Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Sculpture with Purpose - IPFW Edition


I've been watching the Sculpture with Purpose bike racks pop up around downtown, and I love how they are becoming a part of our everyday landscape.  I wanted to see their sister-sculptures around IPFW, too -- and a visit from the grandparents became a good excuse to get the family all onto campus for a walk and a picnic over the holiday weekend.


To start off, we picked up a map of the sculptures from the Fort Wayne Visitors Center (927 Harrison Street) downtown.  I haven't been able to find the map online anywhere, and it was useful enough to make the extra stop worthwhile.  Parking is free and plentiful on evenings and weekends all around IPFW, and over the holiday weekend we nearly had the place to ourselves.  We managed to see all the sculptures on the main campus -- we'll need to make another stop sometime to see the one sculpture that lives across Crescent over by the dorms.


You know what's great about kids on college campuses?  Christer and I noticed this at our own reunion last year.  Everything is designed to be indestructible.  So go ahead, run around through the gardens, climb on the artwork, walk on the benches.  Whatever damage your 5-year-old can attempt, I guarantee its been tried before by a tipsy college student three times his size.  Toby loved racing ahead to find the sculptures, running in circles through the twisting sidewalks, and exploring the various little gathering spaces around campus.  The grown ups on our hike hadn't spent much time wandering IPFW either, so we all enjoyed exploring and taking in the beautiful spring day.


If you're going to search out all the sculptures, make sure to find the hidden (sometimes not-so-hidden) triangle on each one.  Take a picture of you pointing at the triangle, and you can enter each picture in a raffle.  Take a picture at each sculpture and you can enter 50 times (although, I'll admit, some of the downtown bike racks still have us stumped).


This cute mastodon was the last stop on our tour -- and he was the only sculpture we saw who was fulfilling his purpose as a bike rack.

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