Omaha By Design: Omaha, Only Better

by Ken Mayer

Some people think I’m a geek because I work with a lot of technology. I’m really just a tool user who is attracted to any gizmo that does something that I want to do, especially if it does it better and faster.

Recently, just such a tool became available for my iPad. I downloaded the free Public Art Omaha app devised for Omaha by Design and the Omaha Public Art Commission by students in the UNO College of Information Science and Technology along with Eleven19 Communications and started carrying it as I wandered the neighborhood.

A really nifty feature is called “Identify This Art.” You just point your mobile device at the art work, take a shot and the app finds the work in the Public Art Database, then displays all sorts of interesting information about it.

Another cool feature lets you submit a piece for possible addition to the database. I started pointing my iPad at a few pieces I liked and discovered they weren’t in the database. Now I’m not an authority on aesthetics or fine art, but these pieces caught my eye, so I sent them in.

Submission is really easy, you just take a picture, enter the location, anything you may want to include about it and finish the form with an email or phone number (only if you want to) where you can be reached with questions.

Here are some of the pieces I’ve sent in and why. I’d like to encourage all you readers to seek out and send in works that you like that aren’t in the database. That way, the Public Art Database will become even more public. Let me know about what you find at ken.mayer@cox.net and I’ll do a column on our discoveries.

This (at left) is near my house. It reminds me of the only good grade I ever got in an art class. We were asked to do abstracts in the seventh grade, and I did a watercolor with lots of reds and yellows that I imagined was what my brain looked like on the inside.

This one (at right) is on the dock at the Bemis. At first it suggested a surrealist sort of drippy thing, but then I imagined myself sitting down at it to eat lunch and having the melted cheese run out of my sandwich and over the edge of the plate just like the table.

Although I was taken by the whimsy of this door (at right) on North 13^th near Slowdown and Film Streams, it seems to me there’s a bit of a contemporary antiviolence message here. Maybe, “Spray Water, Not Bullets”?

Note: to download the Public Art Omaha mobile app, visit www.publicartomaha.org.