with the rising and falling 16-foot tides.”
Hepler’s art was featured at the Portland Museum of Art in 2010, a show which was widely praised and won her several awards at the following New England Art Awards.