One of the first sights to greet travelers waiting to collect their bags at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport is a symbol for the Ocean State: A fully rigged sailboat, its hull and sails sporting the names of regional maritime companies.
Welcoming travelers is a replica of a Whitbread 30, a mainstay near the baggage claim exit since the terminal named for former Gov. Bruce Sundlun opened in 1996. Getting the boat inside the building during construction was hardly smooth sailing.
“We had to get it in there before they put the doors on,” recalled Tom Rich, former co-owner of New England Boatworks, now Safe Harbor New England Boatworks, in Portsmouth, which built the model. “To get it through the frame, we had to turn it on a 45-degree angle and then had to refinish it inside because it got scratched up coming through.”
Never meant to be seaworthy, the Whitbread is purely decorative. The same goes for a public art installation that for more than two decades has been a fixture at the gate entryway after passing through the airport’s security checkpoint. Titled “Islands,” it consists of two sets of laminated wooden arches in a ribcage shape, adorned by rows of wire-mounted acrylic pods that resemble mussels, petals, or lacquered fingernails.
But now “Islands” and the Whitbread must be moved in order to make way for a $64 million renovation planned at the Warwick airport. So too will a small, Depression-era dinghy built by one of the state’s historic shipwrights and installed underneath the replica sailboat.
Only the dinghy will survive the move.
Letting go
Public art has a tendency to fade away, said Peter Stempel, the artist behind “Islands,” in a recent phone interview. So he never expected his art to live in T.F. Green forever.
“Even incredibly famous artists like [Alexander] Calder and Picasso, their pieces get moved,” Stempel said. “Things have a way of either getting put into a back hallway or an odd corner, or disappearing.”
Stempel’s overhead, cresting sculptures have blue pods on one variation, and red on the other. From a distance, their shapes gather like a tiny grove of trees on the horizon. Since being installed in 2002, three years after the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) awarded Stempel the $99,000 commission, “Islands” has provided a canopy and rendezvous point for travelers. Stempel said he often heard people say of the work, “That’s where I meet up with my family.”
“Islands” is scheduled to sink out of public view once renovations begin, as the walls near the artwork are going to be demolished.
“I think the fact that that space has not been renovated in over 20 years is pretty remarkable,” Stempel said. “So it was always a possibility…There are very few buildings that change as much as airports.”
Boatmaker Rich, meanwhile, said his understanding had always been that the boat replica would forever be a part of the terminal.
“People come to Rhode Island and think it’s an impressive thing — it kind of says who we are,” he said. “I don’t know how they’d get that thing out of there, I guess they could just cut it up.”
A 60-foot-tall water feature is going to be installed near baggage claim, right where the information desk and the Whitbread and a 13-foot “Amphicraft” dinghy next to it are on display.
Other plans call for new flooring to replace the existing carpet in the atrium, new ticket counters and seating, and lighting intended to “create a sense of place,” according to a July 11 memo from airport CEO Iftikhar Ahmad to Rhode Island Airport Corporation’s board of directors. Terminal renovations are set to be completed by late 2027.
The idea, Ahmad wrote, is to build upon other cosmetic upgrades and amenities added to the airport in recent years, such as $10 million marble-lined bathrooms, automated coffee machines, new restaurants and colossal welcome signs off Interstate 95.
“I’m fully committed to transforming this place,” Ahmad told reporters after a recent board meeting.
The boat will likely need to be relocated, airport spokesperson Bill Fischer said in an emailed statement. But where exactly it will go is still up in the air.
“Discussions related to the sailboat’s future remain ongoing,” Fischer said. “Once material submittals from the contractor come back to us for review, we will have more details on the final aesthetic.”
The overall goal of the renovations, Fischer said, is to borrow aesthetics from notable buildings in Newport and Providence.
Ahmad told reporters the decorative sailboat could be relocated, but it’s not a top priority for airport officials.
“There is no compulsion for us to do this right now,” he said. “Maybe we just see things differently as to what’s important to us.”
The last of the Herreshoffs
The Whitbread is just for show, but the Amphicraft dinghy constructed in the 1930s by the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company — the Bristol boatbuilder that dominated the state’s marine industry from the 1870s through the 1940s — can sail the sea.
