SALINAS, Calif. — This is a love story involving three hats, one town and the right shade of yellow paint.
For decades a trio of giant hat sculptures in a scraggly grass field here had been treated like derelict pieces of playground equipment. Teenagers climbed to the top of what they knew as the "Salinas Hats." The metal grew rusty and was scarred with gang graffiti.
Few seemed to remember that this was "Hat in Three Stages of Landing" by well-known artist Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Or that Salinas had once believed public art should be part of life not just in cities such as San Francisco, Paris and Cologne, where other Oldenburg works towered, but in an agricultural town surrounded by lettuce fields.
That changed this month. The sculpture, restored under the direction of its 84-year-old artist, returned to this city of 150,000 with great fanfare. At the rededication ceremony, hundreds of residents tossed their hats into the air.
"We're not the kind of community where you would expect monumental public art," said Trish Triumpho Sullivan, who runs Salinas' tourism board. "It shows great imagination."
Life here is tied to the fields. Farmworkers pay middle-class mortgages by working more than one job. The wealthy families have ties to the land dating back generations.
The city is just 18 miles from Monterey and the coast.
"But they're the longest miles in the world," said Gary Smith, art gallery director at Hartnell Community College. "It really is different worlds."
In 1977, local art lovers landed a $50,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. They matched it with $75,000 from private donations and commissioned Oldenburg to create a sculpture representing Salinas. Art critics said his oversized twists on commonplace objects — think giant binoculars on L.A.'s Westside — heightened awareness of the beauty in the everyday.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen visited. "It was a warm day. Everyone was wearing a hat. Everyone was wearing a different hat," Oldenburg recalled.
He sketched hats in a little notebook. He made note of the rolling hills of the Salinas Valley and the rodeo stands on two sides of the field where the art would stand.
"Our formula was to get a deep impression of a place, then go back to New York, think about it and come to a conclusion about what we should do," he said.
Van Bruggen suggested a hat. Their idea grew into a hat being tossed from the rodeo field and landing with three hops.
It was one of their first artistic collaborations. They had met in 1970 when he had a show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where she was a curator. But she avoided him.
"I was on my way to becoming what they called a pop artist. And the most horrible thing she could imagine was an American pop artist," he said with a smile.
They married in 1977.
"She changed my direction completely," Oldenburg said. "I'd had a whole career before then. But now we wanted to bypass museums and galleries and speak directly to the community."
The artists showed their model of three yellow hats with turned-down brims punched with holes like a colander. The city of Salinas almost balked.
"The reaction was, 'Oh, my God, it isn't a Stetson,'" Smith said.
Witty, impassioned letters flew back and forth between the darlings of the world art scene and the citizens of Salinas, who knew what a Western hat should look like.
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