Volunteers working in conjunction with the Humboldt Arts Council are pulling out the art from the Romano Gabriel Sculpture Garden exhibit on Eureka’s Second Street, in the heart of Old Town, to give it all a good cleaning.

Jemima Harr, the Arts Council’s executive director, was pacing around this afternoon fretting about the work, which was being laid out on the sidewalk for dusting — though “dust,” she said, isn’t quite the right word. It’s almost like a very fine silt that somehow makes it through the glass panels of the exhibit and collects on the world-famous folk art.

“It’s unbelievable how dirty this gets,” Harr said.

This week’s deep cleaning is prompted, in part, by a forthcoming documentary on the artist, who in the 1950s and 1960s filled the front yard of his Pine Street home with thousands of carved and painted wood sculptures, until the whole installation was widely recognized as an important piece of Italian-American folk art, akin to the Watts Towers. (SPACES magazine has some good photos of the Gabriel sculptures in situ.) After his death, a good portion of the garden was stuffed into the gallery space at 315 Second Street for permanent exhibition, where it remains a popular tourist attraction to this day.

Local resident Jeffrey Reinus is directing the documentary, which is being produced in conjunction with KEET-TV and an art historian. He told the Outpost this afternoon that he’s been a fan of Gabriel’s art for a very long time, and upon retirement he set himself the challenge of making a film about it. (He used to be an underwriting executive at KEET.) And to make it, he needed some good photographs of the work.

The Arts Council was happy to comply. They try to clean up the work every year or so, Harr said, but they haven’t done a full-on deep cleaning in a while. It was overdue. While they’re taking everything out and laying it on the sidewalk, Reinus is running around tagging the things that he particularly wants photographed.

It’s a nice spectacle for passersby, who are stopping on the street to check out the pieces up close for maybe the first time. Harr said that the Arts Council still gets about a call a week from out-of-towners planning their trips to Eureka, who want to be assured that they’ll be able to visit Gabriel’s sculptures while they’re in town.

If you want to check out the operation, cleaning is expected to go on for another day or two. Come on down. Photos from this afternoon follow.