Look up! See that bright-colored man on the roof of that prominent TC building? Maybe not yet, but Crooked Tree Arts Center Traverse City is betting you soon will.

The organization is hard at work installing "Man in the City" throughout town -- and along the way hoping to encourage locals to take in and appreciate their surroundings, and to talk about art. As a part of the campaign, the roofs of several prominent buildings in Traverse City and nearby communities now sport an orange, two-foot metal silhouette of a hatted man. 

“It’s a public arts sculpture project, and we’re picking buildings for historical significance or for architectural significance or it’s a place that really helps tell the story of our region,” explains Cindy McSurely, Crooked Tree's development director. “It’s encouraging people to look up and around where they are.”

The Ticker tagged along as crews crisscrossed through the county to erect the installations, which so far include the State Theatre, Carnegie Building and Building 50A of The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, as well as 9 Bean Rows in Suttons Bay and Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville. “The Man in the City has the best views in the county,” McSurely jokes.

“This is a pretty cool way to get people to look for art in unexpected places,” agrees Raymond Minervini Jr. of The Minervini Group, redevelopers of The Village. Minervini says while the victorian spires overlooking Building 50 often catch passerbys' eyes, the modest section dubbed Building 50A -- designed in the 1960s to be administrative offices -- is sometimes ignored.

“The middle section that’s not historic often gets overlooked,” says Minervini “I think [the installation] fulfills the idea of getting people to pay attention and look up and look around.”

Artist John Sauvé, the man behind The Man, says the project is open to interpretation, but he hopes each piece will spark conversation about art.

“The dialogue, that’s what it’s all about,” he says. As to the installations’ shape and color, Sauvé remains vague, saying only that he has been working with the same silhouette for more than 20 years. Sauvé says he's pleased to see the places hosting Man in the City take ownership of each installation, which he thinks creates a stronger relationship between art and architecture. 

“This [project] was designed to identify the buildings,” he says. “We’re trying to bring attention to them just as much as the artwork.”

Sauvé, 52, is a internationally renowned sculptor and printmaker and a Detroit native. He has worked for the Michigan Commission on Art in Public Places, and studied art history and arts administration at Michigan State University.

“I couldn't work with better partners than Crooked Tree,” says Sauvé of the organization founded in Petoskey with new roots in Traverse City.

McSurely says there are plans to install several more Man in the City installations around town in the very near future, though she prefers not to disclose the locations.

“The goal is to have people sort of come upon these,” she says. “It’s not a saturation project, it’s not like everywhere you go you’re going to see an orange man.”

McSurely does say however that Crooked Tree will make a map of all installation locations available as more are installed.

The new installations in Traverse City will be added to the 20 that are already up around Northern Michigan. These will join the more than 40 Man in the City pieces on Detroit rooftops. Man in the City installations will be on display through October 2016.