Local Sculpture Finds New Home At Westhampton Beach Elementary

Green, blue, red and yellow shapes silently spun overhead as the nearly 400 students attending the Westhampton Beach Elementary School scurried into the cafeteria and filed into four neat rows of benches on Friday morning.

It was the third day of school, and echoes of laughter and silly conversations bounced off the lunchroom’s white brick walls. When Principal Lisa Slover stepped onto the wooden stage at the front of the room, the floor squeaking under her sandals, the space went quiet.

“On the first day of school, I came into almost all of your classrooms and I gave you a challenge: to come into the cafeteria and figure out what is different,” Ms. Slover said, standing behind a small lectern and speaking into a microphone.

Nearly all at once, the hundreds of pairs of eyes that were glued to the stage wandered up, and almost all the students pointed toward the ceiling. A few students jumped up and shouted: “the chandelier.”

The chandelier they were referring to was a big colorful mobile hanging from the vaulted ceiling. Once a longstanding fixture in the lobby of Sportime, a fitness center in East Quogue, the piece was relocated and installed in the elementary school in late August.

“We are really excited about our new piece of artwork here,” Ms. Slover said. “I’ve seen a lot of our kids watching it, especially at it moves very slowly with the fans on. It almost gives a calming effect.”

Built by East Moriches abstract artist Peter Marbury, who died in 2009 in a motorcycle accident at the age of 70, the piece stayed in the same location—first the Hampton Tennis Academy and then, when ownership changed, Sportime—for more than 40 years.

John Salomon, the original owner of Hampton Tennis Academy, commissioned Mr. Marbury to build the piece in 1974. Earlier this year, in January, Sportime staff took down the sculpture to make way for a new surveillance camera and security system—that’s where Mr. Salomon’s son, James Salomon, an East End art exhibitor and the founder of Salomon Contemporary, stepped in.

When Mr. Salomon’s friend Kelcey Edwards, who is also a gallery director and Sportime member, first told him that the sculpture was dismantled, he said he was on the phone within seconds to make arrangements for a new home for the artwork.

“I spoke to Sportime and they gave it to me,” James Salomon explained. “Through Jeannine Ryan, the art teacher, and Lisa Slover, we got the piece. All I know is it belongs here. It really belongs here and I hope that generations of kids can enjoy it and dream with it.”

As a child, the younger Mr. Salomon said he remembered watching the mobile and being enthralled by the shapes and colors. His love for art, and his childhood memories of the mobile, are what, he said, moved him to find a new place to install the sculpture.

For Mr. Salomon, the move was a perfect fit.

“I grew up with the mobile above my head,” he said to the students. “I like to call it ‘The Dragon,’ but you can call it whatever you like, because there is no title. You can call it the chandelier.”