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A Whale’s Tale
By Beth Elaine Wilson . Photos by Rick Kelly

There’s a 60-foot whale beached in Poughkeepsie’s Waryas Park, but this time it’s not a case of distress, but rather an emblem of mending the community.

The city of Poughkeepsie has survived plenty of ups and downs in recent years. “Urban renewal” in the 1960s destroyed several of Poughkeepsie’s old neighborhoods, as the intrusive presence of the automobile carved through the space along the riverfront with the 9W expressway and parking lots were erected on the empty lots created by the wrecking ball. IBM developed as the region’s major employer, even as the MetroNorth line made the city a bedroom community for New York City and Westchester-bound commuters, which in turn encouraged the development of middle class suburban sprawl on the fringes of the city, leaving large sections of its interior to the increasingly black and Latino working class.

In the summer of 1978, a public art project sought to reinvigorate the sense of community along the waterfront in Waryas Park. Playground designer and landscape architect David Aaron designed a series of free-form concrete sculptures, covered with mosaics by over 400 members of the community, ranging from schoolchildren to seniors. At the conclusion of the project, the work became the property of the city and its people, a vibrant expression of community and a popular landmark in the park, where it became both an object of conversation and a climbing apparatus for local children.

There are several different accounts of how this public artwork fell into disrepair over the next 20 years. Part of the problem lay in a lack of maintenance by the city, which never sealed the grout of the mosaics, letting them fall prey to the elements; others believe the sculpture’s substructure, professionally designed but actually built by inexperienced workers, was not properly reinforced. In any event, an interim city manager authorized the demolition of the sculpture in 1999, without any public hearings or notification to the community that it was being done. The sculpture was bitten into chunks by a backhoe and hauled away, leaving the park with a physical scar, a gash in the ground that metaphorically paralleled the trauma experienced by everyone who had originally helped make the mosaics, as well as all who had come to love the sculpture’s presence in the park.

Spontaneous candlelight vigils were held: Mayor Colette LaFuente recognized the devastation caused by the bureaucratic order to demolish the work. A committee that included representatives from various parts of the community was formed, and money was budgeted to create a new public sculpture to make amends and replace the original work.

Cragsmoor-based artist Judy Sigunick was selected to spearhead the project. Her work has focused on using art as a community-building process, most often focusing on various endangered species for her imagery. In Rosendale, for example, she created a gigantic rhinoceros for the town’s youth program, incorporating a tile-making workshop for the children that explored the history of the town and its now-defunct cement industry. The tiles were assembled in grids that now decorate the interior of the Youth Center, while the imaginative rhino—whose belly was used as a single-use kiln to fire the tiles—stands just outside in the adjacent park.

For Sigunick, the endangered species imagery serves as a metaphor of hope. “After the cement industry died, Rosendale was left a ghost town,” she says. “But now, largely through the arts, it is a community making a comeback, just as rhinos in the wild are beginning to.”

For the Poughkeepsie project, Sigunick—long a fan of Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick while living south of Albany near the Hudson—hit upon the whale motif when she discovered that there had actually been a booming whale industry in the city during the 1830s, as whaling ships regularly hauled back their catch to what is still called the “whaling dock” on the Poughkeepsie waterfront for processing by one of the two companies based there, not far from Waryas Park today.

To prime her collaborators for the project, Sigunick met with 12 different community organizations, showing each of them a video on sperm whales, sharing readings from Moby Dick, and opening up a conversation about art, imagination, and community. “At this point, we had a hard time defining art and artists,” she concedes. “Here I was as an artist, in the position of collaborating with people who had no intention of being artists, but they were the ones making the work. At a certain point, I became dispossessed of it, and it became the community’s work.”

Eventually, over 600 tiles were created by her collaborators, with a wide range of approaches, messages, and styles. Much of the community work was conducted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, so a number of the tiles are dedicated to the victims or carry images of the twin towers. Many focus on the whale theme, while others represent more personal images and messages. Sigunick’s job was to create the whale on which all the tiles have been mounted. She built the great white beast in three discrete sections across an expanse of Waryas Park—the head surfaces, almost smiling, on one side of an asphalted path, while on the other side a piece of the midsection is followed by the jauntily flaring flukes, as though the whole whale is swimming through the ground to get back to the river. To help ensure the sculpture’s ultimate survival, Sigunick was careful to construct the substructure with stainless steel and carefully sealed cement.

The colorful array of tiles encrusting the body of the whale represent a cacophony of individual declarations, out of which the work creates a multi-layered narrative, paralleling the way that the competing voices of disparate groups make up the city as a whole. Appearing in filmmaker Dan Abbato’s documentary about the whale project, Peter Leonard, professor of Urban Studies at Vassar College, asserts that “putting a major piece of art down in Waryas Park is an essential political moment. It creates a sense of who we are and where we are. When we attach our stories to a place, it becomes a public place with a public story.”

In the wake of the trauma of losing the original sculpture, this project presents an imaginative way of approaching the scattered, decentralized nature of contemporary community in the city. The whale, forever heading toward the water, pulls together a vital, poetic image of what public art and public life can be.