Town Of Yucca Valley's

on-site scupting project

featuring

John Fisher

October 15-30, 2007

The Town of Yucca Valley has formally commissioned internationally renowned artist John Fisher to conduct a public sculpting event in the heart of Old Town.

Beginning mid-October, the community is invited to witness this inspiring and unique exercise in creativity and public art making that will evolve over a three-week period.

Fisher, an American artist of intense passion and outstanding skills, takes a profoundly philosophical approach to art and its impact on communities. For over thirty years, his public on-site carvings have fascinated the communities to which he’s been invited, as they observe his intuitive process. Without models or preliminary sketches, Fisher magically pulls figures out of the stone, employing skills he honed living among the traditional artisans and sculptors of Pietrasanta (Holy Stone), Italy.

Fisher has conducted similar on-site sculpting projects for other cities such as Santa Barbara, Claremont, Mendocino and Fairfax, Virginia, and is thrilled to realize his dream to carve a work of art in Yucca Valley. It is his experience that these onsite projects bring the public and the work together in a way that makes the work a living part of its community. A two-ton piece of Carrera marble, imported from the same Italian quarry used by Michaelangelo, will be installed in the parking lot just west of Water Canyon Coffee Company, who is cosponsoring the event along with Mueller Turner Company, where the marble has been stored in anticipation of this opportunity. Water Canyon Coffee Company plans on providing shade for the comfort of spectators.

According to Jim Schooler, Director of Community Services, “the commissioning of this work demonstrates the Town of Yucca Valley's recognition of art's role as a tangible investment into the community and quality of life in the high desert.”

Running concurrently with the Morongo Basin Cultural Arts Council's Open Studio Art Tours 2007, it is also hoped this event will generate increased regional, national and international media attention to the high desert as a cultural epicenter for all things artistic.