Look at its location on a map and its hard to think of a more out of the way place for a piece of public art, but people who work in anonymous office buildings under the shadow of the freeway deserve aesthetic pleasure just as much as anyone else. Frank Rigg’s untitled 1978 minimalist sculpture graces the grounds of the Salt Lake City Public Services Parks Division building. Riggs was a New York City artist who originally came to Utah to take a position at Brigham Young University.
Discover more art with our Art Lake City map
Get Directions
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Categories: Art Lake City | In Plain Site | Visual Arts
I inherited one of Frank Riggs’
sculptures the paint was chipping and we are stripping it all off now .
Please let me know the name of the Tomato colored paint he used
This is an enormously complicated question. Late in his career, David Smith, the first American sculptor to achieve international fame, painted some of his with Alkyd Resin paints—in other words, house paint. The paint suffered in the weather, but Smith died suddenly at the height of his career and no one really knows how he would have handled it. If you saved some of the paint, you can take it to a high-end paint store and they can match it using a computer to analyze the tint. If you love the work, that’s a good way to proceed. If you wanted only to sell it, it’s now worth less on the market no matter what you do. Or course you might find another owner who loves it and doesn’t care about its “authenticity.” All art works suffer with age and only the responsibility of those who love them can keep them alive.
The Getty Research Institute engages in restoration of challenging cases, so you could always ask them for an opinion.