An idea for Mayor Walsh to emulate
A new sculpture greeting visitors outside Cuyahoga Falls’ municipal offices pays tribute to the waterfall that gave the city its name — and a culture that long preceded the city’s establishment.
The statue, created by Peter B. Jones and installed in early December, was commissioned by Cuyahoga Falls and funded in part through grant funds administered by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town initiative. The public artwork depicts what the Cuyahoga River meant to the indigenous people of the area.
Jones created the bronze sculpture “River Trade” to show how indigenous people utilized the Cuyahoga River to trade with their peers in surrounding settlements, with a Native American rowing a canoe and carrying goods aboard.
“I wanted to commemorate the waterfalls and river that goes through the town,” said Jones, who lives in Salamanca, N.Y. “I have friends in the Akron area.”
If the artistry seems familiar, that’s no accident. In the 1990s, Jones was commissioned to create a similarly themed statue, “The Portage,” along the Cuyahoga River corridor nearly 4½ miles west at the central crossroads of Akron’s Merriman Valley. That sculpture shows a Native American carrying a canoe over his head.
Jones is an Onondaga who resides on the Cattaraugus Territory of the Seneca Nation of Indians in western New York state. His work is featured in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. With his latest work finished for Cuyahoga Falls finished, Jones said his next effort was preparing for his one-man show at the Syracuse University’s art museum, which opens Aug. 24 and is entitled Continuity, Innovation, and Resistance: The Art of Peter Jones. Jones said he will have around 30 pieces in the exhibit.
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