The answer was blowing in the wind.

And James Darrel Kizer found it not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Lawrence sculptor had been working on a series of giant aluminum dancers and was about half finished when he sat down to watch television that calamitous morning in 2001.

“I saw these people shrouded with aluminum, falling from these buildings, and I went back to my studio and I couldn’t work on those aluminum forms anymore,” he says. “It was just the idea of almost dehumanizing people that made me take long walks, and I started seeing leaves blowing.”

Impish, swirling and irrepressible, they captured Kizer’s imagination, made him realize that human beings should pay more attention to their environment.

So he started sculpting the foliage, especially the crispy, petrified, sepia-toned ones that coat the ground in the fall.

And juror Rachael Blackburn Cozad, the director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., found one of them “challenging” and “dynamic” enough to select it as one of eight pieces in the 17th annual Outdoor Downtown Sculpture Exhibition. Passers-by last week may have noticed it poised under a tree outside the Lawrence Public Library. It will be there until next spring.

Kizer created the sculpture, titled “Organic Composition,” by sewing polyester fabric around an aluminum framework and applying layers of fiberglass mat. The result is a diaphanous skin stretched taut into a backbending leaf.

“What I hoped for was that when the light hits it and as the light moves … the reflections will change and there will be times when you can see through it and it will just light up,” Kizer says.

Lawrence artist James Darrel Kizer crouches beneath his sculpture, Organic

He’s the only Lawrence artist in this year’s exhibition, sponsored in part by the Lawrence Arts Commission, which pays each artist a $750 honorarium. The rest of the sculptors hail from cities across the United States. Some are new to the show — one of the oldest in the country — but others are returning, including Bounnak Thammavong, of Cedar Falls, Iowa; Chris Wubbena, of Waterloo, Iowa; and Willie Ray Parish, of La Union, N.M.

Art in plain sight

Parish’s “Breech,” tucked into the northeast corner of the east said of South Park, was selected by Cozad as Best in Show.

“I fell in love with its evocative shape and the artist’s sublime use of color,” she says. “At once purely formal, yet reminiscent of a whale or other sea mammal, it is both beautiful and intimidating.”

Indeed, the steel piece, almost instantly recognizable as the indication of a breeching whale, stands a formidable 11 feet tall, 5 feet wide and 6 feet deep. Parish used 16-gauge steel, however, so the piece only weighs about 250 to 300 pounds.

It’s part of his Humpback Series of abstract sculptures that reference surfacing sea mammals.

“(The series) developed as an interest in environmental issues,” says Parish, who teaches sculpture at the University of Texas at El Paso. “We’ve done more damage to the earth in the last 60 years than in the previous million, so I wanted to draw people’s attention to environmental issues.”

Photo gallery with juror commentary: 2004 Outdoor Downtown Sculpture Exhibition

Parish added the red paint on the “whale’s” head for dramatic effect, and the red vertical stripes on one side of the form indicate baleen, he explains.

The abstract nature of the piece is the rule rather than the exception in the exhibition. Other than Gary Mark, whose “Self Portrait as a Midget” uses fairly straightforward human forms, the artists opt for whimsical lines, found objects and mysterious surfaces. All attempt to communicate concepts rather than present something that’s simply nice to look at.

Even in Lawrence, the sculptures’ presence at downtown corners provides an element of surprise.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Cozad says of the public art show. “My philosophy is that art should be part of everyone’s daily life, and when you have an outdoor sculpture exhibition, the public doesn’t have to make a conscious decision to walk into a museum or buy a ticket or anything like that.

“It’s available for people who live in Lawrence who might just be walking down the street as they go about they’re daily business.”

Boundless energy

Cozad won’t be able to attend Saturday’s exhibition tour, traditionally led by the juror. Arts commissioner Jeff Ridgway is tentatively scheduled to fill in.

Parish and many of the other regional artists won’t be able to make it either, but Kizer will be on hand to discuss his work.

He probably won’t tell the story of a magical experience last fall that helped solidify in his mind the boundless energy of leaves, which he now tries to infuse in his sculptures.

Kizer was jogging on a windy day. Stray leaves lifted by the breeze danced around him, brushing his cheeks, begging for attention. Then he saw them: Six black, plastic bags — obviously filled with leaves — blowing haphazardly down Massachusetts Street.

“You can’t stop them,” he says, laughing. “You can bag them, but you can’t keep nature down. I thought, ‘This is a perfect illustration of humans and nature rubbing up against each other.’

“I felt like chasing them down and letting them go.”