You wouldn’t immediately know from looking at the small Depression-era craft tucked behind the welcome desk, but it’s an important piece of sailing history, said Bill Lynn, president of the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol.
“It’s sort of the first shot at a boat you could actually tow behind your car and take somewhere, set it up, throw it in the water,” Lynn explained. “It’s a pretty cool little boat — it’s this kind of LEGO kit.”
The Amphicraft dinghy is also extremely rare. Only 15 were ever made, according to the museum.
There actually used to be three Herreshoff boats within the terminal, Lynn said.
The first to leave the terminal was a 15-foot wooden racing boat commissioned by the Watch Hill Yacht Club in Westerly during the early 1920s. It was pulled from the terminal by the museum in order to get refurbished for its 100th birthday at the yacht club, Lynn said. Airport officials never asked for it back.
“Now it’s parked in Connecticut waiting for what happens next,” Lynn said.
Then in May, Lynn said he was informed by airport officials he would need to move a steam launch built in 1902 and originally commissioned by railroad tycoon Henry Clay Pierce to make way for the planned renovations.
That boat has since returned to the museum on Bristol’s Burnside Street. Lynn said he remains hopeful all Herreshoffs can come back to the terminal.
“We’re sort of twiddling our thumbs waiting to find out whether we can bring any of these boats back,” he said. “I sort of worry that’s not going to happen, which would be too bad.”
Out of the airport, into memory
The state arts council voted unanimously on Sept. 15 to OK the removal of Stempel’s “Islands” so the airport corporation can carry out its plans.
Stempel, now an associate professor of landscape architecture at Penn State University, was a Rhode Island School of Design graduate living and working in Providence in 1998 when he won the approval of a RISCA panel charged with choosing artworks to accompany T.F. Green’s gate expansion. State law dictates that at least 1% of funding be devoted toward public artworks for state-invested capital projects whose budgets exceed $250,000.
According to Providence Journal coverage from 1998, Stempel’s sculpture — whose shapes reference “grape arbors…[and] shaded patios” and “upside-down boats” — was chosen by a 6-4 vote over a set of eight hanging shell-shaped sculptures. The panel debated its final choice at length, with some finding Stempel’s sculpture overly bold.
“Those colors are just too shocking,” one RISCA board member lamented at the time.
I’m fully committed to transforming this place.
The artwork is site-specific, meaning it was designed and fabricated to accommodate the precise location where it would be installed. The airport’s challenge to Stempel was to fill the slots atop a wall that had once been occupied by planters, but staff found upkeep of the live plants too demanding, Stempel said.
“They also didn’t want you to disrupt the advertising that was in the terminal — part of the terminal revenue,” Stempel said. “These are all the things that public artists deal with all the time.”
Stempel eventually noticed the “lens of space” between the install site and the surrounding advertising. A canopy, he decided, could elegantly fill the space and look sufficiently different from the ads that it couldn’t be mistaken for one. So Stempel installed the colorful arcs and bulbs from 2 to 5 a.m. on a morning in 2002, when post-Sept. 11 security measures were still fresh.
“Every single piece of it went through a metal detector,” Stempel recalled.
Stempel wonders how many people saw his sculpture over the years, although he estimates it’s a “tremendous number” given the high foot traffic in the area. The artist praised RISCA for its commitment to public art and said that “Islands” formed a milestone in his career.
“The difference between doing a $20,000 sculpture and doing a $100,000 sculpture in those years was incredibly significant,” Stempel said. “It’s really what allowed me to transition to being much more professional.”
But Stempel does not want the sculpture back as a “souvenir.” After RISCA informed him of the deaccession, Stempel waived his contractual right of recovery to the state-owned “Islands.”
His preference is that the work would be destroyed. “It’s really very difficult to recover it in a meaningful way,” he said.
The removal process can begin once renovation permits have been obtained.
“With site-specific artwork such as ‘Islands,’ this typically means deconstructing and disposing of the artwork outside of public view so the public memory of the piece as a complete artwork is maintained,” Todd Trebour, RISCA’s executive director, wrote in a Sept. 23 email.
“Remove it and demolish it with dignity,” Stempel said. “And then it will go into memory and history.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
