There’s an overpass in St. Louis Park, on Louisiana Avenue that spans Minnehaha Creek.  There’s a whole marsh wetlands area that the creek goes into and this is just an overpass that they replaced.  There’s a little pedestrian way under it, and it’s a very utilitarian bridge.

The project is to use that bridge–underneath it, on top, at the ends, and kind of on the rails.  So I teamed up with two other artists and we’re working on that.  We came up with a scheme and we’re each working on a different element.  There’s Lori Greene, who is a mosaic artist in St. Paul.  She has her own business–Mosaic on a Stick–and she’s doing mosaics for the underneath of the bridge.  And Gita Ghei is another artist, and she’s doing bronze castings, and then I’m doing these kind of Prairie Roots-like vertical pieces.  But there’s a theme that’s tying all this together. 

The piece is called Perennial Flow, and it’s all based on the wetlands and the life and the seasons, so it’ll be interesting.  It’ll be good.  The bridge is constructed, Lori’s most of the way through the mosaics.  I’m getting the steel, it’s going to start, and should be done in the spring.  And it’s a combination–it’s like a composition of many little parts.

It’s fun to work with these artists.  We’ve had a great time.  And we’ve geared so we have the freedom to do our own thing, each of us, but we’re still coordinating.  I’m heading it up, I have the most experience with the architecture of drawings and detailing and detail stuff like that. 

It is commissioned by the city of St Louis Park.  There’s illumination, so Lori’s mosaics down under the bridge where the creek goes, one side of it has paved a walking path. The other side you can walk but it’s not paved, and it will be illuminated.  It’ll be interesting.  There’s formwork that was put in the concrete, these circles, almost like bubbles or something.  They get dense at one end and they peter out, and on the opposite side they do the same thing but in a different direction, and she’s just making all these mosaics.  There will be some kind of more literal kind of references to water and animal life and plants and stuff.  

There’s been online engagement.  Gita’s put something together where people can vote–she’s put out certain designs for these bronze castings she’s doing.  It’ll be good.  My part of it will be very Prairie Roots-like.  It’s a little unfortunate we can’t actually use the bridge–the bridge has little pilasters, and we originally proposed that these things have the sculptural grass, but then it in the end turned out that the bridge had been engineered to the utmost economy, so if we wanted to propose that, we’d have to go through a whole re-engineering. It’s like a formality, but MnDOT would require that, which would be pretty much unfeasible.  Because even if we put a little aluminum pole up there, it would technically change the geometry of the bridge and trigger this whole process; it’s just silly.  So we’re doing the pilasters that don’t actually span the bridge.  There’s taller ones that are actually on the banks, and those are fine because they’re not spanning.  And I think at first I was a little bummed.  I am a little bit, but it’ll be different but I don’t think it’ll be any worse.  So, it’ll be interesting to see.

St Louis Park Friends of the Arts has a web page about Perennial Flow.

Perennial Flow, prairie roots, St Louis Park