Yesterday the Art All Around jury announced the winner of the international design competition to paint 16 oil tanks across the river in South Portland. Venezuela-born artist Jaime Gili, who lives in London, now has the challenge of transforming the industrial wasteland that is the Sprague Energy tank farm into something more aesthetically pleasing. His work was selected from a group of five finalists, which were winnowed down from 560 entries. Gili's winning design proposal is pictured above.

As you may have guessed from my posts on this blog, I'm a huge fan of public art. Not only does it make art accessible to a much wider audience, but it imbues a city or locale with a sense of character. However, one downside to public art is the controversy it often attracts.

This has certainly been the case here in Portland in recent years. Both the "Tracing the Fore" installation on Fore Street and the "American Baseball Family Group" sculpture outside the Sea Dog's ballpark have garnered more criticism than praise. Each of these works was created by an artist "from away," and this lack of connection to the local community has been cited as one of the reasons the works haven't fared so well in the court of public opinion. Gili is without a doubt an international artist with an impressive resume, but also one unfamiliar with our local history and quirks.

Will he be able to get the public to embrace his work? Only time will tell. I know in my informal survey of local artists and members of the arts community, I can't find anyone who will give the project an unqualified thumbs up. But maybe this current lack of public enthusiasm doesn't matter. Maybe 25 years from now, when we're zipping across the Casco Bay Bridge or down the highway in our electric cars, we'll look at the abandoned tank farm and its faded murals and fondly remember this time as a bygone era, a brief blip in human history when we weren't ashamed of our strange addiction to foreign oil.