Sculptural stainless steel rails frame and light pedestrian crossings across a large canal. The three designs, titled Cat's Cradle, Swizzle Stick, and Cartwheel, each use a similar vocabulary of tilted angles and brushed stainless steel, unifying the decorative elements along the canal.

Date: 2016, 2017

Location: The Grand at Papago Park Center, Tempe, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Salt River Project

Materials: Two stainless steel and stanless steel cable rails with integrated LED lighting.

Team: GBTwo, landscape architects. Magnum Companies and Bernie's Brass, fabrication. Creative Designs in Lighting, lighting design. JE Dunn, general contractor

Photography: Aaron Rothman, ARBR Photo and Mary Lucking

Part of a transit project located near a community library, this project asks the question, if birds were invited in the library, what would they find interesting?

A suite of ten bird-and-book sculptures, accompanied by a birdhouse sculpture that mimics the postmodern architecture of the library, are scattered around the site for visitors to find.

Each book sculpture presents a page from a real book. I attempted to have a wide variety of types of books, which fell into different categories: Fiction, science, how-to, humor, children’s, and arts.

Date: 2017, 2019

Location: Mustang Transit Center, Scottsdale, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Scottsdale Public Art

Project Managers: Jana Weldon, Kevin Vaughn-Brubaker, Jennifer Gill, and Tanya Galen

Materials: Bronze birds and books with marked stainless steel pages, painted aluminum birdhouse with painted steel post.

Fabricators: Bronze casting and finishing by Bollinger Atelier. Pages, assembly, and installation by E Squared Innovations.

Photography: Bill King and Jennifer Gill.

The books:

The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Ukranian Easter Egg Design Book 4 by Natalie Perchyshyn

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems

The Best Nest by P. D. Eastman

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

The Book of Fables by W. S. Merwin

Why Don’t Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings? by David Alexander

Outwitting Squirrels by Bill Adler Jr.

Cooking the Wild Southwest by Carolyn J Niethammer

Mesozoic Birds by Luis Chiappe and Lawrence Witmer

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

In a Desert Garden: Love and Death Among the Insects by John Alcock

FAA 2018 Phoenix Visual Flight Rules Chart

Flora and the Flamingo by Molly Idle

Native Seeds/SEARCH 2018 Seedlisting

Noah’s Favorite Animal Jokes by Jennifer Hahn

When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne

United States War Department Signal Pigeon Company Handbook

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A new lobby for the Arizona Science Center gave me the opportunity to make something big and silly and striking and strange. Because it’s maintained by the AZSC staff, we could use computers and sensors and monitors, and know that it would keep working. The vision behind the telescopes and microscopes a loop of changing perspectives: A giant looking down through the telescopes in the ceiling at us tiny people, we looking back into the sky, animals peering at us through the floor telescope eyepiece. We are big and small, we are us and them.

Date: 2011

Location: Arizona Science Center, Phoenix, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Project Manager: Raphael Ngotie

Materials: Three interactive sculptures, Aluminum, stainless steel, video monitors, video camera, computer and software.

Technical Collaborator: David Tinapple

Fabrication: Magnum Industries

Photographs: Bill King

Mesa Drive Station is located at the edge of Mesa’s original town limits, and is surrounded by historic neighborhoods, churches, and Pioneer Park. The design of the station, a collaboration between the artist and the station’s architects and landscape architects, reflects the feel of the area with vine-filled trellises and artwork styles of the early 20th Century when the neighborhood was developed.

Two 21-foot-tall cut-steel, powder-coated panels, featuring images of a father and a mother reading to their children, tower over the station. At four locations in the station’s shade structure, powder-coated panels with stylized tree imagery frame sixteen storybook panels.

Each porcelain enamel panel, cut in the shape of an open book and measuring 35” x 22”, features a unique story and illustrations based on a real childhood memory of Mesa.

