Artist-Teacher Chosen to Sculpt for IDM Building

Tony DeLap, a Corona del Mar artist and teacher, has been awarded a $60,000 commission to create an abstract 18-foot steel and concrete sculpture to be permanently displayed in the courtyard plaza of an office building under construction downtown.

IDM Corp., a major developer in Long Beach, had conducted a six-month search for an artist to produce a sculpture to be incorporated into the design of the 200,000-square-foot Broadway Office Building being constructed on the site of the old Buffum’s headquarters, bordered by Broadway, Pine Avenue and Pacific Avenue.

Construction, including creation and placement of the sculpture, is expected to be completed by mid-1986. According to Mary Sullivan, visual arts coordinator for the Public Corporation for the Arts which helped coordinate the selection, this is the first time a developer in Long Beach has incorporated a major sculpture into the architectural design of a building.

“It’s very important to the local art community,” Sullivan said. “It shows an interest by the major developer in Long Beach in supporting the arts.”

“It’s very simple and we felt that it was timeless,” Vicki Stowe, vice president of marketing for IDM Corp., said of the design.

DeLap’s design, which Stowe described as featuring a “soaring arc and a winged structure” emerged from 64 original concepts submitted by artists from throughout Southern California. “We believe this building will be a landmark for the downtown district,” she said. “The size of the building and its presence in the community, we felt, warranted something special.”

Because of the interest generated by the project, she said, IDM is considering incorporating local art works into future developments, including the downtown World Trade Center for which ground breaking is expected to take place next September.

“It’s definitely something we are enthusiastic about after this experience,” she said of the company’s new-found interest in art. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the response from the artists.”

DeLap teaches at the University of California, Irvine.