A mile-long art installation in the form of a poem was installed last week along the Truckee River in downtown Reno. The piece is written on the curbs of the city’s sidewalks. Starting at Idlewild Park and continuing across the Booth Street Bridge, the artwork concludes at the corner of First and Virginia streets across from the City Plaza.
Titled “Confluence: Stream Science, Handwriting, and Urban Curbs,” the 4,000-word poem is a project by Todd Gilens, a Bay Area visual artist who first had the idea in 2014.
Leading a team of Reno residents and artists, Gilens’s installation is one long and continuous poem presented in cursive. Thematically partitioned into 20 parts, each section was composed specifically for the location at which it was installed.
The font for the writings was also explicitly crafted for the project and based directly on the handwriting of federal Water Master Claude Dukes, who died in 1984. The portioned themes of the composition are based on water, land, science and seasonal motifs and are “expressed in rhythmic prose,” which is meant to be read while walking, according to the artist.
Arts and Culture Manager for the City of Reno, Megan Berner, told This Is Reno that Todd Gilens first approached the city about the project in 2015. Gilens was then required to do a material test to research how long the project would last, as it was a temporary public art project. Several years of testing resulted in the city’s arts commission supporting the project. The sponsorship, in turn, resulted in partial funding and logistical support for permitting.
“I like that it engages people while they are walking,” Berner said. “It engages them with their environment differently; they might not know what they are looking at. Then they have questions about that, and it might be something that intrigues them as they read some of the text as they walk through those specific places since it’s site-specific.”
Gilens echoed this sentiment.
“It’s kind of delightful for everyday life, slowing people down a little bit and bringing their attention to just where they are at that moment,” he said. “And that place is much bigger than themselves, connecting people to where they are, and that place has processes that happen over eons of time and to minute things. It’s a whole kind of experience of scale.”
He said he designed the main composition to start at Idlewild Drive but included a couple of “spurs” that come into the primary text, like “tributary streams.”
The project was purposively placed around “where water moves,” Gilens said, the Truckee River being the main feature that attracted him to Reno.
Measuring each section methodically to the inch on each block, Gilens said the character count per foot reached 5.85. “I was working with a six-character count per foot, and I had made the font and worked with it. But when it went to the typographer for the final edit, minor adjustments to the lettering changed the length of each section.”
Some of the first onlookers to the project were members of the Black Rock Press from the University of Nevada, Reno. Black Rock Press fellow Kelsey Reiman told This Is Reno that she first heard about the project when Gilens came into the BRP and told them about it.
“It’s something you don’t encounter in other communities, and it’s interesting thinking about how the river impacts our community,” Reiman said. “And even when we are driving down the road in our cars or on our bikes, we are interacting with the river. Much of the work we do at the Black Rock Press is about text and historical typefaces, so it’s really interesting to see this take shape in a large scale and a public place.”
Installation of the project wrapped up early Friday, and the lettering is expected to last several weeks, depending on weather conditions.
Gilens said his desire is for spectators to understand the project that even though there is a lot of calculation involved, it is poetry too.
“It’s really about the scale of the importance of the moment,” he explained, “and the experience of the individual within the scale of how water has shaped the landscape over the eons of time.”
The project is supported in part by the Truckee Meadows Parks Foundation, City of Reno, Washoe County, and Nevada Humanities.
