SECOND NATURE Brings Salvaged-Metal Animals and Haiku to Rockford Art Deli

Rockford sculptor Michael Zant, artist and poet Tré, and Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg will present SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku at Rockford Art Deli during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026.

SECOND NATURE brings together Zant’s salvaged-metal animal sculptures and original haiku by Tré and Vaultonburg. Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each sculpture will be accompanied by two poems—one written by each poet in response to the animal it depicts.

The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden in discarded materials, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature. Zant’s weathered metal animals are joined by the compressed observations of haiku, allowing sculpture and poetry to approach the same creature from different directions.

The presentation will remain deliberately simple. Each poem will be printed in black Garamond on cream paper and mounted on a small pale wood tile placed beside the sculpture. The repeated combination of salvaged metal, unfinished wood, cream paper, and black type allows the poems to become part of the exhibition without altering or competing with Zant’s sculptures.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots, a Rockford-area organization working to preserve and promote the region’s native prairie. Ten dollars from every copy of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, sold at Rockford Art Deli during the exhibition will be donated to Wild Roots.

Vaultonburg is the founder of Rockford’s Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books with Tré. His recent haiku have appeared in journals in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Tré created the cover and interior illustrations for Vanished Roads and is now contributing original haiku to SECOND NATURE.

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal SculptureMetal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Z Zant + Tré + + Thomas L L. Vault Vaultonburg
Rockford Art Deli
402 East State Street, Rockford, Illinois
October 2–3, 2026
5–9 p.m. both evenings
Free admission
A benefit for for Wild Roots

 

The Mystery of the Harvey Wallbangers Toaster

For nearly two years, one of the strangest little mysteries in downtown Rockford kept repeating itself in a tiny garden outside Harvey Wallbangers. I would be walking past and notice that somebody had found a discarded household appliance, carried it to the garden, and plugged it in. Not merely dumped it there or arranged it as some sort of joke. They plugged the thing in, and it would be running.

Over those two years I saw fans, heaters, dehumidifiers, radios and even a mini refrigerator. Every couple of weeks, it seemed, another orphaned appliance would appear and be given one final, inexplicable tour of duty in this little patch of downtown Rockford. The strangest part was that I never once saw the person doing it. I walked through this area constantly, often enough that you would think eventually I would catch the mysterious appliance operator in the act, but I never did. I would simply arrive one day and discover that the garden had acquired another machine. It would remain there humming, blowing, heating, cooling or playing until somebody unplugged it or the thing finally shorted out. Then it would disappear, and eventually something else would take its place.

One day it was a toaster. My friend and Hike You! collaborator, photographer Ryan Davis, took the photograph reproduced here. The toaster sits in the foreground, filthy and weather-beaten, with downtown Rockford rising behind it. There is one important detail that isn't readily apparent in the photograph: the toaster was on. Its little indicator light was glowing. There was something simultaneously ridiculous and strangely moving about it—a toaster sitting outside in a garden, nowhere near a kitchen, without bread or breakfast or any conceivable reason to exist there, nevertheless continuing to perform the job it had been manufactured to perform. Someone had plugged it in, so it toasted.

Ryan and I eventually paired the photograph with the haiku, “power outage— / the stars resume / their old jobs.” It became one of the 24 pieces in our exhibition Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford. In some ways, this photograph gets very close to what the entire project is about. For more than six years, Ryan and I have walked Rockford and paid attention to things that would be incredibly easy not to notice. We weren't particularly interested in documenting the city's official landmarks. Plenty of people can photograph a building and tell you when it was constructed. We became interested in what happens when you walk through the same place long enough that the ordinary begins to become mysterious.

That might mean a bicycle dredged out of the Rock River, an abandoned office chair on Broadway, something left in an alley, weeds reclaiming an object, or some accidental arrangement nobody intended anyone to regard as meaningful. They are little pieces of evidence that somebody was here five minutes ago or twenty years ago, moments in which the city seems briefly to rearrange itself into a poem. And sometimes, apparently, the poem is an electric toaster sitting in a garden.