Four of the stories were taken from oral interviews collected by the Mesa Historical Society. The remaining twelve were collected in a series of interviews with the storytellers: men and women who had grown up in Mesa, and generously agreed to share their memories and their time for this project. The stories are all personal memories from childhood in Mesa. Each story was written, edited, and illustrated as a collaboration between the storyteller and me, the project artist. Typically we met first to chat. I explained how the art would be integrated into the light rail station, and I asked the storyteller to share memories from their childhood. In a second meeting the storyteller chose one or two anecdotes, and wrote a first draft of the story and we shared ideas for how to illustrate their story. The pictures were based on memories of the storytellers, personal and historical photographs, plus a pinch of imagination. After the story had been written and the pictures sketched, we communicated through meetings, phone calls, and emails to review and edit the words and drawings through every step of the process, from copy-editing details in the text to suggestions for how to make the illustrations feel true to their own memories. The story illustrations are all hand-cut and hand-printed woodblock prints based on drawings developed with the storytellers. The prints were then scanned, colored, and combined with the story’s text to create the final designs.

The storytellers are: Owen MacDonald, Angy Booker, Elaine Steele, Boyd Rogers, Ruth Nesbitt, Virginia Berg, Willie Wong, Eva Sesate, Gabriel Sesate, Peggy Matsuishi, Zarco Guerrero, Jim Ruiz, Julianna Curtis, Bruce Nelson, Marco Meraz, and Patricia Kaleopa.

Mesa is proud of its reputation as a family-friendly city, not too far removed from its history as a farming community. This project, a portrait of a town through the eye’s of its youngest residents, reflects the wide variety of memories and experiences of childhoods spent playing, working, exploring, and learning. These sixteen stories, along with millions more, make up the history of One Home Town.

A paperback book containing all the stories can be purchased through lulu.com.

Date: 2015

Location: Mesa Drive Light Rail Station
Mesa Drive and Main Street, Mesa, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Valley Metro

Project Manager: MB Finnerty

Architects: Architecton and DWR Architects

Materials: Cut steel and porcelain enamel panels

Photography: Aaron Rothman, ARBR Studio

Collaboration with Dwayne Arnspiger.

Sculptural, cast-concrete tuffets form the bases for eight different hand-made ceramic tile mosaics. Each mosaic presents a different scene of native wildlife in the environment of the Arroyo Chico area, with humans in the background, watching the activity.

The tuffet forms disappear into the beautiful park surroundings, echoing the form of an abstract succulent and the color of the desert. The tiles on top are a splash of color and pattern, illustrating scenes of desert animals in the arroyo. The scenes are filled with details specific to the park, including native plants and flowers, cityscapes, views of the Rincons and Catalinas, and people on BMX bikes, exploring the park paths, having picnics, and chasing butterflies.

Date: 2013

Location: Arroyo Chico Park, Tucson, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Tucson/Pima Arts Council

Project Manager: Sally Krommes

Materials: Handmade tile on eight cast concrete bases

Fabricators: Concrete Designs, Inc., Metalphysic, and Dwayne Arnspiger

Photography: A.T. Willett

The mile-long stretch of the Crosscut Canal path that winds through Papago Park passes through a wide variety of manmade and natural environments, and each bridge reflects its unique site. The North Bridge features sculptural perforated panels set into a truss bridge. The ripple forms echo the movement of the water below, and the subtle form is low to the water to keep views of the red-rock mountains above. The Middle Bridge, which echoes the form of a nearby dam, features two arch forms with built-in seating, dramatically cantilevered over the water. The South Bridge, located in the more natural, shady point in the park features a wood deck and flared arcs of perforated steel, providing a softer-feeling bridge that melts into the landscape, opening up in the center, giving walkers a view of the natural-banked canal. A 30-foot topographic map of the park, canal and path playfully shows visitors the lay of the land. At the north end, two 20 foot thumbprints mark the end of the path. Both designs – topographic lines and thumbprint ridges – are drawn in lines that reflect rippling water, connecting the three elements that make Papago Park such a unique landscape: the water, the mountains and the people.

Did you know that Papago Park used to be a national monument? I didn’t until I started working on this project. It was decommissioned after the government decided that it was too valuable for other purposes, and is now criss-crossed with a big canal and giant utility lines. But it’s still a beautiful park with spectacular red rock formations and open, dark, desert skies at night. When the City of Tempe decided to create a paved multi-use path along the canal, people who used the park were very concerned that the path would detract from the natural feel of the area. My challenge was to create something that could match the scale of the existing infrastructure but not interfere with open desert views. Three bridges, one at each point the path crosses the canal, become natural stopping points to rest, look around, and enjoy the water underfoot. Sculptures that you can bike through, they feel like they’ve been part of the park forever.

