Geneva library dedicates Memorial Garden, prepares to accept 14-foot steel sculpture this fall

Geneva Public Library officials held a dedication ceremony Sept. 1 for the Memorial Garden on the north side of the building, and unveiled renderings for a new public art sculpture which will be installed in the garden of the building's north side later this fall.

The Memorial Garden was installed by the Dudley D. and Delores R. Malone Family Foundation in their memory. Local public officials attended the dedication ceremony.

"Hortus," a 14-foot Corten steel structure, will be installed in the garden sometime this fall, Dayle Malone said, speaking on behalf of the Malone Family Foundation.

Corten, also known as weathered steel for use outside, was designed to eliminate the need for painting, as it would develop a rusted appearance in a few months, according to the website, Corten.com.

Malone said the artist Joshua Enck still is working on the sculpture, so the dedication of the Memorial Garden will include an unveiling of design renderings of Hortus in the library lobby.

"My parents built a house on Mead Court in 1970, a couple of blocks from the library, in that neighborhood," Malone said. "That's where most of us children grew up and we all went to Geneva High School."

Dudley Malone had a successful business in West Chicago and made philanthropic donations to other public foundations - the Geneva History Museum, the Geneva Park District Foundation and the Delnor Hospital Northwestern Memorial Foundation, he said.

Malone said he and his wife are friends of Bob and Jane Shiffler. And when Bob Shiffler was on the library board at the time, he asked if there was something they could do to memorialize their parents in the area of the neighborhood where they had lived for almost 50 years.

Delores died in 2005 and Dudley died in 2019.

Shiffler suggested a garden, which the library would have liked to do, but did not have the funds, Malone said.

"We underwrote the money for the garden ... and it was completed just at the end of last fall," Malone said. "They put in a stone with a plaque recognizing the Malone Family Foundation."

Malone said the family also wanted to do some type of sculpture for the garden, but didn't know what would be a good fit.

"We left it up to the library on their guidance," he said.

Library officials chose "Hortus" by sculptor Enck, formerly of St. Charles, Malone said.

Enck teaches and has a studio in Rochester, New York. His work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions, and his 22-foot sculpture "Ossicone" is on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

"I'm pretty excited," Enck said in a telephone interview from New York. "This is my first big public commission in the Midwest and nearby my hometown. I'm really super excited to have a piece in the Fox River Valley there. I still have family and friends in St. Charles and I'm really excited to have them come out and see it in person."

Enck said he is building the sculpture using quarter-inch steel, fabricating all the pieces in his shop. He cuts templates out of masonite for the shapes, then cuts sheet metal using different cutting tools and saws, then welds them all together.

The finished work will weigh about 2,500 pounds, he said.

He will paint the top pieces vermilion, blue and yellow and bolt them into place. The bottom pieces that look brown in the rendering is the Corten's patina.

"I like the idea of swoopy gestural shapes," Enck said of the top pieces of the sculpture. "It reminded me of flowers in a garden. That's how the name Hortus came about. I like this idea of I like this idea of organic shapes juxtaposed against more angular forms."

The top parts will retain their vivid colors while the bottom part will develop a patina of rust, he said.

More information is available online at joshuaenck.com.

Enck will give a gallery talk at an opening reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Sept. 29 at the library, 227 S. Seventh St., Geneva.

The reception is free and open to the public.