What will Collection Point look like? It’s a round space, about 18 feet in diameter.  And it’s made up of these tall vertical frames, steel frames that almost look like ladders.  And using the ladder analogy, each rung of the ladder going up is a bracket that holds one of these precast concrete lids at a different angle.  So as you move up the sculpture toward the sky, the angle of these lids changes as if they’re opening. So when you do that, and then arrange them in a circle–there are eight of these frames–it has kind of a flower-like effect, they’re all opening outwards.

 And then the other component to this is that on the underside of the lid, which is just flat–it’s smooth concrete–I’m going to paint with stencils some abstracted imagery from community input that I collected for over a year in about a dozen different settings in the Northeast Minneapolis.  I went to various places in Northeast and gave general open-ended questions and prompts that people responded to with drawings. I had papers that were actually designed with the same graphic design as the temporary street notices to move your car when there’s street cleaning, because that’s what’s in this building is these signs–that’s their department–and I figured it would get people’s attention.  So instead of saying “Warning, move your car or be towed,” everything’s the same but I changed the words to “What is the city to you?” or “What does your house look like?” or “When was the last time you were at the river?” –different prompts. They were translated into Spanish or Somali, and I collected these in various settings. I went to the Ecuadorian embassy once, went to a brewery, went to the fire station, went to a community center. From those images, I will kind of crop a detail and then I will use those as the design and I will paint the underside of the concrete.  There are 96 of these panels, and there will be 20-30 that will be painted with about 14 different images in five different colors.

The concrete is also colored. There are four different colors of concrete. The concrete is actually dyed, pigmented concrete. So these lids as they go up, there’s kind of a gradation. They’re earthy tones, but they’ll start as kind of a dark brown, and then they’ll go to a more reddish, and then beige, and then lighter as they go up.

I worked with the architect and the landscape architect… it’s a pretty interesting site.  It’s right on University and 26th in Northeast. There’s a linear rain garden along the building, and there’s a curving bike path, and there will be steps up to the sculpture, so it’ll be really interesting.

It’s being built right now, the steel is, and the concrete, and at the end of September is when it’s supposed to be installed.  The foundation’s already built and in. It’s a big foundation. There are about 40,000 pounds of steel. And each one of these concrete panels weighs about 180 pounds.  So it’s tricky!

collection point, in progress, Minneapolis, public art