UCI Sued for $2.75 Million for Removing Art

An artist whose outdoor sculpture was removed last year to make way for faculty housing at UC Irvine is suing the university for $2.75 million, charging that in dismantling “Wild Celery for Stephen Davis,” the school damaged his reputation and caused him emotional distress.

In a suit filed Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court, Mowry Baden, a former artist-in-residence at UCI, charges that the school violated California’s art protection laws when it decided that a storm drain and roadway for University Hills, a faculty housing development, were more important than preserving the sculpture he built nine years ago on a then-vacant section of the campus.

The abstract work was not a conventional sculpture. It was composed of four red steel ramps embedded in a ravine, three 60 feet long, one 40 feet long. The wild plants of the area were intended to sprout in and around the ramps, Baden said, and in eight years of untended growth had come to pervade the site. Passers-by “experienced” the sculpture by walking on it, he said.

The sculpture was dismantled when construction workers unearthed the ramps, damaging one in the process.

“Given that it was overgrown, people in the construction trade would have looked at it as discarded steel,” said Bill Parker, director of the Irvine Campus Housing Authority. “They were four steel beams in concrete piers. You couldn’t even find them, the location was so overgrown.”

Nonetheless, Parker, who called the work “interesting,” said that after unearthing the sculpture, the university brought Baden to Irvine from his home in Canada to advise officials on relocating “Wild Celery.” That plan was abandoned after Baden refused to help select an alternative site, Parker said. The components of the piece have been placed in storage, Parker said, though he and other university officials were unable to pinpoint where.

The work “was conceived and constructed as a permanent part of (its) environment,” Baden said from British Columbia in Canada, where he is professor of visual arts at the University of Victoria.

“What you have is a situation of peculiar topography, a very particular plant life and a sculptural form that attempts to meet not only that topography but also to enhance the same so that the viewer, through walking through these ramps and terrain, is a part of that environment and perceives it with greater acuity,” he said. “And all of this was perceived and applauded by those who invited me to come.”

Baden, 52, said that finding his work destroyed “blew me away. It was like the death of a parent, or of a child.”

“I was pretty immobilized and unable to act until I began to see that something could be done. People simply can’t get away with that,” he said, explaining why he filed the suit.

Describing “Wild Celery for Stephen Davis,” whose title derives from a variety of vegetation in the area and the name of a New York artist who Baden said had inspired him, the sculptor said: “It’s not something you see; it’s something you feel.”

The work was intended “to bring people closer to themselves as they move through a natural setting, to tune the viewer’s internal perceptual habits,” Baden said.

“That’s done by adjusting the gradient and the camber of ramp surface, so you’re getting a strong signal kinesthetically. It’s coming up through your motor nervous system,” he said.

Parker, a physicist by training, responded to Baden’s description by saying, “I don’t know what those words mean. To me, it was four pieces of steel stuck on the side of the gully.”

Parker said that because of the sculpture’s location, few students of faculty members knew about it.

“It was to be encountered as a surprise. It was not to be displayed formally,” Parker said. “So, in fact, no one knew about it.

“If you had installed it where there was traffic, where it was observed and experienced, it would have been a different situation,” he said.

“I don’t want to imply it was less important” than more formally displayed works, Parker added. “The intention was to preserve it,” he said, by moving it someplace else.

Baden had harsh words for the UCI administration: “They’re just callous, brutalized people, in my opinion.”

In contrast, Baden said, a sculpture of his at UC Santa Barbara, titled “Santa Barbara,” has been maintained in good condition.

“It receives the reverential response artists expect their work to evoke,” he said.