When the Convention Center Is Demolished, 30 Years of Public Art Is Going With It

John Yancey’s Riffs and Rhythms at the moribund Austin Convention Center (provided by Art in Public Places)

The colors inspire “moments of reverie.”

At least that’s how Margo Sawyer describes her piece, Index for Contemplation. From Russian tea sets to Buddhist temples, the work draws inspiration from all over the world. Each piece in the 40-foot-high sculptural arrangement has a story behind it, and their meticulous placement across the walls of the Austin Convention Center creates unexpected collisions of culture and color.

“It’s really about creating an artwork that instills a contemplative quality in the viewer,” Sawyer says. “A convention center is a very busy place and a sort of inhuman place, and it was a chance to create moments of reverie for people who might enter and stop and look and contemplate.”

Finished in 2002, the piece has been ingrained in the architecture of the Austin Convention Center for over 20 years. It was one of many large art installations sponsored by the city’s Art in Public Places project when the Convention Center was built in the 1990s.

Soon, those pieces won’t be there anymore.

The Convention Center is being demolished in May to make way for a new one. Due to the size of the artworks and how they’re built into the structure of the building, the city says it doesn’t have the budget to safely de-install the works.

On Jan. 30, City Council voted to “deaccession” the works, meaning the city no longer owns the pieces and has no responsibility over their preservation. The Art in Public Places project has proposed preserving the art through videos, written pieces, and interviews with the artists, but Sawyer says that doesn’t do the pieces justice.

“It’s erasing these important cultural facets to the city of Austin’s cultural legacy,” she says.

The Austin Convention Center in 2019 (photo by Jana Birchum)

Now it’s on the artists to save their work at their own cost. Sawyer is paying over $15,000 out of pocket to have her work safely de-installed by the time of demolition. Index for Contemplation, with all its careful craftsmanship, will be packed into crates and shipped to Sawyer’s studio, where it will stay until she can find another home for it.

Sawyer is one of the lucky ones.

For John Yancey, a retired artist on a fixed income, reclaiming his work with his own money is not an option. His broken-ceramic mosaic Riffs and Rhythms is built into a wall of the Convention Center and would cost tens of thousands of dollars to remove. For Yancey, deaccession means destruction.

City Council Member Zo Qadri – who represents District 9, home to the Convention Center – said in a statement that deaccession allows artists the chance to reclaim their work. For Yancey, that suggestion is “ludicrous to the point of being insulting.”

Commissioned in 1996, Riffs and Rhythms is impossible to miss in the Trinity entrance of the building. It celebrates the multicultural blend that inhabits Austin’s music scene, incorporating images from Tex-Mex, Cajun, blues, and other music genres.

“I thought of [music] as a multicultural victory, a success of human spirit that is not seen in other aspects of Austin culture or Texas culture,” Yancey says. “It’s a very Austin piece, both in terms of its concept and its execution.”

Instead of reclaiming his work, Yancey advocated for the city to preserve the piece with its budget for the demolition. After the City Council vote, Yancey is now looking into legal action to force the city to preserve Riffs and Rhythms, which will be an expensive, uphill battle.

“When a governmental entity accepts your work into its permanent collection, there is an expectation that it is protected, that there is stewardship for that work,” Yancey says. “It’s tragic and painful for the city now to turn its back on its stewardship responsibilities.”

Yancey wants to preserve the work not just for himself as an artist but also for Austin’s art culture, which Riffs and Rhythms has shaped for the last three decades.

“It really is a beautiful work of art,” Yancey says. “I hope as many Austinites as possible get to see it before it is destroyed.”