Date: 2011

Location: Papago Park, Tempe, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Tempe Public Art

Project Managers: Elizabeth Lagman, Maja Aurora

Materials: Weathering steel railings for three pedestrian bridges, sandblasted paving patterns.

Landscape Architect: Jason Harrington, E Group

Fabrication: CAID, 5 Star Eco Blasting

Awards: 2012 Public Art Network Year in Review, Valley Forward Award of Merit

Photographs: Michael Lundgren, Bill King

The Soleri Bridge Plaza was transformed for one day into a surreal park featuring White Amur, the fish used to clean the canal by the plaza. Artificial turf, balloon trees, picnic blankets, a DJ playing bubbly lounge music, and three large fishtanks created an environment where visitors were able to share a meal in the company of their finned friends. People were invited to bring a picnic basket, buy a boxed lunch from a nearby restaurant, or take a free orange and from the welcome booth. Historian Marshall Shore and Salt River Project biologist Brian Moorhead were on hand to help visitors understand the use of the fish in the Valley’s canal system.

Date: March 25, 2012

Location: Soleri Bridge Plaza, Scottsdale, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Scottsdale Public Art

Details: Temporary art environment and event featuring live White Amur

Project Manager: Kirsten Van Cleef

SRP: Brian Moorhead, Biologist, Jim Duncan, Facilitator

Historian: Marshall Shore

Project Team Leaders: Mykl Wells, Keith Laber

Photographs: A.T. Willett

Abstract patterns of cut steel invite people's eyes to wander as they wait for rides at a new transit center. Designs were integrated into the facility's main structure, bus shelter, and fence.

Date: 2015

Location: Desert Sky Transit Center, 79th Avenue and Thomas Road
Phoenix, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Project Manager: Rebecca Rothman

Materials:
Painted steel fascia: 5 ft x 620 ft
Painted steel fence: 3 ft x 160 ft
Painted steel bus shelter: 12 ft x 18 ft x 6 ft

Design Team: ART Architecture, Kimley-Horn Landscape Architecture

Fabricator: Marzee Water Jet and Haydon Construction

A plaza on the outskirts of Phoenix gives riders a comfortable place to wait for buses. Working with the project's design team, I developed a large outdoor plaza for people waiting for buses into Phoenix. The design includes large-scale shade screens, decorative railings, and seating. The main shade screen provides shade and seating for passengers, and creates a grand entry into the site. The cut-steel screens and railings feature stylized images of routes down out of the surrounding foothills, into the traffic interchanges that can be seen from the site. The artwork’s title comes the song by Supertramp.

Two other shade structures were commissioned for two new park-and-rides. I adjusted the form to fit the new sites, and designed new cut-steel panels to reflect the history and character of those sites. In a Big Country features cowboys leaning against a split-rail fence (or waiting for the bus), and Nothing But Flowers features a farmer (or a golfer?) and bees gazing out on a field of flowers.

Dates: 2011, 2012, 2013

Locations: Happy Valley Park & Ride, 27th Avenue Park & Ride, and 24th Street Park & Ride, Phoenix, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Project Manger: Rebecca Rothman

Details: Powder coated steel shade structures, railings, and bus shelter and landscape design.

Fabrication: Magnum Industries

Landscape Architect: Janet Waibel

A related project titled Blues Birds was also presented at Glendale, AZ’s Jazz and Blues Festival in 2010. Bird Song Sing is an interactive installation that invites visitors to take on the identity of twittering birds. Large bird masks are mounted on microphone stands on a small platform. Visitors can walk up to a mask, and speak, whistle, and sing. The participants’ voices are picked up my microphones inside the bird-masks, and and transformed into birdcalls, which are played from speakers hidden in the platform.

Temporary projects like this one, which are usually presented at festivals, give an opportunity to see and learn how people interact with artworks. People will talk, tell jokes, curse, and laugh into the microphone. When they sing, it’s often Happy Birthday. When it works best, there’s a delight in trying and failing to understand what the person behind the mask is saying.

