A model of Canter and Shed, by sculptors Joshua Enck and Nick Hollibaugh, is on display now at the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center in Pawtucket.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PAWTUCKET — The competition to design a sculpture to be erected outside the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center has been won by two Providence artists.

Joshua Enck and Nicholas Hollibaugh won for a design they call Canter and Shed, a pair of painted metal structures that, if built, would rise 16 and 18 feet above street level at Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street, with a walking path between them.

“I was kind of surprised, because we’re kind of young, and we never had a project of this size,” Hollibaugh, 31, said.

Before they entered the design competition, Hollibaugh said, he and Enck, 30, had collaborated on furniture projects, designing benches for the AndersonRanch Art Center near Aspen, Colo., and the Rising Sun Mills complex in Providence.

The design competition gave them a chance to do a public art project on the scale of the sculptures that used to be commissioned by Providence’s now defunct Convergence Art Festival –– big structures that loom over the sidewalk and redefine the space.

Canter and Shed was inspired by the architecture of the sprawling mill buildings that still exist in parts of Pawtucket, the artists said yesterday in separate interviews.

Three towers rise from the structures, recalling the smokestacks that tower over the mills.

The towers are set at angles, or canted, to impart a sense of motion to the sculpture. “The spires, or smokestacks, they all lean a little bit. They don’t look static,” Enck said.

Hollibaugh and Enck originally intended to use weathered steel panels for the project. After visiting the site in March, when the street trees were bare and the area had a barren look, they decided to enliven the space by painting the sculpture green.

The design competition was funded by a $10,000 grant from the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor Commission. The commission proposed putting a signature sculpture outside the visitors center after it was suggested in a vision statement by the design firm of Gates Leighton and Associates.

In January, Hollibaugh and Enck were selected along with two other artists from among 11 contestants who responded to a Pawtucket Planning Department request for qualifications.

Their design was selected June 6 from among three entries that included Spindle, a 20-to-25-foot sculpture, by the artist Kenneth Speiser, reminiscent of the rod or pin on which textile fibers are spun; and a 30-foot kinetic sculpture by the artist Donald Gerola, which he described as “a marriage of organic forms” combining “four typical Gerola motifs”: a wind rotor, Buddhist candlestick, serial elements and translucent woven fabric.

Canter and Shed was picked because of the contribution it would make to the streetscape, and the shadows that would elongate from it, said Martha L. Werenfels, an architect who sat on the selection panel.

“We just felt that the massing and sculptural qualities were really elegant. They harkened back to the industrial history of Pawtucket without being literal about it,” Werenfels said.

Hollibaugh and Enck got a $1,500 grant when they were selected, along with Speiser and Gerola, as finalists in the design competition. They got another $4,500 grant when their design was selected as the winner.

But the real money –– the roughly $50,000 it will cost to build and install the sculpture –– hasn’t been raised yet.

Thomas K. Willett, the Pawtucket Planning Department official who guided the design competition, said the city plans to raise the money from private sources now that the winning design has been picked.

jcastell@projo.com