A giant whale sculpture polarized a Salt Lake City neighborhood, but then it brought them together.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Utah, a landlocked desert state, is not known for its aquatic mammals. So when a whale popped up at an intersection in Salt Lake City, there was controversy. KUER’s Tilda Wilson reports.
TILDA WILSON, BYLINE: Reid Goodfellow loves the whale.
What are you doing right now?
REID GOODFELLOW: We’re running around the whale 630 times.
WILSON: Reid is doing a Whaleathon – that is to say, running around the roundabout at this prominent intersection where a brightly painted, life-sized, breaching blue whale sculpture erupts in the middle of traffic. A lot of people are not really sure why the whale is here. Brooke Bullington is Reid’s girlfriend.
BROOKE BULLINGTON: When we were driving by the whale, he said, our love is like a whale in the desert.
(LAUGHTER)
BULLINGTON: And I was like, what does that mean? And he was like, I don’t know.
(LAUGHTER)
WILSON: It’s silly. It’s weird. So why is it a controversy? Felicia Baca, head of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, says it all started during the pandemic.
FELICIA BACA: What do you do with your time when you’re locked up in your house and things are a little heavy? And a group of local residents started putting gnomes in the roundabout, and it became a very active grassroots community project.
WILSON: But when the Arts Council decided to put a whale in the roundabout, an official public arts project…
BACA: As the residents learned about a work of art coming to be, they really started to worry about the displacement of the gnome community.
WILSON: That’s how Emily Plewe first heard about the unusual sculpture.
EMILY PLEWE: OK, so my son went gnoming (ph) one night.
WILSON: Under the cover of night, Plewe’s son and some friends went out to put out gnomes holding signs protesting the new sculpture coming to the roundabout.
PLEWE: So I looked it up.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON:…
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