New gateway: Artist discusses roundabout sculpture

A 20-foot-tall, nearly 6,000-pound public sculpture by New Mexico artist Karen Yank was installed by crane and craftsmanship in the South Carson and South Stewart roundabout Dec. 6.

“Sense of Place” is made of stainless and Cor-ten steel. Public art for the roundabout was first envisioned in 2017 as a gateway entrance after the downtown corridor project was complete, according to city officials. That vision slowly transformed into concrete reality in 2023 as the project went through a submission process and public hearings at the city’s Cultural Commission and Board of Supervisors.

“Her decades-long friend and mentor Agnes Martin helped Yank shape her artistic vision of the natural world and the harmonic mind,” Tonya Turner Carroll of the Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe said of the artist. “Yank combines shapes from the earth and sky, welding them together with fire to construct monumental environmental statements. Yank uses metals, originating from the depths of the Earth, to express both personal memories and memories of nature.

“Likewise, she varies her materials, leaving some steel to oxidize and some to glimmer, alluding to the alchemical transformation that occurs not only as the material changes, but also as our collective consciousness can change and improve over time.”

While taking a break from installation work Dec. 6, Yank said it was her 60th such project. She thanked her fabricator, Phillip Ortiz of New Mexico, explaining he works on industrial projects and gets excited for art projects. She described how the stainless steel was sandblasted to a matte finish then buffed by hand to create a softer gleam rather than a hard glint.

“Every surface is touched a hundred times by the hand. It’s very softened, less industrial, more organic,” Yank said.

She said the eagle element in the sculpture near the bottom blends in with the depicted mountains. Noting a lot of eagle sculptures in Eagle Valley, Yank said putting the symbol in a less prominent place was better.

“The eagle is part of the mountains. It is the snowpack and the land creating the valley that is Eagle Valley and Carson,” she said.

Mayor Lori Bagwell stopped by the installation Dec. 6, excited about the sculpture’s three-dimensionality.

“It’s so iconic, so beautiful, so welcoming,” she said.

In a Q&A, Yank answered some more personal questions:

Artist Karen Yank with her new sculpture ‘Sense of Place’ in the South Carson and South Stewart roundabout Dec. 6. (Scott Neuffer photo) 

What do you want residents and visitors to experience with “Sense of Place?”

“I want them to be able to be, first of all, proud of it, that it is a kind of monument to what Carson City is. It has a lot of the elements they cherish in it, so I’m hoping that… each time they come by, they say, ‘Oh, I missed the eagle, or I didn’t notice the Washoe Tribe seal going around the arch.’ I want them to feel pride and ownership of it, and also I really wanted something that spoke for the entirety of Carson City, so I used a lot of really great imagery.”

What does a gateway entrance mean to you?

“I feel like it is… a big gateway monument saying, ‘Here you are. You are now here in Carson City.’ We really worked hard on trying to decide the height because we wanted it to be seen from far away, but we didn’t want it to over-dominate, so I think we got it right because it’s very visible from a long distance… and I also would like it to be kind of like a spot that maybe people say, ‘Well, let’s meet over there, you know, where the big sculpture is,’ and everyone knows that that’s it.”

What’s your favorite shape to work with?

“Circle. I use the circle because it kind of refers to everything natural in the world: life cycles, cycles of the seasons, the moon, the sun, the planets, the Earth. I love that. I’m drawn to that, and almost all my work has some element of the circle or broken circle. So, with this piece I was putting it in my original design just to speak about how the earth meets the sky and that horizon and how here in Carson you almost feel like this dome effect because of the mountains on either side. That was why I put the circle in, but then as I got a little deeper in research and what matters here and how to make it truly a sense of place for Carson, I realized I’d like to try to make that look like a coin. The seated silver dollar, the first minting of it was here in Carson; that was in 1870, and it’s notated on one side of the coin there, and then we did these very complicated scallops that are inside the coin to really give you that sense of coin because obviously I took the center out, and I put your own Fremont cottonwood tree in its place.

“Originally, I had bristlecone pine in there because I was thinking it was the oldest tree, and it was here before anybody… But it was a nice thing because when I put that in, it got the community response, and they found their own tree that they wanted, and they wanted this cottonwood tree, so that involved their own feedback.”

What is your favorite thing so far about Carson City?

“It’s more a feeling, not a thing… I kind of fell in love with Carson. I was like falling in love again because when I first went to New Mexico and Santa Fe, Santa Fe was still quaint. Now it’s gotten overgrown and overpopulated, so when I came here, I felt that same charm, and so it’s like I fell in love with it again, but it’s Carson. I feel like because I had that connection, I could really pull in all of the important elements and really come from the heart and really put a lot of emotion into the piece. One thing I did not try to make it look like, but it came out — and I think this is really how artists work: they get inspired in different settings and then it just comes through them and sometimes they don’t even understand it — but my piece has this Western flair to it, I think, and I did not plan that Western flair. It just came out.”