AIRPORT PROJECT – TERMINAL C, BUSH IAH:  SKY BARS / WONDER WINDOWS/ CLOUD PORTALS / JANUARY 2022

    Where did you want to go when you were 10 years old? What was your favorite thing? Our imaginations are boundless at that age. For me, as a youngster, there was nothing more exciting than getting to fly on a plane out to visit my grandparents in Sarasota FL and sitting in the window seat. A call for entries, age group 6 - 12 will be submitted through several area children's art schools for drawings seeking a response to "If you could go anywhere where would you go?" and "What would do you imagine you would find there?" The “Sky Bar,” “Window Works,” and “Cloud Portal” pieces that are proposed here are not only about our imaginations but traveling and destinations as well. All student participants would be rewarded with their own reproduction of the final artwork and recognition on an identifying wall plaque installed on site with the finished piece. I’m open to suggestions about where we could go to recruit our artists, but schools and organizations I am familiar with are listed at the bottom of this proposal. The final budget will include funds for the needed art supplies, and with guidance from the schools something for an award ceremony where our young artists are recognized for what I am sure will be pure genius. I don’t want to make this a “contest” as such.  Also, please note that for the purposes of this proposal I have gleaned just such images from the internet as examples. 
    The “Sky Bar,” “Window Work,” and “Cloud Portals” are lenticular lens graphics constructions. If you are familiar with the funny gag glasses with the eyes that opened and close, then you are familiar with the “lenticular lens” technique. So now please forget that image. I took lenticular art to new destinations in the early 2000’s and the technology has come a long, long way in the last 60 years. It’s really a beautiful method. 
     I got involved with lenticular trying to solve a problem presented to me in my collaboration and printmaking studio. I worked with dozens of artists at the Redbud Gallery building over a 10-year period from 2000 through 2011. I produced work with friends Terrell James, James McGee, Richard Stout, and Ed Wilson, and sometimes worked digitally at a distance as was the case with Cora Cohen in New York. We were always pushing the boundaries of the usual printmaking and digital printing techniques in the studio. With each new artist, a new challenge. Every once in a while, an artist would present me with a real head scratcher, as was the case with Nancy Kienholz. The initial image was one of her, and another of her late husband Ed Kienholz, scanned from historical documentation done in the early 1970s. We had no good way to have one image morph into the other as desired with any regular studio techniques. You’ll see why we really wanted to do this when you see the finished example included with this proposal. Art historian David Brauer suggested using what he used to find as a surprise in a Cracker Jack box; an eye that would open and close printed on a little square card. I did the research, installed the needed programs to build the animations in my computer, and then developed a good relationship outside the studio for the actual printing. I acted as Nancy's computer jockey for the better part of a decade, logging hundreds of hours on the internet, gleaning material, and collaging hundreds of images into dozens of large format lenticular lens graphics. A whole new series of works were created for Kienholz using this technique. 
      Lenticular lens graphics have come a long way since the funny Cracker Jack surprises. They can accommodate up to 32 frames of animation, with a vivid color palate, high resolution, and reach sizes of 4 by 8 ft. per tile, and as I did with the Kienholz pieces can be tiled together to create even larger works up to billboard-size. A number of examples of finished works from these collaborations are included as a link to .gif animations with this proposal. A link will be provided to those images with my proposal image list. 
      Window Work pieces are lenticular lens graphic panels surrounded by window framing suggesting big skies as seen through tall windows. The Cloud Portals are round over-sized windows surrounded by fabrication suggesting travel on an imaginary vessel and a place to gaze out from. Both ideas incorporate the images appearing and disappearing in the blue skies and puffy clouds our young artists have imagined they might go and what they would find there. Many of the proposed locations for art in Terminal C would work very well with these two ideas. 
The Sky Bars are proposed for the expanse enclosed by the window wall at Terminal C, location three. This would be an arrangement of columns rising up from the floor of various heights and dimensions. These towers are still incorporating the images of the student’s ideas, blue skies, puffy clouds, but would also include lenticular surfaces dedicated to a purely aesthetic element of intermittent kinetic vertical rainbows.