Emily ChristensenTwo temporary sculptures on Wichita State’s Innovation Campus use ancient materials: the sun and the wind.
Levente Sulyok, associate professor of painting and drawing in the School of Art, Design and Creative Industries, used a solar-powered lamp in one and dozens of pinwheels in the other. Both works respond to the environment.
“We don’t want to make fixed objects necessarily. It’s the Innovation Campus, after all,” Sulyok said. “I knew I wanted to use the elements to make something that wasn’t static.”
One sculpture includes a solar-powered street light. At dusk, it illuminates the Victorian-style iron street lamp below it. Two stools placed under the fixtures reflect “the conversation between old and new.” They invite passers-by to sit facing each other, thereby becoming “viewer-participants” in the work.
A block to the north, a second sculpture is composed of plastic pinwheels affixed to a staggered matrix. Its wavy effect references the Kansas Flint Hills.
Sulyok is the first artist to utilize two new sculpture pads along Oliver. The city of Wichita installed the low-slung brick pedestals in collaboration with WSU’s College of Fine Arts. Sulyok, CFA Dean Rodney Miller, and ADCI Director Jeff Pulaski worked with the city on the design.
“We are pleased to collaborate with the city in order to bring visual interest to campus,” Miller said. “It’s a wonderful example of creating opportunities for our students through outside partnerships, which is what the Innovation Campus is all about.”
The College of Fine Arts supported the project by underwriting the cost of materials for the sculptures. In two years, another artist or artists will install new work. Sulyok hopes the biennial installations will serve as a research opportunity for students and faculty working across disciplines.
Wichita State has been Sulyok’s professional home for 13 years. Born and raised in Hungary, he finished high school in the United States after immigrating to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.
After graduation, Sulyok worked odd jobs and traveled around for a few years before enrolling in classes at Santa Rosa Junior College.
“Junior college gave me another chance, “Sulyok said. “I was in my mid-20s and was ready to take it seriously.”
He went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts at University of California Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The Innovation Campus sculptures represent Sulyok’s fourth foray into public art. He participated in an intervention during — but not officially a part of — Documenta 13, created the installation series “Small Pleasures” on the façade of the Ulrich Museum, and built a gallery-within-a-gallery for the 12th Havana Biennial.
While very different from each other, the four projects share the same approach.
“When it comes to public works, I try to make things that can be interacted with one way or another,” Sulyok said.
“Hopefully, they become a stage for some other thing to happen.”