Fountain of the Pioneers

People: Alfonso Iannelli

Date: 1940

City: Kalamazoo

Fountain of the Pioneers, Bronson Park, Kalamazoo.  Photo courtesy of the City of Kalamazoo.

In 1936 the Kalamazoo Business and Professional Women’s Club initiated a design competition to replace Bronson Park’s unpopular McColl Fountain. Twenty-two contestants from nine states submitted designs.   Alfonso Iannelli, however, was not among them. The competition jury included representatives from the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the public schools, Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University faculty, the Women’s Club, the city, and others. When the jury convened, artist and instructor Marcelline Gougler from Chicago took the $250 top prize for her designs.

When Gougler was called upon to help engineer the design, she consulted her mentor and teacher Alfonso Iannelli. She eventually  ceded the project for final design to Iannelli and his studio.

Over the next several years Iannelli consulted with the city, eventually producing the Fountain of The Pioneers, a complex design of cast concrete. Two large, shallow, curbed pools sit in the center of Bronson Park, forming in-line polygons with three straight sides and points at their respective east and west ends.

The west, reflecting pool now contains a 1970s bronze sculpture grouping. The east pool contains the Fountain sculpture at its eastern end, surrounded by eight concrete water jets mounted atop the pool's low curb. The fountain’s figures form a totemic vertical element to the design’s otherwise horizontal treatment. The whole is raised above a partially subterranean base that encapsulates plumbing and electrical works. Above ground the figures represent an Indian standing in "noble resistance" (Iannelli's words), his face tightly up against the pioneer’s chest in dynamic tension. The figures are abstracted, using Art Deco and Cubist idioms. A raised, decorated parapet encloses the fountain works, representing the Midwest’s rich prairie landscape. Underneath the parapet, water falls through and down steps and cantilevered ledges at the fountain’s corners, into the pool below.

The Fountain complex was built by local men with federal Works Progress Administration funding, and dedicated on June 6, 1940. In an article for American Cities magazine in 1941, Iannelli wrote, “I wanted to see suggested the progression of the growth of Kalamazoo, the efforts of the pioneers, the romantic sadness of the vanquished Indians, the onward strides of industrial accomplishments, the prolific richness of the country they were blessed with.”

Iannelli believed good public art will engage the public, and even before its dedication the Fountain was discussed and speculated upon. In November, 1939, the Kalamazoo Exchange Club’s monthly newsletter said: “The former fountain looked like a silo. We think this one looks like a cross between a German pill box and a duck made out of cement,” and that was just the beginning.

Up to today, discourse has continued: the conversation focusing almost solely on the Pioneer and Indian figures. They have been interpreted locally and nationally by the general public and professionals, lectured on, written about, protested against and defended ever since the fountain’s creation.

Author: Pamela O'Connor