Artificial Cloud by Bob Haozous - Tulsa - Abstract Public Sculptures on Waymarking.com

Artificial Cloud is an odd sculpture made by artist Bob Haozous. This thought-provoking piece was created in 1991, but local newspaper accounts (Luann Ruark's Tulsa World article "Universal Mystery" on 16 Feb. 1997) say it was installed in 1992.

The Tulsa Convention and Visitors Bureau website describes it as "a silent commentary on man’s love of technology and the destructiveness that can come from that infatuation. The surface of the sculpture has been allowed to rust, to show the effect of time and the atmosphere."
Bob Haozous himself tells interviewer Larry Abbott in A Time of Visions:
"It's seventy-two and a half feet tall, but it wasn't made to erode or rust. It's more like there was an intentional effort not to preserve it. And that's a major thing. That's an important statement because steel rusts and if you try to keep it from rusting, you're going against nature. But that's okay, you know, you can make things last forever if you want to. But my statement was not to preserve it but to leave it as it was because it's going to rust anyway. It's one of man's tools and it's guaranteed to disappear in a thousand or two thousand years. There are many meanings in that piece, but its primary statement comes from an idea I've been thinking about for a long time. And that is, in the future, we're going to have to make our environments. We're going to pollute the earth and the sky so much that we have to either move underground or into dome-type buildings and pump in purified air so we can breathe. So I've gradually been going into the direction of making artificial nature."

Although you can see Artificial Cloud from several blocks away, you really need to look at it up close. There are little figures cut into the sides of the sculpture. You have to wonder why some of the human figures are incomplete, missing arms or legs.

Dwarfed by downtown Tulsa's tallest skyscraper (the Bank of Oklahoma Tower looks like a smaller version of one of the twin towers of NYC's World Trade Center and was designed by the same architect), Artificial Cloud sits adjacent to the virtual geocache and waymark, "Center of the Universe."

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Title: Artificial Cloud Artist: Bob Haozous Media (materials) used: steel Location (specific park, transit center, library, etc.): North of the BOK Tower, near the Santa Fe Depot building. Date of creation or placement: Created 1991, installed 1992

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