While sculptor Joseph Buchanan watched, Ken McConnell and co-workers with McConnell Heavy Hauling of Little Rock lowered a 13,000-pound slab of Batesville marble onto the Statehouse Convention Center plaza April 4, 2002.
Over the next three months, Buchanan and art students from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock would carve soft and puffy-looking curves in the rectangle. It would be "public art" because it stood in a public place and because he would carve it in public.
Buchanan explained that although he had sculpted three 15-inch rough drafts, his design was not set in stone: He would draw from nature, the environment and the imaginations of schoolchildren.
The environment included traffic, a liquor store, bars and restaurants. "Nature has many rooms, and this just happens to be one of them," he said.
Buchanan said he would draw out the project for three months to involve children; a second, smaller stone was set nearby for children to hammer on. And in July 2002, he told a Democrat-Gazette photographer that 300 kids' drawings had inspired him.
The large, finished piece — "In a Child's Mind" — has been disparaged as "a pucker" but suggests different geometries when viewed from its four sides. As seen online in the Waymarking visual catalog for the Smithsonian Art Inventory, it suggests a massive upholstery tuft making a fist.
The artwork stood guard outside the convention center until February 2007, when work commenced on the H.U. Lee International Gate and Garden in the plaza. Workers then loaded it onto a flatbed truck and hauled it to Riverfront Park (see arkansasonline.com/411mind).