Committee concerned statues aren’t diverse

PORTLAND – Baseball is supposed to be as American as mom and apple pie. But Portland’s Public Art Committee has reservations about proposed statues depicting a family of four trundling off to a baseball game.

Portland Sea Dogs owner Daniel Burke has offered the statues to the city for free. He wants to put them outside Hadlock Field, home to the minor league baseball team.

But the committee is concerned that the bronze statues, depicting a father, mother and two children, does not reflect the diversity of Maine’s largest city. The committee also is concerned about the statue’s size and depiction of the team logo.

Jack Soley, committee vice chairman, said the committee is not enthralled with designs featuring “white folks on pedestals.” Portland has enough of those, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Longfellow Square, he told the Portland Press Herald.

“There’s so much statuary in Portland that represents white, Anglo-Saxon people,” added Jay York, another committee member. “We want to encourage strong, interesting public art that the city of Portland can enjoy for years to come.”

Burke, who has homes in New York and Kennebunkport, did not consult the committee before commissioning Rhoda Sherbell of Long Island, N.Y., to create the statues. The statues include a father figure who’s 11 feet tall, including a foot-high marble base. The mother carries a small girl and a teddy bear. The son wears a baseball glove and a Sea Dogs shirt and cap.

Burke’s lawyer, William Troubh, rebuffed the committee’s suggestions. “This is not a holiday gift you can go and exchange,” he told the newspaper. “If the city sees fit, in its wisdom, to accept it, so be it.”

Burke never would have offered the statues if he felt they would have been controversial. But it’s too late to change them now, Troubh said. “There will be no fight,” Troubh said. “They will either accept [the gift] or not.”

Press Herald readers largely supported Burke and lampooned the commission.

“I think the committee should be ashamed of themselves. This is political correctness gone haywire,” one reader responded on the newspaper’s Web site.

Another suggested that the art committee should show a little imagination.

“Maybe it’s a single mother who is meeting her divorced boyfriend and his son from a previous relationship for an afternoon of fresh air and fun. And white? I thought they were bronze (and in time will become green!),” the reader said.