There's practically not one aspect of the arts that's not included in this program. Narrative, poetry, dance, sculpture - there's something for everybody. Opera works really well for integrating the arts.

Using that basic unit, we developed the columns and the branches that form the sculpture.

This is a sculpture, hand-built base, with a face on it. I wanted to add cool colors for the shaded part and black-and-white stripes to the handle.

Henry Moore was . . . the Number 1 choice whenever a public sculpture was needed. . . . It was thought that a large Henry Moore work out front would add a final distinction.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem's title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first ordering force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he experienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing 'places'. A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin's sculptures that 'there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them'. Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpable compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens 'like wild beasts' fur'.