After hours of debate in an upstairs conference room of Durango Public Library, the Durango Public Arts Commission on Friday decided to award Tom Holmes $25,000 to build “Arc of History.”

The three-dimensional sculpture is expected to be installed in July as part of the new continuous-flow intersection where U.S. Highway 160 and Camino del Rio merge, also known as the DoubleTree intersection.

Holmes, who is based in Greeley, Pa., said he was delighted.

“It’s an honor to be chosen,” he said.

The sculpture will involve a large stack of local, flat stones impaled by a steel rod, like an enormous southwestern kebab.

How enormous the sculpture will be remains an open question.

Holmes said the Public Art Commission wants it to be “as big as possible.”

He anticipates it will run somewhere between 14- and 18-feet long.

As his studio is in Pennsylvania and it’s expensive for rocks to travel by mail, Holmes will fabricate the work here.

“There’s a lot of logistics to doing something like this out of state. I want to use native stone, and native fabricators and work with the town as closely as possible,” he said.

Public Art Commission’s competition brought forth 26 proposals from around the country, which was the highest number of applicants Durango had ever reviewed, according to the city of Durango.

The three finalists included two local teams, according to a city news release: Gunnar Anderson and Ann Christensen; and Kelly Hurford, Walker Christensen and Craig Stoffel.

Holmes holds a Bachelor of Arts in music theory, composition and performance from the Crane School of Music at Potsdam, N.Y. He has studied instrument construction for the past 15 years with Ben Hume of New York City, the world’s leading authority on ancient Central Asian musical instruments before 1200 A.D.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com