Public Jewel

Liz Larner’s artwork for the Byron Rogers Federal Building and Courthouse plaza in Denver, Colorado, exemplifies the artist’s longstanding investigation into the power of unorthodox materials and forms to relate meaning. Public Jewel is a stone and bronze sculpture that highlights Larner’s skillful orchestration of line, color, volume, and form to produce new relationships among viewers, the sculpture, and the surrounding environment.

Working with a geologist from the Colorado School of Mines, Larner spent a year collecting precious and semi-precious minerals mined from Colorado. The stones that Larner collected include Colorado Yule marble, petrified wood and coconuts, and fluorite andrhodochrosite crystals, to name just a few. These stones are meant to highlight the spectacular natural beauty and complex geological history of Colorado.

The many different mineral specimens that Larner has used to create Public Jewel are the results of eons of natural processes. These materials may prompt viewers to contemplate the vastness of geological time, and temporarily lift them out of the human timescale and quotidian concerns that have brought them to the federal plaza. For example, the sculpture's petrified coconut alludes to the fact that Colorado was once the site of a tropical ocean, and had a warm, humid ecosystem that supported palm trees.

Public Jewel fits seamlessly into the plaza, as if it were part of the original, mid-century architecture. Larner shaped the rectangular cuboid to the same formal pattern of the courthouse architecture, echoing the rectangular grid pattern that is found in the shape of its windows and corresponding stone panels. Additionally, Larner chose bronze as the framework material of her sculpture, in a nod to an earlier bronze artwork created for the plaza: Edgar Britton’s 1965 columnar sculpture, Federal Services.

Larner has said: “Sculpture takes on many of the same problems as architecture, but for different reasons. For me, it is a medium that can address how our world is produced and the factors that go into forming it. Because of this, I feel there is a potential poetics in sculpture that is closely connected to our world as the context we inhabit.”