The toaster also illustrates something I've come to believe after years of walking these same streets: familiarity and attention aren't opposites. You don't necessarily exhaust a place by returning to it. Sometimes you begin seeing more of it. That's also an important part of the Prairie Zen idea that has gradually developed around much of my recent haiku. You don't have to travel to some officially designated beautiful wilderness to encounter mystery. The strange, funny, melancholy or beautiful thing worth noticing might be sitting beside a sidewalk you've walked a hundred times. The trick is noticing it before it disappears.

Ryan Davis and I have selected 24 of these encounters for Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, which will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026. The exhibition combines Ryan's photographs with my haiku and short texts, following six years of walking through Rockford and watching the familiar city gradually become new, strange and occasionally magical. The exhibition also offers a preview of our forthcoming Hike You! book.

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, I have a particular affection for the toaster because I still don't know the answer to the most obvious question. For almost two years, somebody maintained this peculiar little ritual in downtown Rockford, bringing abandoned appliances to this garden and plugging them in, and despite all the miles we walked, I never caught them doing it. I don't know who they were, what they thought they were doing, or whether there was any explanation beyond their own amusement.

Maybe that's better. Rockford has explained enough of itself already. It can keep the toaster.

 

Three Shows, One Fall ArtScene: Haiku, Rockford Streets, and Salvaged Nature

I wasn't planning to have three shows in Rockford Fall ArtScene this year. These things have a way of accumulating. One project leads to another person, one conversation opens another door, and suddenly what began as a few photographs and haiku made while walking around Rockford has expanded into three different exhibitions involving photography, poetry, salvaged metal sculpture, the prairie, and several years of looking closely at the place where I live.

For Fall ArtScene 2026, my work will appear in three separate exhibitions around Rockford: Hike You! at RevHaus, a collaborative salvaged-metal sculpture at the Rockford Public Library, and SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli. Although the three projects developed independently, they've ended up telling different parts of essentially the same story. All of them are about paying attention to ordinary things, reconsidering objects and places we normally overlook, and discovering that the familiar can become strange again if you look at it long enough.

Hike You! — photograph by Ryan Davis, haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Hike You!: Six Years of Walking Rockford

The largest and longest-running of these projects is Hike You!, a collaboration with photographer Ryan Davis that grew out of six years of walking Rockford. We didn't begin with the idea of making an art exhibition. We walked. Ryan carried a camera and I wrote haiku. We wandered outward from the center of the city through downtown streets, alleys, neighborhoods, riverbanks and commercial strips, paying attention to things that most people—including us, ordinarily—would simply pass without giving them much thought.

Over time, that act of looking became the project. A discarded office chair in the window of the old Zant Office Equipment building on Broadway could suddenly evoke an entire vanished era. A mud-covered bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building became an accidental monument to lives in transition. Weather, abandoned objects, signs, animals, buildings, weeds and the strange little collisions between nature and the constructed city became our subjects. None of these things announced themselves as art. They were simply there.

Ryan's photographs and my haiku eventually began functioning as pairs. Neither necessarily explains the other, and that became important to the way the project developed. The photograph provides one way of encountering a moment while the poem opens another. Sometimes the connection is immediately apparent and sometimes it isn't. That little space between the photograph and the poem gives the viewer somewhere to enter the work and make an association of their own.

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026. The exhibition contains 24 pieces, but behind those finished works are years of walking and thousands of moments that never became anything at all. That's part of the idea, too. Art doesn't necessarily require traveling somewhere exotic in search of a subject. Sometimes you walk out the door, pay attention to your own neighborhood, and keep walking until the familiar becomes unfamiliar again.

A Possum Climbs Onto the Library Terrace

The second project took some of those same ideas somewhere completely different. For the Rockford Public Library Terrace, I collaborated with Rockford artist and fabricator Michael Zant on a reclaimed-metal opossum sculpture paired with one of my haiku. Michael makes animals from salvaged metal, taking objects that already had previous purposes and previous lives and reassembling them into something recognizable as a living creature. Nuts, bolts, scraps, machine parts and discarded pieces of the industrial world become fur, legs, faces and bodies.

That immediately struck a chord with me because Rockford is a city that knows something about metal, but it also knows something about reuse, survival and adaptation. The industrial landscape and the natural landscape aren't really separate here. You can walk from old factories to the Rock River, from machine shops to prairie remnants, and watch plants and animals continually working their way through the human structures we've put in their path.

