Filed under: Public Art
Public Art
Last class we were asked to find something on the street and use it as inspiration for a public art installation. Finding stuff on the street is one of my favorite NYC things to do, actually. You should see the stuff I’ve collected (and now have in my apt): tiger figurine, ninja turtle figurine, tiny bell, eggplant magnet, etc. SO, limiting myself to just one thing on the street was a challenge.
I came back to class with the following:
A nicely whittled stick
A lost gardening(ish) glove
A poem entitled “Happenstance” written by a guy on the street
A billion cool ideas seeped in and out of my mind while considering possible art installations. The issue with most of them: $$, time, general lack of resources. For example, I’d love to erect a giant “wailing wall”-type structure in the middle of some large corporate building plaza (similar area as “tilted arc”). I would call it something like the Wishing Wall though and small pieces of paper and pens would be provided, encouraging passersby to write their wishes/hopes/dreams on a piece, fold it up, and stick it in one of the nooks and crannies of the wall (made out of stone). Clearly, this is not possible for this project…but an idea nonetheless.
What I’ve actually decided to do is this:
Take a long piece of paper (around 10 feet long) and with thick magic marker, write a poem on it (exact poem yet to be determined). Then I will take the strip of paper and wrap it around a tree trunk (exact tree location yet to be determined).
Poem inspired by the Happenstance poem. Wrapping poem around tree inspired by whittled stick; instead of whittling away at the bark though, we’re adding a new layer.
Potential part II of installation (inspired by glove and the act of pitching in):
A tree next to the poet-tree (cool how that sounds like “poetry”, eh?) will have a strip of paper of the same dimensions wrapped around its trunk. But, this strip of paper will contain only various/random words scattered on it (maybe with these words on the top: Poet, try!). There will be several Sharpie markers hanging from strings attached to the tree branches. The hope is that people will grab a sharpie and jot something down on the sheet of paper in response to one of the words. The end result would be something like “citizen poetry”…people off the street contributing their own piece to one massive poem.
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