Could this new art piece in Buckner-Webb Park become Boise’s most-photographed icon?
Matthew Mazzotta gazed out his fifth-floor window at the Hyatt Place Boise Downtown and watched a stream of people go up to Gentle Breeze, the art piece he designed for Cherie Buckner-Webb Park.
The pink 23-foot-tall tree features leaves that flutter in the wind. Three swinging rope benches allow visitors to the park at 11th and Bannock streets a place to sit.
“There’s just constant people going up and sitting on it and using it exactly as I intended,” Mazzotta, an artist from New York state, said by phone. “It reaffirms the success of it.”
The conversation took place Thursday, a few hours before the park was dedicated to Buckner-Webb, a fifth-generation Idahoan and the first Black woman to serve in the Idaho Legislature.
Listening to Boiseans
Mazzotta said he developed the idea after speaking to dozens of people in Boise. A recurring thread he heard was Boiseans’ connection to the surrounding Foothills, mountains and the Boise River.
“It was an important thing that you could be working downtown but on your lunch break go fishing or go off into the hills,” he said. “And I just kept on hearing this over and over.”
People told Mazzotta that they didn’t want the art piece to end up pulling from Boise’s historical roots and end up being a pair of cowboy boots or something out of the Old West. He wanted something that would really pop next to the newly completed 11th and Idaho building.
“I think the project sings even more because of where it is, between this brand-new building surrounded by a few other buildings that have quite a few stories to them,” Mazzotta said.
He didn’t want the tree to look like an artificial tree, so that’s why it isn’t green. He said he wanted something bold and chose pink after looking at photos of cherry trees in bloom.
Buckner-Webb is herself an icon
Hundreds of people came to the park Thursday afternoon for the dedication. People clapped as Buckner-Webb walked down concrete steps leading from the 11th and Idaho building to the park grass.
Doug Holloway, the city’s parks and recreation director, predicted the tree will become one of the most photographed city park icons.
“It’s something we’re going to be proud of for a long long time,” Holloway said.
Mayor Lauren McLean lauded Buckner-Webb.
“I look out across this crowd and I see so many people, including myself, whose lives have been marked and forever changed by your mentorship, guidance, cheerleading, chastising and everything else,” McLean said. “Because you know who we are, what we can do, who we ought to be and you help us get there.”
Council President Elaine Clegg said she first met Buckner-Webb when, at age 16, she attended a civil rights protest on the steps of the State Capitol.
“It was the first time I realized that from Boise, Idaho, there were things people here could do that would make a difference, not just for our city or our state but for our nation, and that I was witnessing someone who is going to help be a leader in that,” Clegg said. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
Civil right involvement, service
Buckner-Webb, whose family has lived in Boise for 115 years and whose first name is pronounced Sha-REE, learned about hate at a young age. At age 6, when her family lived on North 19th Street, her mother opened the front door while the family was eating dinner and saw what looked like flames across the street.
“There was a (4-foot) cross burning on our front lawn,” Buckner-Webb told the Statesman in 1998. “My mom said, ‘Put it on the mantle. I don’t ever want to forget this happened.’ That was the real stimulus for my mom to get involved in civil rights.”
The incident and her mother’s defiant reaction made a huge impact on Buckner-Webb, but except for the cross-burning episode and an occasional racist remark from other children, Buckner-Webb has good memories of playing on Grand Avenue and later in Boise’s North End. With few Blacks in Boise, most of her childhood friends were white.
Buckner-Webb helped establish a Black history museum in Julia Davis Park. She was the first Black member of the Boise Junior League and sat on the boards of numerous groups, including the Women’s and Children’s Alliance, the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Center, the Andrus Center for Public Policy, the local NAACP and Planned Parenthood of Idaho.
She served as a Democratic state representative from 2010 to 2012 and then as a state senator until 2020.
She is vice chairwoman of the Board of Trustees for the College of Western Idaho and runs a local diversity-training consultancy for business leaders.
Buckner-Webb is also a member of the city’s task force on the Erma Hayman House, a cultural site acquired by the city in 2018 as part of an effort to preserve parts of the ethnically diverse neighborhood along River Street, near downtown.
She is also a longtime jazz and pop singer.
The park’s name was selected after the city solicited ideas from the public earlier this year. The Boise Parks and Recreation Commission and Boise City Council finalized the selection.
After the dedication ceremony, during an interview, Buckner-Webb said she was humbled to be honored by her hometown.
“I am amazed. I am delighted. I am overwhelmed,” she said after dozens of people came up and hugged her and thanked her for her contributions to the city. “I”m not usually short for words, but I am overwhelmed.”
Buckner-Webb said she hopes the park will be a place where people can relax and mingle with others.
“I’m not trying to make it ‘Cheers,’” she said. “I’m just trying to make it the welcoming place that Boise was when I grew up. That’s what we were and I believe we still are.”
This story was originally published August 6, 2021 at 9:11 AM.