The opossum seemed like an especially appropriate creature for that intersection. It is one of nature's great survivors: ancient, adaptable, routinely misunderstood and remarkably good at continuing to exist under circumstances that might suggest otherwise. It's simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent, which is probably part of the reason I've always liked it. As a subject for a sculpture made from the leftovers of human industry and paired with a haiku, the possum seemed almost inevitable.

Working on that collaboration also produced something neither of us had initially anticipated. Once Michael had made one salvaged-metal animal and I had written a poem to accompany it, there was an obvious question sitting there waiting for us: why stop at one?

SECOND NATURE

That question became SECOND NATURE — Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku, featuring Michael Zant and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at Rockford Art Deli for Fall ArtScene. SECOND NATURE brings together a collection of Michael's small reclaimed-metal animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the animals, their materials and the larger ideas surrounding them. The industrial and natural worlds occupy the same space: discarded metal becomes wildlife while poetry provides another way into the creatures and their environments.

A salvaged-metal animal sculpture takes shape in Michael Zant’s workshop for SECOND NATURE, his Fall ArtScene collaboration with haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

The exhibition is also a benefit for Wild Roots, connecting the work to the prairie and to an organization devoted to promoting it. That gives the exhibition another dimension because the animals aren't simply whimsical sculptures made from junk. They point outward toward an actual landscape and toward questions about what we preserve, what we discard and what can return after we think we've lost it.

There is something wonderfully Rockford about the whole arrangement. This is a manufacturing city surrounded by prairie country, so metal and milkweed aren't really opposites here. They're neighbors. Michael's sculptures make that relationship literal by taking the remnants of one environment and turning them into inhabitants of another. Human artifacts that might otherwise have become waste are transformed back into animals. The artificial becomes natural again—or at least begins pretending to be. Hence SECOND NATURE.

The Thread Connecting All Three

Only after the three exhibitions came together did I realize how closely related they actually are. Hike You! begins with walking and noticing. The Rockford Public Library collaboration takes something discarded and asks us to see another possibility inside it. SECOND NATURE expands that transformation into an entire little ecosystem of salvaged animals and poems. They weren't designed as three pieces of a larger project, but they somehow became one anyway.

Running underneath all three is something I've increasingly come to think of as Prairie Zen. I don't mean Zen as decoration or as a philosophy imported wholesale from somewhere else. I mean something closer to a Midwestern practice of attention: walking slowly enough to notice what's actually there and resisting the temptation to dismiss something because it appears ordinary, ugly, broken, industrial or commonplace. A bicycle dragged out of the Rock River, an old office chair on Broadway, a discarded piece of metal transformed into a possum, weeds pushing through concrete and a three-line poem can all occupy the same landscape and become part of the same conversation.

Rockford provides an almost inexhaustible supply of these things because the city is constantly revealing layers of what it was, what it is and what nature is trying to make of it now. Six years of walking around here has convinced me that finding interesting things isn't particularly difficult. The harder part is learning not to walk past them.

Somehow, that practice of noticing has turned into three Fall ArtScene exhibitions this year. I certainly didn't plan it that way when Ryan and I started walking around Rockford six years ago, and Michael and I didn't plan it when we started talking about a metal possum. But that may be the most appropriate thing about all of it. None of these projects began with a grand plan. We found them by paying attention to what was already there.

 

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford

For more than six years, photographer Ryan Davis and I have been taking walks through Rockford.

That description is completely accurate, but it doesn't really explain Hike You!.

We began with a simple idea. We would start our walks from essentially the same place near the geographical center of Rockford and head in a different direction. Sometimes we had a destination in mind. Often we didn't. Ryan brought a camera. I brought the habit of looking at things as a poet. Then we walked.

Over six years, those walks accumulated into thousands of photographs, hundreds of haiku, a record of a friendship, and a portrait of Rockford that neither of us could have deliberately set out to create. This fall, a selection of that work will be exhibited as Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, a collaborative exhibition by Ryan Davis and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026.

The City at Walking Speed

There is a Rockford you experience from a car, and there is another Rockford you discover on foot.

