Photo from “Artpark 1977: The Program in Visual Arts,” principal photographer Andrew L. Strout, published by Artpark, copyright 1977

By Elmer Ploetz
Editor-in-chief

Artpark is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, and its biggest event will be its Artpark Birthday Bash on Wednesday night.

It’s the Lewiston park’s biggest fundraiser and it comes with a $150 ticket (which includes the Pat Benatar/Neil Giraldo concert in the amphitheater that night). It’s the kind of event that’s necessary for a big nonprofit like Artpark to keep functioning, bringing in high-profile performers and providing its arts program.

The concerts are primarily what Artpark is known for among the general public these days, drawing crowds that can hit up to 10,000 in the amphitheater, but the art part of Artpark is what connects it to its wild and wooly early days. There are still visual arts camps for kids and a series of installations to explore.

But the 50th anniversary inspired me to look back at some of the earliest days of Artpark with my friend Billy Huggins, an area artist who was an intern and assistant at Artpark from 1977 to ’79. As such, he was a witness to some of the wildest art — and artists — to have hit Western New York.

In its early days, Artpark was a very different place. It was built on 150 acres of “spoils” left by the construction of the hydroelectric power project in the region. It wasn’t quite the beautific green space it has become today. It was the soil and rock pulled out of the ground so water could be directed to the turbines.

There were theatrical performances, concerts and craft workers on the grounds. But the visual artists set much of the tone of the place. They were the ones who created what people saw when they came to New York’s newest state park.

The artists who were invited to work there had a kind of blank slate to do anything they wanted — with an overlook of the Niagara Gorge. And they did almost anything

“It will probably never happen again,” said Huggins. “But I made some lifetime friends from all around the country, I saw some really great artwork and it was just, it was very open, unfiltered.”

How unfiltered? Well, the most extreme piece of art may have come from an artist by the name of Story Mann. He built a structure on the edge of the gorge, surrounded it with barbed wire and planted cactuses. The only way to enter was through a tunnel from the gorge side.

“He built what he called ‘Pop’s Pavilion of Death,” said Huggins. “Once you got inside of it, you could only see through a small area. And he would do a little performance that sometimes involved animals in jars and colored water and rattlesnakes and guns, and and the whole thing was surrounded by a wall of of fire. There was a geodesic dome with truck reflectors on it. And then it was surrounded by a wall fire; he had a big propane tank brought out there. It was the craziest thing.

“He was really scary, but he was one of the one of the best, most influential artists that I saw at that time.”

Artpark was open to projects like that because at the end of the year, all of the projects would be removed. Next year’s crop of artists would start with a new blank canvas of parkland.

It was an era and a place where if you could imagine it, you could make it happen. For example, one groupi called themselves the “Electron Movers” and planted TVs in the ground and in the gorge, putting a TV on a tightrope and even stringing LED lights into the gorge itself.

“They were really beautiful as they blinked at night,” said Huggins.

Laurie Anderson tried one of her early installments, having a piano placed by a crane onto the highest knoll overlooking the gorge. She had somebody play that while she played violin. The idea was to project it with speakers across the gorge to Canada and that it would be sent transmitted back.

“It didn’t quite work out, but the concepts came through,” Huggins said. “They had trouble with the radios and speakers and all kinds of stuff. But the idea was genius. And she was nobody then.”

It was the 1970s, and Artpark reflected the social and political turmoil of that time. Many of the interns and assistants simply camped in the woods at the park for the summer, and sometimes they were joined by the artists. Parties were had. Bonfires were fired up.

Much of the artwork reflected the minimalistic art of the times, some of it reflecting structures from what were regarded as more “primitive” cultures. Huggins, an art student at Buffalo State College at the time, worked with Harriet Feigenbaum, a sculptor who went on to some degree of renown. Her sculpture at Artpark was called “Cycles II–Land Structures Built Where the Petroglyphs Are Made by Children,” and was a wooden structure.

“She was a New York artist … she made these very primitive looking structures,” said Huggins. “She was a difficult person to work with. It was not a fun project; she didn’t really explain herself really well. But it seemed self explanatory to me that she was working off of some type of primitive structures as a visual element. She went on to have a pretty successful career doing about the same thing.”

When the works were disassembled at the end of the year, some went into collections, others went into the landfill. But some took on lives of their own.

None of the works from the early years was probably seen by more people than Bob “Daddy-O” Wade’s 40-foot giant iguana sculpture.

In the photo program book of the projects from 1978, Wade described driving into Artpark with his friend “in my GMC ‘iguana Courtesy Van” wearing Resistol cowboy hats, drinking tequila and smoking Austin tobacco. … My project was to take place on the ‘Spoils Pile,’ a desolate area of the park similar to Texas in its rough and flat terrain.”

The iguana was built on a metal frame and covered with mesh and urethane foam, carved, sanded and ready for a “Mex-Tex hot rod paint job.”

Bob “Daddy-O” Wade’s “Giant Iguana.” Photos from “Artpark 1978: The Program in Visual Arts,” principal photographer Andrew L. Strout, published by Artpark, copyright 1978

At the end of the summer, there was no way that iguana was going to the trash heap. Instead it was disassembled, loaded into a moving truck (with the head outside over the cab) and it made its way down the Thruway to New York City where it wound up gracing the roof of the legendary Lone Star Cafe roadhouse until 1989. Eventually it made its way south to the Fort Worth Zoo.

You can check out some of the story in this video:

In retrospect, it makes sense that a scene that wild and creative couldn’t last forever. Huggins said he knew at the time that he was fortunate to be there.

“People would kind of like stumble on this stuff (in the park) And they were either really interested, or they’re thinking, ‘Who’s giving you this money to do this? Is this public money being spent here?'”

And it was. But with the New York City crash of the late ’70s tanking the state’s finances, money for a state art park was going to be slowing down, too.

The park evolved. A museum exhibition at the University at Buffalo in 2010 placed the wild early burst of activity there as lasting from 1974 to ’84. In the exhibit, it said:

“The chief goal of the visual arts program,” Brian O’Doherty explained in a 1976 documentary about Artpark, “is to integrate artists, their methods, and works into the leisure activities of everyday people.”

Owned and operated by New York State, Artpark opened in 1974 as an unprecedented experiment in artist-public interaction and site-specificity that balanced a populist mission with the commissioning of some of the most avant-garde, investigational art of its day.”

ARTPARK: 1974–1984

Since then, the park has gotten greener and probably more concerned about safety around the gorge. It has become the site of large rock concerts, like the Benatar and Giraldo show coming up. For awhile free shows featuring acts such as ZZ Top drew massive, overflow crowds.

Staff members audiences — and artists — have continued to come and go to enjoy what has become a gem built on top of the “spoils.”

Tomorrow night will be a time to celebrate all that has happened over the past 50 years on those grounds. I’m sure in some places some glasses will be raised in memory of those crazy early years too.