It's not easy being a piece of public art. Unless you're a piece that excites public sentiment (and benefits from being well sited) – or a piece that's lucky (and well sited) – the vast majority of your "public" will ignore you.

Occasionally, though, whoever owns you will decide they've had enough of you, and they’ll work to rid the landscape of your presence. They will deprecate you.

The most famous example of deprecated public art in Fort Collins is a sculpture entitled Dance Formation, which was carved from a cottonwood tree by Richard Scorpio in 1984. There's a great photo of Dance Formation by subscriber "clau-huevo" at deviantArt. And blogger "catfc" – who authors Lost Fort Collins – has published an informative (and probably the only) report on the sculpture's provenance, along with some good photos of her own.

Basically, according to catfc, the City of Fort Collins paid Scorpio $2,000 to carve the sculpture from a dead tree that was otherwise inconveniently located in front of City Hall. Twenty years later, the city moved the sculpture to an out-of-the-way place in Lee Martinez Park, on the north side of the city. Weeds and brush have grown up around the sculpture. Neglect and an expectation of decay have set in. You can see the sculpture from Poudre River Bike Trail. (And actually, as catfc points out in her article, the sculpture looks fantastic in its natural setting... Perhaps surprisingly, a second example of funky, environmental art is also only visible from a bike trail in Fort Collins. This art is decaying even more quickly than Dance Formation, so catfc should write about it soon. It's a story right up her alley, and I'm sure she knows the art I'm referring to.)

Other deprecated art in Fort Collins includes the lifelike bronze statue of Louis Armstrong, which formerly stood near the stage in Old Town Square. I cannot say I liked the statue. It was mawking and fawning and embodied the worst in gratuitously realistic art. The statue got deprecated when it was stolen from its site one morning in 2001. It's never been recovered. I do not endorse the theft or vandalism of public art (even art as God-awful as the Louis Armstrong statue). But, I also don't miss that statue.

Which brings me to the public art that's located at the corner of East Prospect Road and Specht Point Drive, which is an area zoned for commercial and industrial uses. You can see the art when you drive by on Prospect or look across the parking lot from the Girl Scout office.

The art involves a pair of facing steel arcs – each, I'd guess, ten feet tall (see the photographs above). The concrete foundation of the eastern arc is signed T. HICKS 79, which refers to Thomas C. (Tommy) Hicks of Tesque, New Mexico.

Tommy Hicks founded the famous Shidoni Foundry and Galleries in 1971. In 1986, he donated a steel sculpture entitled Between to the City of Fort Collins. That sculpture is located on the grounds of the Lincoln Center and can be seen from Meldrum Street, near the intersection with Magnolia Street. I imagine that the provenance of Hicks' sculpture on Specht Point Drive also dates from 1986.

When I moved to Fort Collins in 1993, the Specht Point Drive sculpture was painted a nice bright shade of industrial orange. And it was very visible from Prospect, before the landscaping grew up and filled in. Then, around 2000, someone painted the sculpture dark blue, as if they wanted it to disappear and go away. All the paintjob did was look terrible. More recently, someone has painted the sculpture again. This time: rustoleum orange and beige, which simply looks ridiculous.

In spite of the indignity of its paintjobs, the Hicks sculpture has stood its ground and refused to recede from view. It has fought against being made invisible (when painted blue) and being made provincially acceptable (when painted its current "safe" colors). Its arcing forms defy deprecation. Why not take a drive east on Prospect, turn right on Specht Point Drive, swing into the parking lot, and find out what integrity can look like in abstract public art.

Then, someone should call up Tommy Hicks and ask him how to restore the original color.