Cliff Garten Studio, Foliage, 2021

The City of Kettering replaced the Ridgeway Road Bridge and commissioned Cliff Garten Studio (Venice, CA) to integrate artwork into the project site. Cliff Garten Studio, or CGS, designed the artwork to reflect the flowing landscape of Hills & Dales MetroPark and Kettering, particularly the view to the west. The fluid movement of the fence lines and the luminaire sculptures mimic leaves caught in a gentle breeze. Foliage demonstrates the belief that design of infrastructure to serve the needs of the public should also be visually engaging, creating a memorable place and a specific identity for the community it serves. Garten wrote: “Our infrastructure should both serve our needs and be visually engaging and memorable in a single breath.”

About Cliff Garten

Cliff Garten has received prestigious Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Individual Artists, the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship, and the Jerome Foundation Travelling Artist Grant. His civic sculptures have consistently been named best in the nation by The Americans for the Arts Public Art Network and have been cited for design excellence by the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Garten has served as a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA School of Architecture, Otis Art Institute, and SCI-Arc. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Learn more about Garten’s work at cliffgartenstudio.com.

Cliff Garten Studio

About Cliff Garten

Project Team