Client: Northern Spark: Weisman Art Museum: Forecast Public Art

Overview

River of Iron
Cast iron
6” x 236” x 171”
Northern Spark
Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota
Pour performance – June 13-14, 2015/ Exhibition of casting – 2016

McKnight Public Artist Professional Development Grant/ Forecast Public Art, Minnesota
Imagine Fund Special Event Grant, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
XYZ Lab/ U-Spatial/ UROP/ Department of Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
St. Paul Neighborhood Network, Minnesota
Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota
Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota
Northernlights.org, Minnesota

Goals

River of Iron: Pouring the Mississippi
Rivers are the lifeblood of landscape, as necessary to a healthy environment as iron is within our bloodstream. River of Iron: Pouring the Mississippi focuses on the importance of the Mississippi watershed within our lives and its beauty and vulnerability. From its headwaters in Lake Itasca, to its delta in Louisiana, the Mississippi stretches from the Western Rockies to the Appalachian mountains in the East. Poured at the foot of the Weisman Art Museum next to the Mississippi River, the great tributaries of the Mississippi including the Yellowstone, Missouri and Platte Rivers in the West, the Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee in the East, and the Red River and Arkansas in the South were cast river by river throughout the night of Northern Spark, in a public performative event.

Process

This project was funded by a McKnight Public Artist Professional Development Grant/Forecast Public Art and an Imagine Fund Special Event Award/ University of Minnesota.
Additional support from the Weisman Art Museum, Franconia Sculpture Park, University of Minnesota Art Department and Foundry, Steve Brunsberg and St. Paul Neighborhood Network, Northernlights.org, XYZ Lab and U-Spatial/ University of Minnesota and Nelson Minar. Iron artists and assistants included local and regional sculptors specializing in cast iron process and graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota.