During the fall and winter of 2021, BBOI embarked on another ambitious project, proving our originality and capacity to produce spectacles anywhere in the world. Stemming from an inquiry about an outdoor public pop-up art exhibit that would embrace themes of immigrant justice, abundance, and collective care, we came up with the idea of building a sculpture consisting of two giant metal wireframe sneakers, marching forward into the future. It was shown in the City of Houston’s sprawling Emancipation Park.
The client was the dynamic organization United We Dream, who also had a partnership with Houston BLM to do a kickoff and programming around the sculpture. We also worked closely with the good folks at the City of Houston Parks and Recreation department and a few other city departments. And one of our trusted fabricators for the metal work and finishing. It took a village to pull it off! You can see a full detailed accounting of the project, replete with a 360 degree viewing tool on their site at https://giantsneakers.unitedwedream.org/tour-the-sculpture
We knew this was going to be a giant step for all involved. We dig how outdoor art experiences have the potential to engage and have an impact more than your traditional gallery or museum. There’s an accessibility that just comes with such projects. We utilized the client’s themes of abundance and collective care as inspiration and ultimately began building on imagery of marching, protests, rallies, and more. ‘Move Into The Future’ made its way from that. If we’re going to make progress, we all have to be unified, marching into the future together, so a sculpture consisting of giant shoes became an exciting concept.
Once the idea around two large scale shoes became developed & solidified further, we took things to another level by reaching out to and working with diverse trusted artists we knew from around the country who are connected to the immigrant story, and have them present artwork that embodies the project’s themes. We would embed them inside of the ‘tesselations’ in the shoes — the geometric shapes created by the metal frames. Take a second look and you’ll notice that the art and tesselations are fashioned into stripes on the sides of the shoes!
That included Tatyana Fazlalizadeh from Brooklyn, NY, Mer Young from Long Beach (Los Angeles area), CA, and local Houston based artist Alex Arzu, all with different styles but amazing talent and commonality of purpose.
This entire process culminated with a launch event on February 26, 2022 that featured speeches from United We Dream, BLM Houston, our Founder and Artistic Director of the Sculpture Wyatt Closs, artists Mer Young and Alex Arzu, and more. The sculpture was on display until May 17, 2022, nearly 90 days in this beautiful public park. We built it in such a way that it could disassembled and reassembled, so it can travel to other cities.
This project marks a turning point for BBOI in terms of doing more projects like this on scale.
Leadership of United We Dream, Houston BLM, BBOI Founder (and Artistic Director of the project) Wyatt Closs, and artists Mer Young and Alexander Arzú.
