The ground would not take the cone

When ArtsFairfax and the Fairfax County Arts Committee picked Miriam Gusevich and Salvatore Pirrone in August 2023, the drawing was a 27-foot hollow concrete cone. It would have stood at 12055 Government Center Parkway, outside the Herrity Building and the county's Public Safety Headquarters, split down the middle, with a hole at the top so you could sit inside it and look at the sky.

That is not what went up.

On Wednesday 23 September a small crowd stood on the same plaza for the dedication of Circles of Memory. WTOP had been told there used to be a broken fountain there. In its place are concentric rings of seating, and blue panels cut with flowering dogwood.

The cone needed deep footers. Annandale Today later reported that the artist and the project team had found the site too expensive to build on: the foundations would have gone too far into the substructure already under the plaza. FFXnow, reading the zoning letter that December, said two tall abstract shapes were dropped for the same reason. What could sit on top of that ground is what they dedicated this week.

Pirrone told Mary Stachyra Lopez how the panels were made.

"The panels are rolled aluminum, waterjet cut, and powder coated blue to connect one's gaze to the sky."

"Their patterns evoke groves of flowering dogwood — Virginia's official tree and flower — casting shadows across the space, which is a marker of the passage of time and the changing seasons."

In the spring they will plant white flowers beside the work, so it looks different again.

The Board of Supervisors asked for a Covid memorial in February 2022, when 1,344 people in the Fairfax Health District had died of the disease. The brief did not stay there. In May 2024, after the tall design came off the table, the county widened the purpose to first responders and to "the toll of all life-threatening events in Fairfax County." A spokesman put the finished piece at about $265,000.

Gusevich, speaking at the dedication, said a path divides the plaza, the circles make a promenade, and the alcoves are for sitting. Northern Virginia Magazine had her shorter line.

"Art cannot cure, but it can help us heal."

Diane Braunstein was in the crowd. "It's memories of COVID, and any other kind of memories of people that are not with us anymore, and those are universal emotions."