Filling the Void is a project that was located at YouthLink, in downtown Minneapolis.  It’s kind of a resource center, a one-stop shop for youth experiencing homelessness. They can go in there and get counseling, or medical attention…  There’s a housing component to it now that was just added; it wasn’t there originally.

In 2013, I got a grant from Forecast Public Art and McKnight. It was a mid-career public arts grant, so the idea was, if you’re a mid-career public artist, come up with a project that you want to do. Because typically you’d go after competitions where there’s a theme, and there’s a site–but this was open ended.  Do something that you want to do.

Using fiber, I’ve always been confronted with permanence in a piece of art because is fiber going to last? It’s not maybe super short term, but it’s also not long term.  It can be a middle-ground material. So I was interested in the idea of making a piece of art that could change.  That was the basic idea, even before I worked with YouthLink. How do I make a piece of art that really can change, that can keep changing into the future?

So it seemed to me that there was a permanent component to it, and there was this more temporary component.  And having that idea, and getting the grant, I found YouthLink–and I specifically found YouthLink because of the population it serves, the homeless.  Homeless youth seemed to me an ideal population for this project because they’re young, they have energy, they don’t have a place that is home, so they need some kind of space that they can claim somehow.  They’re often not visible. And it’s a changing population. So it seemed like there would be some incentive to take this on, this project, and actually embrace it.

So I approached YouthLink, and YouthLink has a partner organization called Kulture Klub, which is just about art, and connecting homeless youth with artists and doing art projects. So that was even more perfect, because I could then partner with them.  I said, look, I’m interested in doing a piece of permanent art for the building, for YouthLink, which happened to be a very invisible building–low, off the radar, across 394, you didn’t even know it was there.  And youth didn’t even know it was there all the time–there’s nothing that calls it out. So I said, I want to do a piece of permanent art that can change, where art installations can keep happening–different ones, not just mine. But artists-in-residence and youth can come up with something–it introduces a whole way of doing art–it’s like a rotating outdoor gallery.  So they bought into that and that’s really kind of the concept of the whole piece.

Filling the Void 1 is just a generic frame.  It’s a three-dimensional billboard frame, without a billboard on it.  So it’s a steel structure. It was 20 feet long, maybe 15 feet tall, 4 feet wide.  It’s made of square steel tubes, so it’s like a grid, and then there’s steel mesh, so it’s almost like a cage, in a way, but it’s like a billboard.  It just sat there on the ground, on footings. But you could get inside it–there was a little door–and the idea was that you could then do anything–you could attach things to this frame: rope, fiber, flowers, photos. And there were lights too.

We started with a fiber installation, because that’s what I do, knowing full well that it would come down at some point and then the next artist would come in with whatever they did.  So it was really just about weaving this frame–weaving colored rope through the mesh, back through the space, any way that happened, and getting as many people as we could, kids, staff, whatever, family, friends, to come.  I think we did the weaving process over a couple months.

[coming soon: changing Filling the Void!]

filling the void, Minneapolis, public art