Columbia HS Teacher, Artist Celebrates Tony Smith

Nearly 100 plastic bottles hang from street signs and lamp posts, lining Mead Street and circling the Duck Pond in South Orange. The project is Kate Dodd's "birthday gift" to artist and South Orange native Tony Smith.

Dodd, an artist, South Orange resident, and Columbia High School art teacher, exhibited 100 "vitrines," or bottles, each containing information or images that tell the story of how Smith's Tau sculpture came to be in South Orange.

Tau and Tony Smith are celebrated this fall in South Orange; the artist would have turned 100 in September. The Village of South Orange and the Lennie Pierro Memorial Arts Foundation mark the occasion with a day-long event, a Pierro gallery show until the end of October, and Closing Celebration/Gallery Talk on Thursday, Oct. 25 at 7 p.m.

This is not Dodd's first work with water bottles.  She created an exhibit, Water: Illusions of Purity, for The Noyes Museum at Stockton College this past summer.

Dodd's exhibit was described by the Noyes Museum curators as, "Using various bottle manipulations, organic delicacy and a startling quantity of plastic bottles the installation will fill the museum and raise the question, 'Is the bottled water pure?' We tend to associate purity with nature, and so our belief in pure water is reinforced through nature images on bottle labels. In her work Dodd addresses the environmental damage from the associated energy, water use and plastic waste."

Dodd exhibits her artwork in the South Orange - Maplewood community, including a faculty show at Pierro Gallery.

The bottles lining the streets of South Orange won't last. Curious passers-by have already opened some to view the images.