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Asked to envision “public art,” many of us might imagine something like the monumental bronze statues grouped at the main entrance to Highland Park.
The dominant figures are two women, bare-breasted and cloaked, heroically posed atop the pair of five-story stone columns flanking the drive. Larger than life, each stands with a child on either side, while below, nearer eye level, two more female figures hold torches aloft, and a pair of big eagles spread their wings.
The 1896 statues by Giuseppe Moretti, patinized green by time, are prime examples of Art Nouveau, a style that peaked in popularity in an era when quite a lot of public art was being created.
The Highland Park entrance grouping is titled “Welcome.” But even to view it from across Bunkerhill Street requires craning one’s neck. And the figures are either so visually inaccessible or so familiar that when Marlana Adele Vassar asked neighbors what they thought of the art in the park, she says, “They were like, ‘What art?’”
Vassar was asking because, in 2021, she was commissioned to add an artwork of her own to Highland Park. The result is “Flora,” a bronze of a beatific Black girl cradling a rabbit, sited in a flower garden near the entrance. It is Pittsburgh’s first piece of public statuary to depict a woman or girl of color. And Vassar crafted it in deliberate conversation with works like “Welcome,” which is visible about 100 yards away.
“I think a lot of people get frustrated because they don’t think they’re heard or represented,” says Vassar.
Vassar grew up in Uniontown, studied art at the University of Pittsburgh, and moved around a bit before returning in 2015. The project is part of the Allegheny Regional Asset District’s Art in Parks program; Vassar lives in the East Liberty area and walks in Highland Park most days. “This is my neighborhood park,” she says.
Once hired, Vassar met with neighbors and assessed the scene. Moretti’s hand is inescapable. The famed Italian-born sculptor lived for years in Pittsburgh, where, along with the four bronze panthers on the Panther Hollow Bridge, his works include “Horse Tamers,” the pair of monumental bronzes depicting two youths struggling with two rearing horses that flank Highland Park’s Stanton Avenue entrance. But of Moretti’s six Highland Park sculptures depicting children, all are male, and “Horse Tamers” especially seemed to Vassar to celebrate a kind of triumphalism over nature.
“What if you had one that could show greatness through humility, care and respect?” she says.
She was also inspired by José de Creeft’s famous 1959 “Alice in Wonderland” sculpture in New York’s Central Park, upon which children readily clamber. “I wanted to show a small person could still do great things,” she says.
“Flora” is indeed smaller-scaled than “Alice” (which features its own rabbit, among other characters). Vassar’s sculpture — a composite figure, she says, not modeled on any individual — stands 3-and-a-half feet tall, perched on a 2-and-a-half-foot pedestal. Her headpiece and flowing gown are adorned with blossoms, and her long locs wind around her garment, gradually transforming into vines at the hem.
The piece, installed April 15, is already gaining fans.
“This is just so beautiful,” said Ray Roberts, who passed by walking his dog while Vassar and I visited the sculpture last week. “I’m just so glad you did this,” he told Vassar.
Moments later, Sydney and Clayton Johnson arrived with their infant daughter, named … Flora. Former Pittsburghers now living in Virginia, they’d heard about the sculpture and while visiting family swung by the namesake sculpture
“Thank you for making this,” Sydney Johnson told Vassar.
While Roberts noted that “Flora” provides a “counterpoint” to the park’s “old-fashioned” statuary, Vassar doesn’t consider her piece a rebuke.
“Moretti is actually one of my favorite sculptors,” she says. “Just the classic detail. I’ve always been about heavy draftsmanship.” She admired the way the cloaks of Moretti’s torch-bearing “Welcome” figures flow over the hard edge of the pedestal. (Vassar even admired the craftsmanship of Moretti’s now-infamous Stephen Foster memorial, though she agrees with the 2017 decision to remove it from public view.)
In Highland Park, she says, “As much as I love this art, I didn’t see too much art that ever included people like me. If you want to see these things, you can create them.”
“I wanted,” she says, “to provide another chapter to the story.”