Date: 2011

Locations:
Glendale Blues Festival, Glendale, AZ
Chalk the Block Festival, El Paso, TX

Commissioning Agencies: Glendale Public Art, El Paso Public Art

Project Manager (Glendale): Gibran Villalobos

Project Manager (El Paso): Patricia Dalbin

Interaction Manager (Glendale): Ricardo Leon

Project Assistant (El Paso): Mykl Wells

Materials: Plexiglass masks with colored adhesive, microphone, speakers, light, computer, custom software

Plexiglass Fabrication: Creative Plastics

Photographs: Alejandra Carrillo, A.T. Willett, Aaron Latham.

Rabbit Hole Tables offers the opportunity for people to imagine themselves inhabiting a different place with a friend or stranger, using their hands as avatars. Each of the six tables has a different miniature setting under glass (a dance studio, a beach, a city playground, a fencing piste, a spa massage room, and a croquet court). As the participant sticks their hand into a hole in the side of a table, it becomes a character in the landscape, where it can socialize with other hands: dancing, giving a massage, building sand castles, fencing, playing miniature tetherball or croquet.

This series of six tables was created as a temporary exhibition for the Paradise Valley Community College gallery, which serves as the lobby for their auditorium. I imagined shy people on a date, going to see a show, and created tiny environments for their hands to inhabit together. I liked the idea that your own hand could serve as an avatar for your whole body: projecting yourself both literally and figuratively into these different spaces. The challenge in designing the boxes was to create the widest range of experiences for the hand so that each box would be not only an extension of the concept, but would be a compelling sensual experience in itself.

Date: 2010

Details: Six 4 ft x 2 ft x 2 ft painted wood tables, tempered glass, model materials.

Table Fabrication: Claes Bergman, Neil Borowitz

Life-size bronze birds populate the rafters of an existing light rail station, intently watching clocks that never move.

When I got this commission to create a piece for an existing light rail station on the outskirts of St. Louis, I had never been to the city. Since I couldn’t very well create a piece that said anything honest or real about a place i had never visited, I decided to focus on an experience I did share with the people at the train station: the way time seems to stand still when you’re waiting for a train. As I sat at the station enjoying the grass and trees surrounding the platform, I started thinking about how differently I experience time compared to the birds and squirrels that inhabit the space around the station. As I sat, watching the seconds tick by, these creatures were living parallel lives completely untied from mechanical time.

Serendipity often adds to the meaning of artworks. Just before I installed this piece, a squirrel interrupted a World Series game in St Louis, and became a local celebrity. The bronze squirrel in the piece, placed next to a cardinal, meant more to the locals than I had intended.

Date: 2012

Location: Wellston Light Rail Station, St. Louis, MO

Commissioning Agency: St. Louis Metro

Project Manager: David Allen

Materials: Bronze sculptures, Stainless steel base

Sculpting Assistant: Keith Laber

Bronze Casting: Bollinger Atelier

Base fabrication and installation: Troco

A suite of artworks tell the history of the neighborhood, which includes a historic Phoenix Indian School. Given the complex history of the site, the project included hundreds of hours of research in cooperation with community groups to ensure a broad and balanced telling of the stories that make up the area’s history. The project consists of three parts:

Fifteen sets of "memory markers" based on oral histories about the area are installed on the platform. Mounted on the station's vertical columns, each memory marker consists of between 3 and 5 enamel-on-steel panels. Each 5 in. x 7 in. panel feature a black-and-white historic photograph of a place near the station, with text and silhouettes printed on top. The text describes a memory of an event that happened at that site, and the silhouettes illustrate that memory in action. A long arrow connects each series of panels, and point in the direction of the memory's location.

Near the ticket machines at the north and south entrance to the station, two 8 ft. x 10 ft. terrazzo "murals" are installed in the ground. Each mural features a photograph of Central Avenue as it looked in 2004 -- one looking north, the other looking south, before the light rail was installed.