Mt. Fuji mailbox 7th Street

Walking changes the scale of a city. Places that seem unrelated when you're driving between them turn out to be connected. Streets have transitions you don't notice at thirty-five miles an hour. An alley becomes as interesting as a major road. An abandoned building stops being part of the background and becomes an object with a history. You notice old signs painted on brick, strange objects caught in trees, flowers growing through concrete, forgotten staircases, railroad tracks, utility poles, river debris, vacant lots and the remains of businesses nobody has thought about for decades.

We walked past the Rockford everyone knows: the Faust Hotel, the Midway Theater, the Times Theatre, the Rock River and the old Register Star building. But those landmarks became only part of the project. We became equally interested in the things that weren't landmarks at all.

A discarded office chair in a window on Broadway could become a poem. A bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building could become an image about transition. A fading ghost sign on the side of a building could briefly become the most important thing we saw that day.

The ordinary kept refusing to remain ordinary.

Photography and Haiku

Ryan and I weren't trying to make photographs illustrate poems or poems explain photographs. That distinction became important.

Photography and haiku are both very good at paying attention, but they pay attention differently. A photograph can preserve an instant with enormous specificity. A haiku can take that same instant and move sideways into memory, association, humor, absence or something that can't actually be seen.

Sometimes Ryan would photograph something and a poem would occur to me immediately. Sometimes I wouldn't understand why an image mattered until much later. Sometimes the photograph and poem seemed to be looking at entirely different things even though they came from the same place and moment.

We learned not to force them together.

The best pairings created a third thing between them: something that belonged neither entirely to the photograph nor entirely to the poem.

Six Years Changes a City

When you repeatedly walk through the same city for six years, you also begin documenting time whether you intend to or not.

Buildings disappear. Businesses close. Murals appear. Trees come down. Construction fences go up. Something you photographed because it seemed mildly interesting one afternoon becomes historically interesting three years later because it no longer exists.

This sign for Mera's has since been painted over. 

But the walkers change, too.

That became increasingly important to Hike You!.

The project began during one period of our lives and continued into another. Some of the places we encountered began to feel symbolic of that movement without either of us intending them to. The bicycle that came out of the Rock River is perhaps the clearest example. It was simply an object Ryan encountered and photographed, covered in river mud and standing improbably in front of the old newspaper building. But over time it came to represent something larger to us: an object emerging from one existence into another, battered and dirty but still recognizably itself.

That is part of what these walks became.

They weren't an attempt to escape Rockford. They were an attempt to see what was already here.

The Rockford We Found

There is a tendency to believe that discovery requires travel. We imagine that interesting things are elsewhere and that familiar places have already revealed everything they contain.

Six years of walking around Rockford taught us almost exactly the opposite.

The more familiar the city became, the stranger it became.

We found hidden murals and remnants of old advertisements. We found architecture we'd passed hundreds of times without actually seeing. We found animals, weeds, industrial ruins, religious objects, graffiti, abandoned furniture and things neither of us could satisfactorily explain. We watched seasons repeat themselves over the same streets while nothing ever repeated itself exactly.

There is no exotic destination at the center of Hike You!.

The destination is attention.

The project is about what happens when you return to the same place often enough, slowly enough and openly enough that familiarity begins to break down. Eventually you stop seeing what you expect to see and begin noticing what is actually there.

That was when Rockford became mysterious again.

Hike You! at Fall ArtScene 2026

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be exhibited at RevHaus, 1023 Harlem Road in Machesney Park, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.

Fall ArtScene takes place Friday, October 2, from 5–9 p.m., and Saturday, October 3, from 4–9 p.m. ArtScene is presented by the Rockford Area Arts Council and is free and open to the public.

RevHaus describes itself as a creative automotive space where craftsmanship, design and art come together. For Fall ArtScene, the venue is bringing together artists working in photography, poetry, mixed media, reclaimed materials, woodworking and metalwork. Along with Hike You!, the venue will feature reclaimed metal and wood artwork by Oscar Pagles of Foraged and metalwork by Shayne Pagles of VinGogh, LLC, as well as live metalworking and woodworking demonstrations.

