In the film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner builds a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield because a voice tells him, "If you build it, they will come", and so arrive Shoeless Joe Jackson and the banned 1919 Chicago Black Sox, eager to play baseball.
In real life, circa fall 2011, I had just returned from sixteen years overseas to find America deep in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, when Occupy Wall Street began and I returned to painting in public again. There began iThinkOutsideMyBox™, a public studio in a public park where anyone could paint – that moved to the High Line in the fall of 2012.
Two years and twenty thousand paintings later the concept has grown from an activist vehicle for one to an interactive vehicle for all that has become the most attended public engagement activity in the park – an organic growth that I could not possibly have foreseen at the outset but have had the good sense to nurture into a blossoming non-profit social concern that spans genders, ages, skill sets and over 80 countries and counting.
But what about the structure, the physical representation of the work? Compared by many to Charles Eames' House of Cards, a set of custom playing cards with slits for joining together, I didn't pattern the structure on the Eames concept specifically, but must have had the idea buried deep in my memory, having seen it as a child and studied Eames' design concepts for years.
The architecture for me is a simple form-follows-function distillation of the dimensions of the park's concrete decking, divided by the dimensions in which I am able to buy the corrugated plastic. After that bit of fairly simple mathematics, the components are multiples of a basic 4" cube in which our 3"X3" paintings reside, arranged in a pyramidal composition that probably owes more to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water than any particular Eames building.
Two years and twenty thousand paintings later the concept has grown from an activist vehicle for one to an interactive vehicle for all that has become the most attended public engagement activity in the park – an organic growth that I could not possibly have foreseen at the outset but have had the good sense to nurture into a blossoming non-profit social concern that spans genders, ages, skill sets and over 80 countries and counting.
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| Charles Eames, House of Cards |
The architecture for me is a simple form-follows-function distillation of the dimensions of the park's concrete decking, divided by the dimensions in which I am able to buy the corrugated plastic. After that bit of fairly simple mathematics, the components are multiples of a basic 4" cube in which our 3"X3" paintings reside, arranged in a pyramidal composition that probably owes more to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water than any particular Eames building.
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| iThinkOutsideMyBox℠ at night |
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| Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water |
Beginning January, 2015, iThinkOutsideMyBox™ will extend its public engagement activity to the museum space as I begin an Artist in Residence program at a museum in the city I'll name later, once we've locked down all the details. In this next incarnation, I've been asked to work with museum visitors on a daily basis, over a period of time, to create an interactive exhibit that will become part of the permanent collection on site - and the only thing I can tell you is that it will not look like the display above:)
As our exhibit on the High Line was designed specifically to integrate with the space around it, whatever we do in this new museum space will be a synthesis of the art participants create, married to the space in which it resides - creating yet another experience for others to view and interact with.
"If you build it, they will come." Again.
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