Last week, while hurdling down the highway (for the first time), in attempt to distract my father from my worrisome driving, I asked him about the stained glass water tower visible from the BQE. Though he and I have driven past it many times, neither of us knew any details about the installation. With a quick Google search he told me it is called Watertower, and had only been installed in 2012. I was surprised to hear it hadn’t been around my whole life since for me its existence seemed almost a given.
To my surprise, the water tower is actually part of a series of similar installations called The Icon Series, by sculptor Tom Fruin. The series consists of three water towers and one house-shaped piece. Fruin specializes in creating artwork from “found” materials. He crafts these sculptures from thousands of multicolored scraps of recycled Plexiglas and steel bands, creating the impression of stained glass.
In an interview with Master and Dynamic, an online blog, Fruin said, “I’m not looking for an ‘art’ audience, I really just want to reach everybody.” And he’s doing just that. Standing beside the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, one of Brooklyn’s major thoroughfares, on the waterfront visible from Manhattan, his water tower is widely known in Brooklyn and beyond.
The most striking element of the piece is the diversity of color. No apparent pattern can be discerned, yet the colors blend smoothly together. The Plexiglass panels start larger near the top, graduating to smaller sizes toward the bottom, and varying in size with no clear pattern or order. Some are horizontal or vertical rectangles, others are perfect squares. Some panels appear to be made of multiple shards of a similar shade, while others seem perfectly smooth and almost transparent. Some panels are in fact transparent, allowing the viewer to see straight through to the other side of the piece.
I’m unsure if this feature is still in place today, but in past years the sculpture would light up at night with flashing lights projected from the center, attracting attention with a mini light-show. Personally I remember noticing it during the day more than at night, but that could be because I pass it more often during the day on my way to and from high school.
The positioning of Fruin’s piece on a rooftop especially distinguishes it, making it harder or even impossible to see from street level. The majority of Fruin’s viewers are drivers or passengers whooshing past the sculpture, not leaving much time for extended analysis. The piece can be seen from other locations as well, like the Brooklyn Bridge Park, but from there the Manhattan skyline, parallel to the park, likely draws attention away from the water tower.
Artwork on buildings (and especially on top of buildings) more often is made by anonymous graffiti artists who, though talented, are breaking the law and defacing property of others. Fruin’s piece, though legal, to some extent resembles the miscellaneous graffiti on the buildings surrounding it: most people don’t know or think about who created it or how it came into existence. Many people I know are familiar with Fruin’s water tower, yet they’ve likely never given thought to the artist.
Fruin managed to attract attention by transforming the mundane into the unusual. Water towers are commonplace on building rooftops. Fruin’s Watertower doesn’t differ in size or shape from an average water tower; but by adding a splash (or more than a splash) of color, he caught and continuous to catch the eye of thousands.
