When Tom Montan, the executive director of Sculpture Space, which has offered a residency program for artists for nearly half a century, arrived at its studio in a former factory in Utica, N.Y., on Sunday morning, he grew frightened. The doors were ajar. The space was flooded. Broken glass was scattered across the floor.
“It was horrifying,” he said in an interview.
The Utica Police said Tuesday that they had made several arrests in connection with the ransacking: Five juveniles between the ages of 8 and 11 are being charged with multiple crimes including burglary, criminal possession of stolen property and criminal mischief.
“My heart is broken,” Mr. Montan said after the arrests were announced. “I understand kids being kids, but this is so beyond that.”
Photos of Sculpture Space posted on Facebook show what officials described as a devastating act of vandalism: chairs strewn across the floor, pieces of destroyed sculptures scattered everywhere and graffiti sprayed on the back of a garage door.
In a news release, the Utica Police said items had been damaged, projects had been destroyed, and several hundred dollars’ worth of antique bicycles and other property had been stolen.
Sculpture Space officials lamented that the upheaval came as they were preparing for their annual art auction in late September, which serves as a fund-raiser for the organization. Sculpture Space has set up a new “vandalism recovery fund” in the wake of the episode, officials said.
Mr. Montan said the damaged facility had been storing works that had been donated by artists for sale at the fund-raiser and that “some of those pieces were casualties.”
The police said that they made the arrests after officers were dispatched to a local automobile repair business on Sunday, where they discovered several juveniles throwing rocks at vehicles in the lot. Officers saw that there were several antique bicycles near the cars and also noticed that the juveniles had “paint on their shoes consistent with what had been spilled within Sculpture Space,” the news release said.
“Having reason to believe that these parties may be responsible for the previous burglary, the investigation proceeded in order to determine if this was the case,” the police said. “After compiling a substantial amount of evidence indicating that these parties were in fact responsible for the illegal entry, damage and theft at the Sculpture Space, investigators with the Juvenile Aid Unit charged five juveniles.”
The authorities did not identify the juveniles because of their age. They will be instructed to appear at Oneida County Probation at a date in the near future, the police said.
Sculpture Space’s 45-year-old artist residency program was among the first in the nation to focus on sculptors, according to the organization. The residency provides both space and time for artists to further their practice in a facility that was formerly a boiler factory.
Sculpture Space has hosted more than 550 artists from around the world, and it offers funded fellowships to roughly 20 artists each year.
