Early Sunday morning a drunk 23-year-old slammed his truck into Mark di Suvero’s “Helmholtz” outside the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, causing damage to the prized public artwork that may take over $200,000 to repair, the Journal Gazette reports. The massive steel sculpture, which got a fresh coat of red paint just last summer (pictured), weighs between 8-10 tons, but was nevertheless knocked over in the collision.
The driver, Colton Adamonis, fled the scene of the crash, which took place at 2:18am, but was arrested by police shortly thereafter. He was found to have more than double the legal blood-alcohol limit. According to the museum’s director of security, Scott Tarr, Adamonis’s truck jumped the curb, just dodged a nearby tree, before slamming into one of the sculpture’s steel legs, which pierced through the vehicle’s hood and became lodged there.
“I never would have guessed when I got the call that the truck dented it,” the museum’s director, Charles Shepard, told the Journal Gazette. “I never would have believed the power would be there to knock the sculpture down.”
The sculpture was commissioned in 1985 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rea Magnet Wire Company being in Fort Wayne. Its title pays homage to Hermann von Helmholtz, a 19th-century German physicist who specialized in magnets. True to its namesake, di Suvero’s sculpture proved magnetic for Adamonis’s bumper.
“There was some glimmer of hope for a moment or two that maybe we could prop things up and bending them back into place, but no, (the damage is) too extensive,” Shepard said. “The artist is totally in shock about it … although he’s thinking ‘All right, we’ll get together and see how we can fix this stuff.”
— Benjamin Sutton
(Photo via Fort Wayne Museum of Art/Facebook.)
