505 Design, SignArt Bedeck Romare Bearden Park With Sign Pylons

Legendary artist Romare Bearden left his native Charlotte as a young child, when his family migrated to New York City. However, he remembered his roots. He frequently returned to visit family in North Carolina, and many of his works depicted the injustices foisted on African-Americans in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and ‘60s. He also gained fame as a collage painter and muralist, and, when he died in 1988, the New York Times called Bearden “one of America’s pre-eminent artists.”

Charlotte paid tribute to Bearden’s legacy by building Romare Bearden Park in the city’s Third Ward, near his childhood home. The 5.2-acre parcel, which hosts numerous music festivals and community events, celebrates his life with an innovative sign program that entails five, colorful, ground-mounted pylons that feature acrylic-faced, LED-illuminated, interpretive panels that recount key places and people in his life.

Charlotte-based 505 Design’s creative team – which included Erik Vincent, Kevin Penland, Jim Babinchak, Cherish Rosas and Kevin Kern — devised the program using Adobe Illustrator® and Photoshop® software.

SignArt Inc. (Charlotte), an architectural-sign fabricator that’s been in business since 1910, fabricated the five, freestanding pole signs. The shop prepared the production-art and CNC-router .EPS files using Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW X6. SignArt used SignComp aluminum extrusions to create the poles’ radius ends, and created the ¾-in.-thick, acrylic-face graphics on its two, 10-ft.-long Gerber CNC routers. They created second-surface graphics using 3M translucent vinyl. To illuminate the monolith signs, SignArt implemented Bitro Tito 2G LEDs because they provided the most brightness in such a confined space, according to Alan Capps, Sign Art’s senior account executive.

The general contractor installed the anchor bolts and matchplates, to which SignArt secured the monoliths. SignArt’s George Winn, Charles Smith, Troy Frazier, Allison Sloop and Terry Weeder designed the monoliths in sections that slide over the support posts, which allows them to be serviced without removing the entire structure.

“One of the challenges of fabricating these types of signs is building them with minimal seams and configuring the lighting within the reveals to be UL-compliant and easily serviced,” Capps said.

Advertisement

505 Design specified Deer Park, NY’s Fossil Industries to fabricate the digital, high-pressure-laminate panels, which are produced by printing an image on paper that’s impregnated with phenolic resin, and coated with a protective layer, that’s bonded to the surface and renders the substrate highly resistant to UV damage and abrasions.