During the fall and winter of 2021, BBOI embarked on an ambitious project. 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.
There’s another blog post about the concept and the purpose and artists. You can see that here. But this particular write-up goes deeper into how we did it.
How We Did It
Assembling an Inspiration Board of Sorts
Early on, our Founder and Creative Producer Wyatt Closs, was intrigued by the notion of creating an work with a wireframe as the basis of aesthetics and construction. The sense of openness and the ability to do something interesting with the tessellations (the shapes forms by rods in a wireframe structure) would lend itself to accessibility, airiness and could accommodate contributions by multiple artists. A group art show on sneakers!
As always, we scavenge not just the internet but walking around and finding inspiration at markets and crafty shops and in this case, hard to avoid looking at all types of monkey bars.
Mock Ups and Sketches
Once the idea around two large scale shoes became developed & solidified further, we then added another element: work with artists around the country who are connected to the immigrant story, and have them present artwork that embodies the project’s themes. Working with Tatyana Fazlalizadeh from Brooklyn, NY, Mer Young from Long Beach (Los Angeles), CA, and local Houston based artist Alex Arzu, all with different styles but amazing talent. One of our original ideas was to print the artwork on acrylic tiles for a “stained glass” effect.
Making those Tesselation Tiles
After testing a few pieces out, we determined that the printing on translucent acrylic actually caused a loss in detail, which we didn’t want to sacrifice. Upon brainstorming with one of our fabricators (and doing virtual tests via FaceTime), we opted to use Dibond, a lightweight, durable aluminum composite that we had success with for our ‘Revolve Resolve’ project. This would also ensure the panels would be able to handle the elements outdoors, as this sculpture would be installed in a public park and need to be up for 90 days.
Piecing it Together, Mechanically and Culturally
We had one of our longtime engineering collaborators create structural drawings from our sketches, which would then be passed to the fabrication team. We conducted a rather extensive search for fabricators who could take on this project and meet our tight deadlines. One other factor that was important to consider here, as with other participants in this project, was a connection to the immigrant story itself, which we took great pride in identifying for the client and making the project outcome with greater meaning.
Our local fabricator was in Houston and his family came to the US from Guatemala. His father is a master woodworker and runs his own custom cabinetry business, so he began learning about carpentry & metal work at a fairly young age. He continued to learn this craft through high school until he began taking on projects of his own, including a 2020 wireframe sculpture in a neighborhood of Houston. This was not some big overloaded, corporate-driven production company, but a genuine craftsperson with engineering chops. When we discovered this project, we knew they and their crew would be right to take our engineered drawings and translate them into reality. He said he was taking an old school approach to this, and actually built a small scale (about 18” tall) version of the sculpture to ensure that all the dimensions were on point. Cutest little wireframe sneakers you ever saw.
Bringing It All To Life
After about 2 months of fabrication and even more time discussing the project with various city departments, we received all the necessary permits and permissions to install our sculpture at Emancipation Park in Houston’s Third Ward, which in 2020 was designated as a cultural district by the The Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA). Our team traveled to Houston to oversee the installation in mid-February 2022. Geison and his team worked for three days making sure everything was perfect, including paint touch ups and welding on-site.
A New Kind of Dolly
Being resourceful is nothing new but this latest solution was kinda dope in a low-key way. For example, our fabricator told us that although each piece of the sculpture was about 200-300 lbs, they would be able to transport them from the street to the installation site using a dolly. But we were like where’s a dolly that big?. Well, it didn’t exist. The team a built a custom dolly using 2×4 lumber and giant casters in a little under 15 minutes. No big deal!
This entire process culminated with a launch event on February 26th 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 will be on display until May 17th, after which it will either travel to other cities, or possibly extend its stay in Houston. If you can’t make it to Houston to see it in person, you can take a virtual tour here.