For Ryan and me, the exhibition is also a preview of the forthcoming Hike You! book, which will bring together photographs and haiku from the larger six-year project.

What Hike You! Is Really About

I suppose an artist statement is eventually supposed to explain what the art means.

After six years, I'm not sure I can reduce Hike You! to one meaning, and I'm glad I can't.

It is about Rockford. It is about friendship. It is about walking. It is about photography and haiku. It is about aging and time and places disappearing. It is about discovering that an object pulled out of a river can suddenly seem like a self-portrait. It is about looking at something you've seen a thousand times and, for reasons you can't entirely explain, seeing it for the first time.

Most of all, I think it is about attention.

A city doesn't have to be beautiful in the conventional sense to deserve attention. A moment doesn't have to be important to deserve preservation. A place doesn't have to be famous to contain mystery.

For six years, Ryan Davis and I walked through Rockford and paid attention.

Hike You! is what we brought back.

78 Years of Art: The History of Rockford's Greenwich Village Art Fair

 There are some Rockford traditions that have been around so long that it's easy to forget somebody had to start them.

The Greenwich Village Art Fair is one of them.

In 1948, Rockford held the first Greenwich Village Art Fair. Nearly eight decades later, the event is still going, making it the longest-running art fair of its kind in the Midwest, according to Rockford Art Museum.

In 2026, Greenwich returns for its 78th year on September 19 and 20.

That's a remarkable run for anything, but especially for an arts event.

Greenwich Before Greenwich Was Cool

The first Greenwich Village Art Fair took place in 1948, a very different moment in Rockford history.

World War II had ended only three years earlier. Rockford was booming as an industrial city. The postwar era that would transform the city's neighborhoods, businesses and population was just beginning.

And somewhere in the middle of all that manufacturing, machinery and industry, Rockford started an art fair.

It survived.

Through recessions, changing tastes, downtown redevelopment, generations of artists and the enormous changes Rockford itself has undergone, Greenwich became one of those events that simply returned every year.

The name is a nod to New York City's Greenwich Village and its long association with artists and bohemian culture, but over the decades Rockford's Greenwich developed an identity entirely its own.

Today it is closely associated with Rockford Art Museum and is held on the museum grounds at 711 North Main Street along Rockford's riverfront.

Not Just Another Craft Fair

One thing that has helped Greenwich retain its identity is that it remains a juried art fair.

The artwork exhibited at Greenwich must be original and produced by the exhibiting artists themselves. That distinction matters.

You aren't just wandering through rows of mass-produced merchandise with an occasional painting thrown in. Greenwich remains centered on people who actually make things.

The 2026 participating artists represent ceramics, drawing, fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and wood. Artists are coming from around Illinois and the Midwest, but Rockford itself is well represented.

That's also one of the things I've always liked about art fairs. You don't have to know anything about art.

You can know everything about ceramics or nothing about ceramics. You can spend twenty minutes discussing technique with an artist or just point at something and say, "I like that."

Both are legitimate responses to art.

More Than Art

Over the years Greenwich has evolved into something larger than rows of artists' booths.

The 2026 fair will include live music, children's art activities, a local vendor marketplace, food trucks and cocktails along with the juried artists. Admission proceeds support Rockford Art Museum.

The music schedule alone is basically a small Rockford-area festival, with performers scheduled throughout both Saturday and Sunday.

And then there's the food.

The announced 2026 lineup includes local and regional vendors offering barbecue, bao buns, ice cream bars, coffee, kettle corn, baked goods and other things designed to destroy whatever disciplined nutritional program you had before entering the grounds.

As it should be.

The 78th Greenwich Village Art Fair

This year's Greenwich Village Art Fair will be held:

Saturday, September 19, 2026 — 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Sunday, September 20, 2026 — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission is $10, or $5 for Rockford Art Museum members, with children 12 and under admitted free. The fair is held at Rockford Art Museum, 711 N. Main Street. Well-behaved leashed dogs are also welcome.

Greenwich Village Art Fair official website

Seventy-Eight Years Later

There are flashier things a city can brag about than an art fair.

But longevity tells you something.

An event doesn't make it from 1948 to 2026 because somebody came up with a clever marketing campaign. It lasts because generation after generation of artists, volunteers, organizers and visitors decide it is still worth doing.

