The city of Madison is welcoming a public art exhibit of oversized Terrace chairs crafted by artists as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Union celebration of its 75th year. “Terrace Chairs on the Town” turned up around the city Sept. 20 and are designed to bring art to the public in a style that has come into worldwide popularity in the last three years through displays by groups like CowParade.

CowParade public art exhibits feature a fiberglass sculpture of a cow that is then painted or manipulated by local artists for display in their hometown. The concept got its wings in December 1996 when artist Walter Knapp proposed the idea for the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Knapp asked his son, acclaimed sculpture Pascal Knapp, to fashion cow statues that could be used as canvases.

The city of Chicago commissioned the cows to appear on its downtown streets in 1999. This parade started a tradition of corporate sponsors choosing the artist for its cow, paying for the expenses of the art and donating a sum to a charitable cause. In 2000, the cows came to New York City, becoming the first public art exhibit to take place in all five boroughs of the city at once.

Since CowParade came to the United States, it has visited numerous cities and seen various spin-offs. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, statues of police and fire rescue dogs were painted by artists such as Vera Wang, Luis Vargas and Dean Johnson and displayed on the streets of the island of Manhattan for three months.

“There’s been probably 50 copycat events, and some of them are good, and some are very, very bad,” said Ron Fox, vice president of CowParade Holdings Corporation, the company that stages CowParades and miniature replications of past cows. “The thing that the poorly planned events fail to remember is that the art has to come first.”

Fox criticized events organized by city officials which focus on the potential of such events to raise money for charity or increase tourism, saying that these events often make poor choices for their canvas sculptures by picking something specific to their town.

“Some of these cities try to have artists paint a landscape on a howling gorilla. That’s not a neutral image,” Fox said. “In Minneapolis they have Peanuts characters, because Charles M. Schultz is from there. But those characters already have a life of their own; you can’t paint a landscape on Lucy Van Pelt.”

Fox said cows worked as canvases, because they were neutral images with lots of surface area in the flank to paint on. In that respect, Fox said, the Terrace chairs would make a malleable canvas, in addition to being a recognizable image to Madisonians.

Indeed, UW Union director Mark Guthier said the Terrace chairs are clearly the most iconic image associated with the Memorial Union, to the extent that the sunburst back of the metal chairs is now the official logo of the Wisconsin Union.

Wisconsin Union membership director Maggie Baum said the artistic spirit of the painted public statues would not be misconstrued by the Madison event.

“Really, this is a perfect representation of what the Union has stood for these last 75 years,” Baum said. “This project was the idea of a student on the Union art committee, and through its gestation students have really been the ones who planned and implemented this event.”

Baum also said the chairs were a way to display the art that has found haven in Memorial Union’s stages, theaters and galleries for the last 75 years.

Gail Simpson, an assistant professor of art at UW, said the Terrace Chairs on the Town and public art events in this theme become a community experience, since much of the population never experiences art in a museum. Fox agreed there was value in bringing art to the public in a way they could not ignore.

“When we did CowParade in New York, the big debate was ‘Is this art?’ Of course, the real question was, ‘Is this high art or fine art?'” Fox said. “Our type of public art events are supposed to appeal to the masses.”

Simpson said the Terrace chairs were perfect for this style of event, because they were attractive, playful and easily recognizable.

“This sort of event is very inclusive, and its not always treated as a sculptural project or artistic endeavor,” Simpson said, adding that she had even seen art in this style promoting local news coverage. “But because this event is concerned with celebrating the Union’s birthday, it looks like the jury who decided on the chairs were able to focus on artistic merit.”

The chairs will be on display through the summer of 2004. Fox said he had been approached in the past about bringing CowParade to Madison, and the group would love to bring their event to the city if the arrangements could be worked out.