In June 2022, Carmel Monthly proudly spotlighted two key members of the creative team behind the “Classic Cars of Indiana” roundabout sculptures installed along the 96th Street corridor: Arlon Bayliss and Robert “Bob” Buchanan.
Buchanan, along with his brother Mark, owns bo-mar Industries. Working with Bayliss’ artistic vision, they have collaborated on several of Carmel’s notable sculptures, including “Homage to Hoagy” in front of the Palladium, which was featured in our February 2020 issue.
The fourth and final sculpture in the “Classic Cars of Indiana” series was installed on Friday, Sept. 20, at the roundabout on 96th Street and Gray Road.
The Story Behind the Sculpture
The sculpture, titled “Stutz,” joins three others—“Marmon,” “Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg” and “Studebaker”—that were previously installed at the roundabouts along 96th Street at Priority Way, Delegates Row and Hazel Dell Parkway. Commissioned in late 2021 by the City of Carmel under former Mayor Jim Brainard, each sculpture represents an artistic interpretation of these iconic classic cars, all of which were designed and built in Indiana during the first half of the 20th century when the state was a leader in automotive innovation.
We recently spoke with Bayliss and Buchanan about the final installation of the “Classic Cars of Indiana” series. They shared insights into the creation of this last sculpture, which pays tribute to the iconic Stutz marque, as well as the unique challenges they faced in bringing this piece to life.
Inspired by the Art Deco Stutz “Ra” hood ornament, the “Stutz” sculpture stands 18 feet tall on a six-foot-high base of Indiana limestone and brick. It was crafted using dozens of steel sheets, locally fabricated by bo-mar Industries in Beech Grove. The vertical slices in the sculpture create a light-permeable, abstract form that takes on a new life at night when illuminated with Bayliss’ signature-colored dichroic-filtered lights.
“I wanted each of the four sculptures to have a different style and feeling so that folks might have their favorites,” Bayliss expressed. “Like children, I love each of them equally, but this one presented more challenges than the others. We started it first, believe it or not, and finished it last. Bringing it to completion took a great deal of patience, ingenuity and, most of all, love.”
According to Bayliss, it took several hundreds of hours to translate his sketches into a detailed computer model. Then, bo-mar cut out the sheets of aluminum and fabricated special fasteners.
“It was actually built three times,” Bayliss shared. “They built the structure and tested it for stability, then stripped it down, added improvements, rebuilt and retested it before disassembly, powder coating and final assembly and installation. I believe this one truly was a labor of love. Bo-mar never lost their passion or attention to detail.”
When asked about the challenges in designing and fabricating this particular automotive sculpture, Bayliss shared, “My designs often challenge my fabricators, bo-mar Industries of Beech Grove, to come up with novel solutions in order to create something practical while preserving the artistic intentions of the sculpture. In the ‘Stutz’ sculpture, the main obstacles were weight and the amount of material needed. Owner Bob Buchanan’s solution was genius. He thinned each sheet to a third [of] its original thickness but sandwiched them with two four-inch edge borders. The result is a significant saving in weight, and, as a lovely bonus, it allowed me to use the borders to enhance details of the sculpture’s face and wings. The gaps between each slice, as well as their thickness, are calculated to give an impression of transparency as the viewer moves around the head.”
Buchanan spoke about the project from his perspective and what they learned from the “Homage to Hoagy” that influenced the “Stutz” piece.
“We actually started the ‘Stutz’ [piece] before the others in the design phase pre-Covid,” Buchanan said. “Post-Covid, it made sense to do the other [sculptures] for other reasons. The ‘Stutz’ had the earmarks of being the easiest of the projects because all of the pieces were flat and vertical. How could that be? Famous last words. When we built it the first time in our shop, you could kind of wiggle the wings… they had a jiggle to them. We took it apart and solved the issue so now you could hang meat off of them. They’re stable and resilient.”
Buchanan continued, “It makes this one more special to us because of the hurdles we had to jump to make it work. The solution wasn’t simple or intuitive, but it doesn’t detract from the look, and everything we did had to be subliminal and built inside of the sculpture to give it stability. I nicknamed this one ‘Four of Four’ because it was the last of the four pieces, and it was kind of bittersweet when it left the dock of my shop. It was like sending the last kid off to college. It was the fastest install out of all of them… it took only 20 minutes, and then Arlon and I put the lights on it that night. What we learned from the Hoagy Carmichael piece helped us through this one without any guesswork. It was much more calculated. It was nice to see the second generation of dichroic-filtered lights, and it was a fun project altogether.”
Bayliss and Buchanan hope that both locals and visitors will appreciate and celebrate the creative engineering of the “Stutz” sculpture, along with the other three pieces that honor the automotive innovations of all four featured marques for generations to come.
“I hope it captures and pays homage to the Art Deco spirit of elegance that Stutz cars embody as well as the creative engineering advances that [make] Stutz known as one of the great classic cars of Indiana,” Bayliss said. “As the last of four ‘born,’ it presented my fabricators, bo-mar Industries, with unique challenges [like] balancing lightness with strength, as well as keeping faithful to my artistic vision. We are so proud of these [sculptures], and I hope the community loves them as much as we do.”
