Ken Kelleher kitsch for Cry Baby Hill

The site in the 2005 Route 66 Master Plan:

The area, bounded by Southwest Blvd, Riverside Drive, Lawton Ave, and 12th Street, was just the edge of the slow rise from the river to the heart of downtown, but excavation for the south leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop sliced the Riverview neighborhood in two, dooming the north half to urban renewal, and making this high place overlooking the 11th Street bridge an isolated hill. It was the location of two-story single-family homes, plus some small commercial spaces along Southwest Blvd. In 2005, Tulsa's Route 66 Master Plan, developed to guide the spending of $15 million in Vision 2025 funds, earmarked this site for the Route 66 Xperience, a three-story visitor's center with a cafe and interactive exhibits:

Route 66 Xperience

Plans for the property located on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and Southwest Boulevard call for the development of a major tourist attraction/destination (hereinafter referred to as the "Route 66 Xperience"). The first story of the proposed three story building will contain approximately 15,000 square feet of exhibit area and will house various interactive exhibits themed toward Route 66. It also could house a Route 66 gift shop and possibly a juice and coffee bar/sandwich shop that would cater to users of River Parks and provide a food and beverage option to visitors of the facility.

The second floor of the building is intended to be more passive in nature and will include exhibits that are more informational and educational and less interactive than the exhibits on the first floor; an atrium open to the floor below; and a multi-purpose room that will be used to house changing/ traveling exhibits, host private events, etc. The second floor would also likely house the administrative offices of the entity that will oversee the day- to-day use of the facility. The third floor of the facility will contain approximately 6,000 square feet of floor space and could be used to house a restaurant.

The Route 66 Xperience will serve as the anchor for the redevelopment of Route 66 in Tulsa County. Intended to both educate and entertain, it will appeal to visitors on a local, regional, and even national level. The influx of national visitors will spawn redevelopment along Route 66 as business and property owners take advantage of the economic opportunities presented by renewed interest in Route 66.

Part 3 of the report included a due diligence analysis of the Route 66 Xperience. The anchor for Route 66 redevelopment remains undeveloped, 19 years later.

Tulsa Tough came into existence in 2006, but the Riverview Criterium, the race involving Cry Baby Hill, was added in 2009. It's now called the River Parks Criterium.

The current Route 66 RFPs for the site:

The City of Tulsa has issued three RFPs related to the site, with a fourth to follow:

• RFP 24-327 (2): Route 66 Roadside Attraction (Bid document, list of submissions.)
• RFP 24-925: Commercial Development at 815 S. Riverside Drive (Bid document, list of submissions.)
• RFP 25-900: Qualified Technology & Curatorial Consultant, Agency or Team to Develop an Interactive Route 66 Digital Experience (Bid document, list of submissions.)

The fourth RFP doesn't appear to have been released yet. The bid document for the technology & curatorial consultant describes it:

An additional RFP also seeks to honor Tulsa's Route 66 heritage through an interactive, augmented reality initiative that recalls historic establishments, celebrates existing features, and contemplates the future of this venerable corridor ("Route 66 Technology Piece"). The Route 66 Technology Piece will include a site-specific installation in the area surrounding the Project Site, though does not have a designated footprint at present.

James W. Deming, a member of Tulsa's Sales Tax Overview Committee, posted about the award on the Historic Route 66 Facebook group, including a photo of a report describing the three elements for the site: Roadside Attraction Public Art ($250,000), Commercial Development (up to $4.5 million in incentives), Route 66 Interactive Experience (up to $300,000).

The idea of a 30-foot-tall statue of a baby was mentioned as early as last fall, and neighbors objected to it.

Reviews of Kelleher's work linked on his website:

The following reviews and profiles are all linked on Kelleher's website, and all describe his monumental work as imaginary, not real. Most of them are from 2018, with many of the same images appearing on each. (Some articles lacked an explicit date, but the image file URLs indicated that they were imported into the website's WordPress content management system in 2018.) Emphasis in the quotes below was added to highlight the virtual nature of his work.

A 2018 article about Ken Kelleher on MyModernMet.com makes it clear that he is creating photos on a screen, not sculptures in the real world. (Archival link here and here.) The images accompanying the article show monochrome blobs in Calatrava's Oculus, St. Mark's Square in Venice, Parvis La Défense, the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace.

