Mags Harries & Lajos Heder - Wall Cylcle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel

 Phoenix

Mags Harries & Lajos Heder - 

Wall Cycle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel

1745 E Montebello Ave, Phoenix

If you lived in Phoenix in 1992, you might remember the controversy around the Squaw Peak Pots.  State Highway 51 (now known as Piestewa Freeway), was once called the Squaw Peak Parkway.  The construction of the freeway included a sound wall that reduced the mountain and city views of those living along the freeway.  To help ease the pain of losing these views and to reward people for putting up with having a freeway in their backyard, Phoenix decided to decorate those walls with a series of 35 concrete and steel pots, cups and bowls - between McDowell Rd and Glendale Ave, at twenty specific sites.  The project was titled Wall Cycle to Ocotillo, but it quickly became known as the Squaw Peak Pots.

Controversy ensued almost immediately, coalescing around three main complaints:

1. The project cost $474,000 in taxpayer dollars during the recession of the early 90’s.

2. The artists, Mags Harries and Lajos Heder, were not Arizona artists but hailed from Massachusetts.

3. The art work did not seem to embody the Southwest esthetic.

These concerns are not objectively obvious.  People have differing views on public funding of the arts.  We live in a society where fame/name recognition is often more valued than “buying local.”  As for the works not having a Southwestern feel, many of the pieces include Native American patterns and symbols, as well as traditional pottery designs.

Per the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, some of these objections seem unfounded.   The focus of the piece is about pottery, which the artists found in most homes they visited along the freeway during their site specific visits.  Part of the idea was to make the artwork to reflect the people who lived in the area, so making this connection about pottery does have some logic to it.  They also underscore my observation that many of the pots are designed in a Native American motif, which was added after feedback from meetings with nearby residents..  The city also claims that the pottery designs were created by Arizona artists, and were fabricated in Arizona, which takes some of the fire out of the second complaint above.

But the outrage against the pots seems to have won the day.  In 2002, during a renovation of the freeway, most of the artwork visible from the freeway was removed and put into storage where it remains to this day.  Some of the artwork still left in the neighborhoods can be seen from the freeway, but it is usually unrecognizable.  For example, Wall Cycle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel has a round opening in the wall that shows only a red orb of the backside of the pot.  This is visible from the freeway, but is not worth taking your eyes off the road to see what looks like a red bump on the sound wall.

During the original public outcry, the artists Harries and Heder were publicly villainized.  However, a decade later the city of Phoenix hired them to design the Waterworks at Arizona Falls at 56th St and Indian School Rd, and this piece of public art is considered one of the treasures of the Valley.  Harries and Heder have been involved in other projects across the Valley also.

Even though many of the Wall Cycle to Ocotillo pieces are gone, there are about twenty remaining pieces that can be seen in the surrounding neighborhoods.  You will find future posts on Greater Phoenix Public Art that will address these other pieces.  For this post we will look at Wall Cycle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel.

Located at Montebello Ave, on the east side of Piestewa Freeway, Wall Cycle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel consists of a red pot, made to appear like a clay pot that may have been used in a local Native American tribe, that is imbedded in the wall of the freeway.  A water clock was used to keep time, prior to our modern timepieces, by monitoring the flow of water from one vessel to another.  Under the pot is a painting of citrus.  Citrus is one of the Arizona Five C’s that helped to build our economy in the early part of the state.

There seems to be quite a bit in this work that focuses us back to our roots here in Arizona, both to ancient civilizations as well as more modern history.  I hope this piece can stimulate some questions about where we have come from, as well as how public and private art can, or should, fit into that history and our present time.

Wall Cycle to Ocotillo: Water Clock Vessel is located at the end of a small court so there is plenty of room to park.

Last verified 10/2020.