Prism-based artwork to be installed south of 4th Street parking garage in downtown Bloomington – The B Square

Concept for the 3-trapezoid version of PRISMA by Esteban Garcia Bravo.

Walkway between The JuanSells.com Realty Co. building (right) and the 4th Street parking garage (left) looking east. (June 17, 2024)

The image, from the March 2024 aerial imagery available through Monroe County’s property lookup system, is looking west.

In the second week of July, artist Esteban Garcia Bravo will be arriving in Bloomington to install a version of his sculpture called PRISMA.

The sculpture to be placed in Bloomington is a 3-prism version of the original 7-prism sculpture that was installed in Columbus, Indiana for the city’s exhibition last year called Exhibit Columbus.

In Bloomington, the smaller version of PRISMA will find a home in the walkway that runs south of the 4th Street parking garage, between Walnut Street and the north-south alley that splits the block.

When it was a part of Exhibit Columbus, PRISMA was installed at a parking garage for Cummins, Inc.

Access to the space south of Bloomington’s 4th Street parking garage was made possible by a unanimous vote of Bloomington’s redevelopment commission (RDC) at its regular Monday meeting.  The RDC owns the parking facility and the walkway.

Based currently at Purdue University, but heading soon to Santa Cruz, California, Garcia is an artist who is known for public audiovisual sculptures that embed animations, LEDs, video projections, and virtual reality.

PRISMA is described by the Public Art Archive as an “open-air tunnel with a free-flowing, animated lighted experience.” The description continues, “Walking through PRISMA, the entire space comes alive with animated lights, each color vibrantly playing off the next.”

The proposal to install PRISMA came to Bloomington’s RDC from Bloomington’s assistant director for the arts in the department of economic and sustainable development, Holly Warren. The $9,300 cost is to be covered by Downtown Bloomington, Inc.

At the RDC’s Monday meeting, Warren put the PRISMA installation in the context of a broader collaboration between the city and Downtown Bloomington, Inc. to activate alleys in the downtown.

PRISMA is supposed to remain in place at the 4th Street parking garage for two years, with the option to continue longer than that. Garcia will create a maintenance plan for the installation to be paid for out of city funds, according to Warren. If maintaining the artwork becomes unsustainable, the city will remove the artwork, according to the proposal.

Warren confirmed to The B Square that the whole width of the walkway south of the 4th Street parking garage will be taken up with the artwork, so pedestrians who navigate down the walk will necessarily go through the sculpture.

The proposal is to install small ramps to lead over the secured rods so that pedestrians can cross through the structure.

Questions from RDC members came from John West and Deborah Myerson.

West got confirmation that liability for issues connected with the artwork would be covered under the city’s insurance.

Myerson wanted to know how many people use the walkway currently and where they’re headed and where they’re going.

Warren indicated that she is willing to incorporate measures of pedestrian traffic into the metrics for success of the project.

Warren said she hopes that PRISMA will have a positive impact on nearby businesses and might help convince someone to lease the ground floor commercial space in the parking garage, which has been a challenge to rent out, since the garage was completed in fall of 2021.

PRISMA is the second piece of art by Garcia that is featured in a Bloomington parking garage. After the construction of the Trades District parking garage, which was completed in 2021, Garcia’s “Aurora Almana” was installed in the south stairwell.

“Aurora Almana” consists of 3D tiles, and integrated contributions from the public, in the form of designs they drew on gridded paper, which Garcia scanned and used to compute the 3D images.