Designed by artist Athena Tacha and inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s colonnades at St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, this site-specific installation is situated on a teardrop-shaped 0.2-acre island at the eastern entrance of the University of Arizona. The work anchors the campus’s east-west formal mall at Campbell Avenue. Commissioned by the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1980 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the installation comprises three arcing rows of vertical Corten steel sculptures.
Completed in 1981, the commission consists of three, inviting, uniform curvilinear arcades each composed of ten, sixteen-foot-tall “wishbone”-shaped units, created by cutting slits into monumental sheets of steel. Each piece was then stretched and embedded into a lawn carpet, forming legs that are spaced four-to-five feet apart. The three arcades are painted different colors on each side, creating a blue gradient when viewed from the south and red when viewed from the north. Surrounded by vehicular drives and accessed by a sidewalk, the work is meant to be viewed by pedestrians and vehicles alike, and is intended to evoke “people marching in unison to the beat of a drum or performing a ritual group dance.” Each unit stands at approximately half the height of the framing palm tree allées that terminate in a mountain scenery backdrop.
In 2024 the lawn was replaced with rust-colored crushed stones. The following year, the sculpture was restored and repainted in accordance with Tacha’s original design intent, which included metallic enamels ranging from aqua and royal blue to burnt orange and wine red.
