Stitches and Sticks - Seeking Venues

The Milkweed Project is currently seeking museums, galleries and other art spaces as exhibition venues for the project. The information below is provided to answer questions you may have. Please do not hesitate to contact me with further questions by clicking on the "Contact" button in the sidebar.

What is The Milkweed Project?

The Milkweed Project is a conceptual artwork that will culminate in a large sculpture installation. This sculpture will be assembled from individual fiber pieces made by artists and crafters from all over the world. The idea is to create a piece that celebrates the individual creativity of the human person while also emphasizing our interdependence, thus the goal is to create a project requiring many individual hands but that is, in essence, bigger than a single person.

"The Pod. Watch it Grow," link features individual contributions to the project. These are some of the individual pieces that will be assembled into one sculpture.

The entire project is inspired by the milkweed plant and the stage in its life cycle when it is dying and the pod has opened to reveal the seeds attached to the soft, white filament that allows them to float with the wind, dispersing themselves: a stage that is both beginning and end.

What themes does this project explore?

Though I don't want to over-explain or analyze the artwork, I have developed a list of major themes the project addresses:

-Interdependence, with nature and one another

-Social networking, particularly the use of social networking to spread the project and virtually mimic the way the wind disperses milkweed seeds.

-Macro/Micro: a huge project made up of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions!) of tiny stitches.

-The impersonal nature of technology vs. the personal nature of a handmade object.

-The familiar, comforting nature of traditional knitted objects juxtaposed against the sometimes disconcerting nature of conceptual art.

-The often tenuous relationship between art and craft.

What will the final sculpture look like?

The sculpture will be an assemblage of hundreds of individual pieces sent in by artists and crafters from around the world. Its final form will be dependent upon the pieces sent to me, but my vision is that it will hang from the ceiling, in an effort to reproduce the diaphanous quality of the floating seeds. The sculpture will be a large installation that visitors can walk through. It's palette consists of white, off-white and other light, natural tones and it will be made up of millions of tiny stitches. It will not be a literal milkweed pod. The project is inspired by nature but does not seek to literally represent it. The final piece will be quite large and will most likely require a full gallery room for exhibition.

I would love to see the sculpture travel and its final form will be portable and relatively easy to assemble and disassemble.

Since the geographic range of participants is integral to the concept of the work, exhibit materials will include wall panels listing the names and locations of all participants.

Audiences for this exhibition will include people interested in visual art and/or craft. Anyone interested in knitting and crochet will be amazed at the sheer diversity of stitches represented in the project. The recent explosion in popularity of all things handmade provides a large base for a craft audience, which might be of particular interest to museums and non-profit art spaces looking to expand audiences.

When will The Milkweed Pod be available for exhibition?

The final deadline for pieces to be mailed to me is Dec. 1, 2009. The sculpture will then be assembled and should be ready for exhibition by August 2010.

Thank you so much for your time and interest. Please do not hesitate to email me with further questions!