Before I did public art, I did a lot of work with thread and little teeny fragile delicate sculptures, and I had a studio in Northeast Minneapolis, and they have open studio events.  Jack Becker came and visited–he is the one who founded Forecast Public Art.  He’s really an instrumental guy, not just locally as far as public art, but nationally. I didn’t know who he was and wouldn’t know him from Adam, and he came with a friend, Scott, who had lost his vision. He’d been losing it progressively, not all his life, I can’t remember when it started, but at the point that he and Jack came to my studio, Scott had to be led around and he couldn’t see. 

And one of the things I had a pet peeve about was people touching this work that I did. It’s fragile and you don’t go in and touch work. So here come Jack and Scott, these two guys, and Jack’s explaining and showing him and Scott’s touching the work, and I can see clearly that his vision is not full, so I was very conflicted about what to do.  One part of me was like, you know, this is not okay. And then the other part of me was like, of course it’s okay. He’s experiencing my work.

And Jack introduced himself, gave me his card and said, you should think about public art. I didn’t really know what it was. That was back in 2003, and that was really the beginning of my public art career.

But experiencing the work–that in fact was the insight.  And that’s really the difference. I mean here I was in a little studio, a little gallery setting, and people came to it: they’re already predisposed to art, they’re interested, and typically go to a place and look at a little thing on a pedestal and walk around it and don’t touch and it’s a lot of money and then you go.  But the thing about public art is that it’s out there, uninvited, nobody is asking necessarily for the art, and they’re going to be skateboarding on it and experiencing it in ways you can’t control. So that was kind of a prophetic thing that happened.

Here’s a story about some of my early work:

fiber, studio