A Kent State University grad student is calling on the community to help him on his journey in documenting all of Knox County's outdoor art.
Zach Baker, a KSU Library and Information Sciences program student, is in a partnership with the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture (OOS) database for his internship. He is working in the East/Central Ohio Sculpture Inventory Project, and his task is to locate area outdoor sculptures that have not yet been documented in the OOS record and complete the Knox County database.
"At the very beginning, Knox County only had one or two entries in the database," Baker told Mount Vernon News. "And now, after I've went out and searched for things and done internet research, there's close to a dozen."
So far, Baker has tracked sculptures to Mount Vernon and Gambier. There are several communities that Baker has not visited yet, including Fredericktown and Centerburg, which is where the help of Knox County locals comes in.
To alert Baker and the database of a Knox County sculpture, locals should first visit oos.sculpturecenter.org and search Knox County to see if the sculpture has already been recorded. If it hasn't, any known information about the sculpture including pictures, location and artist information can be submitted through the site.
Baker explained that a complete outdoor sculpture database will have many benefits, including in research and tourism. Cemetery monuments and gravestones are not considered sculptures.
"We just need help," Baker said. "Any help is better than no help. A lot of these counties started with only one or two entries, when there's actually dozens out there and the interns just can't get to all of them. And some of them we can't find on the internet because there's no record of them being created."
About Ohio Outdoor Sculpture
There are over 1,500 publicly accessible outdoor sculptures in Ohio listed in this free Ohio Outdoor Sculpture (OOS) database with images, historical data and condition information provided. OOS is maintained by The Sculpture Center as both a reference tool and a means to encourage communities to preserve their outdoor public sculpture.
This database is a compilation of all the outdoor public sculpture in Ohio that was surveyed during the 1990s through Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!) and is now being expanded with new sculptures, information and images.
Read more at oos.sculpturecenter.org/about.
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