Artist Ken Kelleher combines his training as a sculptor with his prowess in UX design to create hyperrealistic projections of public sculpture. Kelleher allows his imagination to run free, placing contemporary sculptures everywhere from Venice's busy St. Mark's Square to minimalist interiors. Working with different series, Kelleher churns out three-dimensional renderings that give potential clients a look at the artwork that could decorate any given environment....

In the virtual world, he's able to experiment quickly and see how his artistic vision blends into any environment. The results are so effective that it's often difficult to believe we're not looking at fully realized, physical sculptures....

Now that these renderings have provoked such a positive public response, Kelleher has been invited to submit proposals for public sculptures in Italy and Portugal. He's also turned in proposals for a piece at Oman's airport and has been invited by Nike to produce an Augmented Reality installation for an upcoming event. Slowly but surely, Kelleher is merging his virtual and physical worlds.

Let's focus on Augmented Reality, which seems to be the key to understanding what this artist offers. AR is similar to Virtual Reality, in that you have a computer generating images of something that is not actually present, but with AR the imaginary is blended with the real world. The mobile phone game Pokemon Go is an example of AR. Pokemon creatures are visible in the app based on your current location, shown against a real world background. The game uses your phone's forward camera, GPS receiver, and gyroscope to render the blended image.

An aviation application of AR is a pilot's heads-up display (HUD) that superimposes an image of the runway over the out-the-window view as an aid to landing in heavy fog. At a trade show, I saw a demo of AR for training fire safety: A fire appeared in the headset, superimposed on the real world background, and if I correctly aimed the virtual extinguisher at the base of the virtual fire, it would be put out. AR is used in simulation to mix real-world objects needed for tactile cues (yoke, column, pedals, levers, toggle switches) with objects that only need to be visible (out-the-window view, electronic flight instruments, warning lights). The F-35 uses helmet-mounted AR and cameras to allow the pilot to "look through" the floor beneath his feet, without losing the ability to see his controls.

An AR installation of a Ken Kelleher creation would likely require the viewer to install a phone app or don a headset.

Another 2018 article, at ignant.com, contains many of the same images: "American Sculptor Ken Kelleher makes large-scale digital sculptures that are imagined in real public spaces. The abstract renderings are mammoth in size and appear to stand in strong contrast to their surroundings of galleries, gardens, and public squares."

Another 2018 article, at fubiz.net: "Ken Kelleher is an artist specializing in the creation of large scale digital sculptures around the world. Digital works are set into real landscapes: streets, galleries or small places, and the result seems incredibly real."

September 2018 in Collater.al: "Digital sculptures of American artist Ken Kelleher look like twisted tangles. These are placed in public spaces and are able to astonish the viewer, altering the actual spatial perception of where they are. Each rendering has gigantic dimensions and seems in strong contrast with the surrounding environment of galleries, gardens, and squares as if to underline the pop-exuberant character of the artistic operation.

October 2018 in Gessato: "While he creates sculptures using traditional materials such as wood and metal, his digital series enhances this concept. Monumental and imposing, the digital sculptures appear transposed in public spaces, courtyards, museums, or galleries."

September 2018 in FeelDesain.com: "The American Sculptor Ken Kelleher makes large-scale digital sculptures that are imagined in real public spaces."

October 2018 in AD magazine (Russian): "He creates renderings for futuristic urban installations and then uses digital technology to place them in a variety of public spaces." (Via Google Translate.)

If any of Kelleher's work had been installed anywhere before, it would have been mentioned in these articles. My guess is that Kelleher sent out a press release with a collection of renderings to a bunch of art and design webzines. The common language of the articles suggests that in many cases editors merely paraphrased the press release. Some seem to confuse virtual art and reality and to be under the impression that some of these designs had been or shortly would be realized, but that is never expressly stated.

A 2019 story about Kelleher at IdeelArt is clear that his work is imaginary (emphasis added):

A huge part of his current output consists of digital renderings of imaginary, large-scale abstract sculptures, which he then drops into photographs of real-world public spaces. These digital renderings are so hauntingly realistic that you would be forgiven for believing the sculptures actually exist.... He claims to be working with a number of fabricators and public planners to make some of his imaginary creations a reality, but the problem is that most of the forms he imagines are either so monumental, so complex, or both, that fabricating them would require a Herculean effort paired with limitless funds. Despite how awesome the renderings look, the vast majority of his sculptures have not been, and may not ever be, built.

