The Titusville Gateway

Titusville is the town of the first commercial oil well. A gateway sculpture there cannot be generic public art. It has to belong to that ground.

In 2024 I was awarded the commission after a national call. The piece was finished in early 2025 and installed in June. It is 15 feet tall, 15 feet long, and 4 feet wide, in corten and steel, at 5,500 pounds. The corten is meant to take weather and go to a stable patina. That is the right finish for a civic object that will be rained on for decades.

The form carries silhouette cutouts - work, wildlife, native plants - and the derrick that still names the place. I wanted a visitor to feel the town before they read a caption.

A gateway has a job. It marks an edge. It has to read from a car and still reward someone who walks up to the steel. The cutouts are how the piece keeps air in a mass that large.

This is the kind of project I want more of: a real site, a real history, a competition that is about the work, and a sculpture that can take the weather.

- Adam Stempka