Photos by Myron Pitts, Fayetteville Observer. Sculptor Tom Grubb makes adjustments to his objet d’art.
A Sprint monopole topped by a weathervane-like sculpture of a plane in flight had been relatively hidden for the past 15 years until a new bridge opening on Rowan Street in Fayetteville, NC brought it into view, according to the Fayetteville Observer. Surrounding trees were cut down to allow for bridge construction and exposed the tower and sculpture, which had won a Tower Summit award for “most creative site concealment” when it was first built.
The artwork, 31 feet long, atop the 133-foot monopole in Festival Park is called “Voyager” by its creator Tom Grubb who described it as “a ship of exploration” honoring all explorers of land, sea, sky and space. A baseball stadium in the 2019 plans for the park will increase both visibility and usage of the site, the Observer reported. Grubb is the former director of the defunct Fayetteville Museum of Art and has an engineering background.
“I had to really engineer that so it would withstand time and still move,” Grubb told the Observer, “I put back-to-back bearings on top of each other. They have redundancy. It takes just the slightest wind to make it change direction.”
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