Prosit, Wayne!

A hundred forty-three years in the making, and my tribute to a friend.

When John and Nancy Bellett asked me to create something for Wayne, I didn’t want to make a plaque. I think Wayne would have hated a plaque. I wanted something that worked the way she worked — quietly, with layers, where the real substance only reveals itself when you get close. About the same time we were talking about making a piece of art for Wayne, Frates Seligson, the Executive Director of the San Antonio River Foundation entered the picture.

When the river was dredged and widened between 2007 and 2009 for the Museum Reach of the Riverwalk, an enormous cache of beer bottles came up from the riverbed. 19th-century bottles, some dating to the 1880s were dumped there between the Pearl and Lone Star Breweries. A few still had liquid in them, but the beer had turned to vinegar a century ago. Frates saw the value of those bottles before anyone else did. He stored them, protected them, and argued for years that they mattered. He knew that the bottles could tell a story about the reclamation of the river that words could not. He didn’t know Wayne, but her knew Lila Cockrell and others who cared deeply for the environment of San Antonio.

RiverGlass is installed at the Lock and Dam at Brooklyn Street on the RiverWalk — the very structure that Lila Cockrell championed. The sculpture stands twelve feet tall – three four-foot terrazzo cubes, fabricated by Venice Art Terrazzo Company here in San Antonio.

The glass from the river was sorted into light and dark fragments and were cast directly into the terrazzo faces. The bottles themselves create the contrast, and that contrast forms a pattern. Each face of each cube carries a working code called Aztec, QR and PDF417. Anyone with a smartphone can scan the codes and they link to the stories of the four honorees: Wayne, Lila Cockrell, Roberto Anguiano, and the Fay Sinkin Family. They also carry the river’s own narrative, in four panels, decoded straight from the glass.

The bottles that were thrown away are now telling the story of the people who saved the river.

Wayne and I shared a love of art. She was a friend, and I thought about her constantly during this project. The other honorees were public figures in the traditional sense — elected officials, civic leaders whose names appear on buildings. As you all know, Wayne worked differently. The millions of dollars she directed toward environmental causes around the world didn’t come with a lot of public recognition. That’s exactly why this monument matters: it puts her name, literally cast in stone, in the company where she belongs.

Ansen Seale
Seale Studios, San Antonio
riverglass.org

RiverGlass was made possible by the Wayne Hollomon-Price Foundation, The Brown Foundation, The Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation, and the San Antonio River Foundation. Fabricated by Venice Art Terrazzo Company, San Antonio.