Georgia Ave-Petworth  

Plaza intersection of New Hampshire & Georgia Avenues.

New Leaf, 2006
Lisa Scheer
Bronze, granite base
8' l x 5.5' h x 4' d

Georgia Ave-Petworth New Leaf - 2006

This large bronze sculpture rests atop a two-step platform and is inscribed with the following poem by E. Ethelbert Miller:

every leaf surrenders to air
we dance
we flutter
we touch the earth

This project was made possible in part by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities and was donated to WMATA.

Lisa Scheer works and lives in Maryland and Washington, D.C. She received a BA from Bennington College and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. New Leaf is representative of Lisa Scheer's work - primarily large-scale abstract sculptures constructed out of metal and fabricated sheet metal.

Scheer said, "My goal is to have a mixture of really interesting references, oftentimes stemming from the sort of program or the site in which I'm installing the work. The piece at Petworth is a sort of abstracted form, but it also looks a tremendous amount like a leaf, or something very organic and growing, and I do mean to do that because I mean to evoke metaphors of growth and change and seasonal time shifts."

E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank located in Washington, D.C. Miller is the founder and former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. "E. Ethelbert Miller Day" was proclaimed in D.C. on September 28, 1978. In 2003 Miller's poems were selected for sculpture installations at the Petworth and DuPont Circle Metro stations. On April 19, 2015, Mr. Miller was inducted into the Washington DC Hall of Fame.