Allan Appel Photo
Lehman with torch and prepatory model for the bike rack.
Come this fall, if you lock up to a bike rack in the shape of broccoli and carrots in front of a local vegetarian eatery or to a cupcake-shaped rack beside a bakery, you’ll have Ann Lehman to thank.
Using metal sculpture to put whimsy and art into bike security is only one of the projects that the versatile metal sculptor, teacher, and founder of Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) is involved in this year.
Oh, and she’s going to be 85 years young. A concert and reception in her honor is scheduled for this Saturday at 5 p.m. at CAW.
Lehman with “Cross Reference,” aluminum and copper piece in the artist’s sculpture garden.
Lehman was recently tapped by Yale rising senior Benjamin Green to create the first painted and artistically designed bike racks for his New Haven Bicycle Rack Project.
Lehman said Green brought his project to CAW after obtaining approvals and buy-in from the the state Department of Transportation, Yale, and the participating city businesses who will be underwriting some of the costs; it eventually fell to her to create the designs.
“It will put fun bicycle racks all over town,” she said.
The first location is Claire’s Corner Copia, which should be ready for installation this fall, Lehman guessed. After that, a cupcake bike rack is to be fabricated and installed in front of Kathy Riegelman’s Katalina’s Bakery on Whitney Avenue, where Gov. Dannel P. Malloy recently had a cookie.
A cupcake is going to be easier to make than a rack of carrots, broccoli, and turnips, Lehman predicted.
Lehman’s first wooden sculpture, from 1950 beside one of this year’s commissions: sculptural illustration of a Yale math prof’s equation.
On a tour Tuesday of her home studio in Bethany, on property her family has owned since the 1930s, Lehman showed some of her recent work juxtaposed with an early wooden sculpture.
She’ll do the models for the bike racks at the studio. The fabrication will be done at CAW, with her students, and with the help of some serious pipe-bending equipment.
As Lehman went over some models for the vegetable bike rack, she said, she was amused at the idea. But at some point a sculptor has got to get practical. “It’s got to be very sturdy,” she said, even though those carrots might look delicate.
“I love making it [steel] fold and move,” Lehman said of steel, like this cover for her fireplace.
The bike rack project is the most recent touchstone in a long career that combines a passion for working directly welding steel and other metals with a commitment to community-minded teaching. Click here for a portrait of Lehman in action teaching the three courses she continues to conduct at CAW.
When she helped found CAW in 1960, Lehman said, not only were there few outlets in the arts for kids or adults; New Haven was socially divided. “There were people we didn’t get together with before [CAW],” she said.
“Art Brought Us Together”
The large volunteer committees that made CAW happen brought together people from the Yale faculty, the Jewish community, and the city’s old- line patrician families in a way that had not occurred before.
“Now everybody mixes, but then the world of the Lawn Club, Yale Faculty, the Jewish community,” did not mix easily socially, if at all, she said.
As CAW evolved, they became socially friendly. “Art brought us together,” Lehman said.
That atmosphere still obtains at CAW, she said. “You need a reason to be together,” she added.
Lehman is a graduate in sculpture from Yale’s School of Art and before that Smith College and Cranbrook Academy of Art. The pursuit of art and in the the three dimensions came with her childhood.
Her grandfather Abraham Podoloff and her dad Nathan Podoloff, both engineers, built the New Haven Arena on Grove Street in 1928. It was the pre-Coliseum site for ice hockey and concerts.
“My father was a big influence, a brilliant student a civil engineer. We used to talk about structural things around the dinner table, the building of the Merritt Parkway the degree of rise and the curves, ” she said.
She works today as always because “I feel unsatisfied if I’m not making things.”
I asked Lehman what she finds to be the unique pleasure in using torches on metal.
“I like to make hard things seem soft because it’s unlikely. I’ve manipulated them. I’ve asked or told them to do this,” she said. Her special fondness is for steel, which she said “obeys better” and has “body.” That meaning that when it’s hot, it can be more easily worked with than copper and other non-ferrous metals that when molten “go shloop.”
Commissions, such as the bicycle project, give her a special pleasure because they go toward a specific and in this instance public purpose, she added.
Lehman called today’s art scene, with its galleries and withevery corridor and business showing art on the wall, a different world from the 1960s. “The businesses realize art is a common denominator of pleasure, ” she said.
The bicycle rack project is a back-to-the-future moment for Lehman. She called it another example, like CAW more than half a century ago, that is bringing people together.
Click here for information and tickets for the Saturday concert in honor of Lehman. It features The Foggy Mountain Consort, a musical group led by Peter Lehman, Ann’s son.