Here's a 2023 article in DesignBoom: "Ken Kelleher's digital art pieces on vehicles borrow their elements from whimsical dream sequences and hypnotic attraction toward grandeur [sic] design inquiries and possibilities.... 'Once I create the renderings, I research how they could be done and connect with people who I think would be right for the project,' he says." No mention of any that actually had been done.

The only article in Kelleher's list of links that appears to show a physical object is a December 2019 article by Anthony Haden-Guest (older half-brother of Christopher Guest of Spïnal Tap fame) of a show called Off the Charts at Manolis Projects, in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami. Haden-Guest's work (he's a cartoonist) was part of the exhibition, so the article is more of a promotional piece than a critical review. The same article and images are on the gallery's website. One photo shows a Kelleher sculpture which sits on a glass table in the foreground. I'd estimate the sculpture to be about 12" high. It resembles a digital rendering that appeared in many of the 2018 articles. Haden-Guest writes:

There are other sculptures at the front, including two mirror gloss surgical steel pieces. These are by Ken Kelleher who can be considered a second discovery in that he has only been making art as a full-time career for a couple of years, remains a barely known name in the buzz-factory of the art world at large but has built a thriving career, including recent commissions in China, Qatar, and Surabaya, Indonesia, by way of that rising power in the art economy, Instagram.

I haven't found a photo of the second sculpture. More about those commissions below.

Kelleher's claimed installations:

With those articles in mind, take a look at Ken Kelleher's website. Kelleher's lists of "Shows / Activations" has some big gaps -- a show in 1991, one in 2001, the aforementioned Miami show in 2019, Art Palm Beach in early 2020, and then an unprecedented explosion of activity in 2023 and 2024.

It's difficult to find independent photographs, video, or even written accounts of this later work.

He claims to have installed six two-meter figures at Boulevard City shopping district in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2023. I scrolled through the past two years of Boulevard City Instagram posts. I saw dozens of photos of special events and people walking through the boulevard, but I saw no sign of Kelleher's work. Surely some delighted passers-by would have taken a selfie with his eight-headed Donald Duck.

A large tubular structure called Hand Drawn Sculpture was installed last year in San Diego's new Research and Development District (RaDD); blogger Richard Schulte has a very recent entry (just last week) with photos on his blog Cool San Diego Sights. It could be fairly described as a three-dimensional squiggle.

Kelleher touts an "activation" at Airside Mall in Hong Kong, but that consisted of inflatables and a projection onto a building.

There is an Instagram post by Hyundai Department Store - Pangyo about Kelleher's "Garden of Dreams" installation, which appears to be fabric flowers.

It appears he did create an inflatable pink dragon for a Chinese New Year 2024 celebration at a Bangkok shopping mall. The Nation Thailand posted video on Facebook showing the dragon tethered on a platform outside the mall with Chinese actor Lin Yi posing in front of it.

A YouTube video art tour of the cruise ship Wonder of the Seas captures a fleeting glimpse of a giant chrome hat at 5 mins 3 secs, which appears to match photos on Kelleher's website from a different angle. It is set in an indoor shopping atrium.

I wasn't able to find independent confirmations of the other sculptures Kelleher lists in China, Indonesia, and Qatar, several of which he says are in private collections. There weren't enough clues to pinpoint a location for searching for images or street views. It doesn't help that the three countries with public installations all use different writing systems, where variations in transliteration and translation can make it harder to search for a location. None of these sculptures are in locations where members of an evaluation committee in Tulsa can easily travel to see them in person.

Scrolling through thousands of photos attached to the Google Maps entry for Krasnodar Park in Russia, I saw plenty of pictures of public art, play structures, gardens, walls, and water features, but only two of Kelleher's 9-foot high "Inner Child" statues, one by Olga Tarasenko from May 2021 and the other by Anastasia Grunicheva from July 2021.

But there is a Google Maps place in the park for Vnutrenniy Rebonok, which is Russian for "Inner Child." The most recent photo is from three months ago. So it appears that there is one verified outdoor permanent Kelleher sculpture installation in the world, albeit not at the scale proposed for "Cry Baby Cry."

Kelleher also has a profile on CodaWorx. One Facebook commenter mistook it for independent confirmation of his installations, but it's clearly stated that the photos were uploaded by Kelleher.