Man Sits on Giant Typewriter
Munster, Indiana
The Times newspaper of northwest Indiana had some money it needed to spend (as compelled by a town public-art-for-construction ordinance), and decided the best use would be to fund a sculpture that suggested the importance of news reporting.
The result, unveiled on December 13, 2006, was "Inspiration," an 18-foot-tall, eight-ton sculpture of a man sitting on a giant typewriter.
Sculptor Zachary Oxman crafted the artwork out of stainless steel, both as a tribute to northwest Indiana's steel industry, and as a hedge against northwest Indiana weather.
The man -- a fedora-wearing, 1940s reporter -- sits on the keys of a huge manual typewriter, notebook in hand, pondering how to write his story (The keys, according to Oxman, spell the word, "thought").
Underneath, a similarly giant roll of curling newsprint awaits the reporter's tap-tap-tap, ready to leave the presses.
The sculpture's visual whimsy and abstraction of an old school mechanical tool may not easily communicate its original intent to younger viewers.
But no worries! The modern world's smart devices seamlessly access the explanation -- scraped by an invisible robot from a crowdsourced free wiki populated with content curated from a newspaper that went out of business for no apparent reason.