Twelve 22" x 30" glass panels are mounted in a fence that runs along side the entry ramps to the platform. There are two groups with six panels in each: one at the north end of the platform, and one at the south. Since passengers will be seeing them as they walk both to and from the platform, each group is meant to be read left-to-right and right-to-left.

Date: 2008

Location: Indian School Light Rail Station, Phoenix, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Valley Metro Rail

Project Manager: MB Finnerty

Materials: Terazzo, baked enamel, stainless steel arrows, powder-coated steel frames, and glass with image interlayers.

Fabrication: KVO Industries, Advance Terrazzo, Magnum Industries, Paragon Glass

Awards: 2009 Public Art Network Year in Review

Collaboration with Pete Goldlust.

Our aim for the piece was to help the station blend with the festive, colorful atmosphere of 4th Avenue. Bold colors and biomorphic forms of flowers, cactus, bugs, and fruits enliven the station with playful references to the desert and 4th Avenue’s eclectic culture.

The artwork is comprised of two parts: The station furniture (seats, shade panels, trash can and columns) are covered with cut-metal panels featuring a wide swath of dancing forms filled with fun details to be discovered. The station platform has been turned into colorful Lithomosaic mural of psychedelic cactus forms. The two parts work together to make the platform a bright, fun island in the middle of 4th Avenue.

Date: 2013

Location: 4th Avenue Streetcar Station, Tucson, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Tucson/Pima Arts Council

Project Manager: Mary Ellen Wooten

Materials: Lithomosaic platform and cut steel seat backs, panels, and trash receptacles.

Fabricator: Lithomosaic installed by Progressive Hardscapes

Tile Assistant: Mona Higuchi

Amur Serenade is an interactive artwork that creates a playful connection between visitors to the Scottsdale waterfront and the Arizona Canal. Inspired by real fish (White Amur, a sterile carp) that the water company uses to clean the Valley's canals, computer-generated fish appear to swim below the bridge, projected onto the surface of the water. Another projector creates a slow procession of giant fish that seem to float out of the water and up the buildings along the canal.

A lighted glass sign on the bridge invites people to sing to the fish. As people talk, sing, the fish respond to their voices: turning colors on different notes and wiggling to the music. In the past few years, the Valley has begun to change the way it views the canals-- from an ugly utility that was hidden and ignored, to the existing framework for a system of useful and beautiful pedestrian spaces. This artwork was designed in this same spirit: to help people see the canal in a new and different way. Using the murky canal water as the projection screen (who knows what lives down there?) Amur Serenadeinvents a population of dancing, rainbow-hued fish living in the canal, who come up at night to dance. Visitors are invited to participate in the fantasy, by peering down into the water at the circling fish and by singing to them. Turning the tables on the usual art-audience situation, the visitors become the performers, and the fish become the audience, wriggling in response to the voices.

Date: 2008, reprised in 2012

Location: Marshall Way Bridge, Scottsdale, AZ

Commissioning Agency: Scottsdale Public Art

Project Managers: Diana Fisher, Sophie Hook

Materials: Neon-lit glass sign, microphone, computers, digital projectors, and custom software

Sign Fabrication: Stonehenge Designs

Awards: 2009 Public Art Network Year in Review

Built as part of a streetscape redevelopment in the formerly rural town of Laveen, AZ, the bus shelters and benches were designed to provide a comfortable place for people to inhabit while waiting for busses or walking along 35th Avenue. A small heard of cows, recalling the area’s disappearing dairy farms, appear to nap in the shade of nearby mesquite trees, keeping the bus riders company while they wait.

As part of the project, I created a two-week artist residency program with Tiffany Enriquez's sixth grade honors art class at Cash School, located near the project area. The students created icons that reflected treasured parts of their changing neighborhood, and learned to silkscreen the images onto paper and t-shirts. The images were then transformed into boot-stitch designs that were incorporated into the backs of the benches.

Date: 2008

Location: 35th Avenue at Southern Avenue, Phoenix, AZ

Project Managers: Chris Kelley, Donna Isaac

Fabricators: CAID, Metalphysic, Southwest Precast Concrete

Materials: Five bus shelters: rusted steel with solar lighting. Fifteen benches: powder-coated, laser-cut steel. Ten cow sculptures: painted, cast concrete.