The City of Davis announced today that it will install two pieces of public art from the City’s Art in Public Places collection later this spring.

Balance Beam, 1999, by Cedric Wentworth, will be installed at the Veterans Memorial Theatre’s northern lawn. This piece was formerly located for 20 years at the corner of 5th Street and Pole Line Road. Measuring 6’ x 21’ x 5’ and built from steel and bronze, this piece is an example of the postmodern sculpture work Wentworth is known for that combines abstracted figurative subject matter with industrial structures. Balance Beam was donated to the City by James Kidd in 2018.

Frog Totem, 2008, by Mary Fuller McChesney, will be installed behind the San Marino Park patio on the edge of the Open Space trail area. The roughly eight foot tall concrete composite piece is a whimsical tribute to our natural environment. The work says “Save the Frogs” in English and “Salva las Ranas” in Spanish, and the artist intentionally created this piece to promote wildlife conservation in her hometown of Petaluma. The Civic Arts Commission selected this work because of its universal appeal to all ages, especially children, and its playful nod to the renowned Davis legacy of celebrating and protecting our frogs and other wildlife. The artwork was purchased in 2021 using the City’s Municipal Arts Fund, accrued with 1% from City capital improvement projects.

Residents are welcome to provide feedback or obtain additional information by contacting Rachel Hartsough, Arts and Culture Manager, at: [email protected]. 

The immediate surrounding areas will be closed off during the installation process for both art pieces, and the public is asked to maintain a safe distance from the work area.

Press contact: Barbara Archer, [email protected], 530-400-3418

About the Artists:

Wentworth is an internationally exhibited Bay Area artist, born in 1966 in San Francisco. He is known for his work depicting the human figure, representing an evolution of Bay Area figurative work. He studied marble carving at Cacciatori Studies in Italy, which specialized in figurative stone carving. He later became assistant studio master at the Paolicci Studios in Rome. Wentworth left Italy in 1988 to live and work in New York City, later returning to the Bay area in 1991. Since then, he has received public commissions in the US and Japan and his work is featured in museum collections. Wentworth's large pieces are installed at the Crocker Museum, and the sculpture garden of the Oakland Museum.

McChesney was an American sculptor, born in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. She grew up in California's Central Valley and attended UC Berkeley. She apprenticed at the California Faience Company and worked as a welder in the Richmond shipyards during World War II. McChesney was largely self-taught as an artist. She had been sculpting since the 1940s in the garden of her hand-built, ranch-style home in the Sonoma mountains. Her enchanting animals and mythological women were formed in a cubist style, reminiscent of pre-Columbian sculpture and African art, which profoundly influence her aesthetic. McChesney was a writer at Currant, a researcher for the Archives of American Art, a Ford Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the 1975 NEA Art Critic’s Grant. Her sculptures can be found in many public and private collections, including: the Petaluma Library, the San Francisco Zoo, San Francisco General Hospital, Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, Salinas Community Center and Squaw Valley. She died in spring 2022, at the age of 99, and was recently remembered in an obituary in The New York Times.