That's what makes Greenwich interesting beyond whatever happens to be hanging in the booths this year.

For one weekend every September, people gather beside the Rock River and look at things other people made with their hands.

They talk to artists.

They buy something strange to hang on a wall.

They eat something they probably didn't need to eat.

Kids make art.

Bands play.

Then everybody packs everything up.

And Rockford does it again the next year.

We've been doing that for 78 years.

That's not merely an art fair anymore.

That's part of the city.

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

There are certain things a Rockford artist eventually learns are expected of them. Sooner or later, somebody is going to suggest a sock monkey. A screw is always available. The Rockford Peaches remain eternally on deck. And looming over all of it, quite literally, is The Symbol.

You know The Symbol. Everybody in Rockford knows The Symbol, even if quite a few people couldn't tell you what it is supposed to symbolize.

Officially titled Symbol, the enormous sculpture standing near the Rock River was created by Russian-born American sculptor Alexander Liberman, one of the major figures in 20th-century American monumental sculpture. Constructed from massive steel cylinders painted bright red, the work has become one of Rockford's most recognizable landmarks.

But Rockford's relationship with it has never been quite that simple.

When Symbol arrived in the 1970s, it immediately became something Rockford excels at producing: an argument.

To supporters, it was exactly the sort of ambitious public artwork a city like Rockford should have. Here was a monumental sculpture by an internationally recognized artist, placed prominently along the river and impossible to mistake for anything else. Rockford wasn't merely decorating a park. It was participating in contemporary art on a scale usually associated with much larger cities.

To critics, it was a collection of giant red pipes.

And expensive ones.

That disagreement has followed Symbol for decades. Depending on whom you ask, it is an important example of modern public sculpture, an enduring Rockford landmark, an incomprehensible pile of industrial tubing, or evidence that somebody somewhere had access to public money and very persuasive presentation materials.

Which may be precisely why it has succeeded.

Public art that everyone immediately agrees is pleasant tends to become invisible. A tasteful statue sits in a park. People walk past it. Nobody argues about it at the dinner table thirty years later.

Rockford has been arguing about Symbol for roughly half a century.

Liberman's work makes particular sense in an industrial city. His monumental sculptures frequently used cylinders, beams and other fabricated steel forms, transforming the vocabulary of factories and heavy industry into abstraction. In Rockford—a city whose identity was built around manufacturing, machinery and metalworking—the material doesn't exactly feel foreign.

It looks manufactured because it is.

It looks industrial because it is.

And it looks a little like somebody dropped the contents of a gigantic machine shop beside the Rock River because, well, this is Rockford.

Over time, however, something happened that neither the sculpture's defenders nor its detractors could completely control. Symbol stopped merely being a controversial piece of public art and became The Symbol.

The capitalization almost feels necessary.

It became part of the city's visual shorthand. Photograph Rockford long enough and eventually The Symbol appears. Design something intended to announce ROCKFORD and somebody will suggest putting The Symbol in it. Along with the sock monkey, the screw and the Rockford Peaches, it entered that small collection of images Rockford continually uses to explain itself to itself.

That doesn't mean everybody suddenly decided they liked it.

That's the interesting part.

A landmark doesn't necessarily require affection. It requires recognition. The Eiffel Tower was despised by prominent artists when it was built. Plenty of cities contain monuments their residents spent years mocking before eventually becoming fiercely protective of them. Familiarity does strange things to public art. Yesterday's monstrosity becomes today's landmark and tomorrow's irreplaceable piece of civic identity.

Imagine someone announcing tomorrow that The Symbol was going to be removed permanently.

People who have spent forty years calling it ugly would probably be among the first to complain.

Because after all this time, the question isn't really whether Symbol is beautiful.

The better question is whether Rockford would feel slightly less like Rockford without it.

Rockford Symbol

I think it would.

And maybe that's the final verdict on the old argument about whether The Symbol was a boondoggle or enduring art.

A boondoggle disappears when the money is gone.

Art hangs around long enough for everybody to argue about what it means.

Nearly fifty years later, those giant red pipes are still standing beside the Rock River, and Rockford is still arguing.

That sounds suspiciously like art.