Whirligig Park: A Playground for Folk Art in North Carolina
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North Carolina’s Whirligig Park in downtown Wilson presents Vollis Simpson’s colorful kinetic steel sculptures. Whirligig Park opened in November 2017 in downtown Wilson, a small city of about 50,000 people. The park contains 31 brightly painted folWhirligig Park: A Playground for Folk Art in North Carolina
North Carolina’s Whirligig Park in downtown Wilson presents Vollis Simpson’s colorful kinetic steel sculptures. Whirligig Park opened in November 2017 in downtown Wilson, a small city of about 50,000 people. The park contains 31 brightly painted folk art constructions, made mostly of steel and with industrial-quality engineering, all of which spin and turn with the wind. The park is a $10 million civic project, attempted to lure tourists to Wilson, with professional landscaping by the Durham firm now known as Surface 678. Its layout alludes to Wilson’s former status as the largest tobacco market in the country.Simpson enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II. After coming back home, he made a living pulling farmers’ tractors out of gullies and became an expert all-purpose rigger. He duplicated his Pacific windmill, the one he had built for the GIs in Saipan, on his property at Wiggins Mill Road in Lucama, about 11 miles from the park’s location. This gave Simpson the idea of building similarly huge gadgets and it took him the next three decades to do so. The Wilson city leaders’ desire for a tourist attraction led to the purchasing of the work by a public-private entity in 2010.Simpson’s Whirligigs employ everything from HVAC fans to stovepipes, I-beams to textile-mill rollers, to all-important ball bearings. Small fragments of reflective road signs give the work glitter at night and the clever constructivist imagery depicts airplanes from Simpson’s past, noted The Wall Street Journal. Read more