Janet Echelman: ‘The sky is the canvas for my work’

As a child, Tampa’s Janet Echelman was fascinated by government and policy-making; her dream, in fact, was to be the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Later, she entertained the notion of a career in classical music, and actually performed as a piano soloist with the Florida Orchestra for a series of concerts when she was 14 years old, before deciding that well, she probably was never going to be good enough.

Janet Echelman. Photo: Andrew Sachs, Courtesy Studio Echelman.

The germ of her eventual career as an artist began with the five dress boutiques owned and operated by her mother and her aunt. “I would pick up beautiful scraps from the floor,” Echelman remembers. “Chiffons and sequins. And I would start layering them and make my own little funky things. So that was an inspiration, but I had never done art, or really had a chance to delve into painting or drawing until college.”

Echelman got a B- in her first art class. “When I graduated, I told my art professor that I wanted to be an artist,” she says. “And she recommended I should focus on a backup plan.”

It’s a guarantee that instructor isn’t laughing now, as Janet Echelman has become one of the most revered sculptors in the world. Her giant, dynamically moving pieces made of net-like fibers, site-specific installations, grace urban landscapes in major cities on five continents. It is intuitive, interactive and inspired public art.

This week, her piece Bending Arc is being installed at the new St. Pete Pier. The title references the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Far from stationary, the gossamer work – 424 feet in length, suspended 72 feet above the ground at its highest point- undulates and transforms with wind and light.

Here’s how we got there: In 1997, on a Fullbright Lectureship, Harvard graduate Janet Echelman traveled to India and was invited to create paintings for an exhibition. When her supplies failed to arrive, she attempted to salvage things by attempting to sculpt work in bronze.

That, too, proved problematic, as Echelman told the Catalyst in a phone interview Tuesday:

I realized that my budget wasn’t sufficient to buy the raw metal to create the sculptures I needed to fill these large exhibition spaces. I would work in the bronze studio all day, and just before sunset I would go to the beach, a block away, for exercise, to take a long walk and a swim. And that was the time the fishermen were finishing their work day as well. So every day, I watched them reeling in their nets, just as I was thinking through how many pounds of bronze I’d need, and realizing it’d cost more than I had. In that desperation, I saw the fishermen who I’d been watching every single day, and suddenly saw their nets in a new way. Isn’t that a way to make volumetric form without heavy, solid material? Can I use netting to make sculpture? So I owe everything to desperation and accident.

And things progressed from there.

The first ones were only maybe 10 or 15 feet tall, but I photographed them so they looked 100 feet – by getting close with the background far away. As a kid, I made forts out of sheets and pillows in our house, and I liked how I’d feel cocooned inside those fabric spaces. I wanted my net sculptures to be big enough to have that sense of feeling sheltered and enclosed, but still soft and free. I gradually built them larger each time – and Bending Arc is my largest permanent work in the world. I’m grateful for the help of brilliant professional engineers.

The City of St. Petersburg commissioned the sculpture in 2016.

When I was first commissioned, the new pier was already completely designed, so the only available spot for my sculpture was Spa Beach, which was not being changed. All my art starts with research on its site, and I found historic Spa Beach postcards with octagonal parasols with blue and white stripes, and 1950s bathing outfits. They were playful and whimsical, and I thought this was going to be a fun and lighthearted project.

I was also looking at the marine life that lived underneath the pier, at the way barnacles form geometric colonies. So I began to sketch a colony of three parasol-like barnacles. And you can still see that in the aerial view of the sculpture.

I was thinking about when I look at the sky, and I can really notice it and pay attention to it. So I started using a range of blues that spans from white to black, but with different hues in the middle. The sky is the canvas for my work, so the blue of the sky is part of my art, and the sculpture changes as the sky changes.

After a series of public hearings in 2018, the site of Bending Arc was moved south, from Spa Beach to the heart of the Pier, near the entrance.

The public voiced the issue that the beach was a place for regional shorebirds, and they didn’t want large-scale art to be so close to the area where these birds come for rest. The public hearings led the city to consider other parts of the pier. And that became my new site. And, in fact, the new site was even better. Because now my sculpture is more accessible. Now it can be a meeting place. Here’s an example where the public hearings made the art better – that’s public process at its best.

The new site had been a spa and a public pool, neither of which – along with Spa Beach – were accessible to African Americans prior to 1957.

Through my research, I discovered it was an important civil rights movement site, where local citizens peacefully challenged racial barriers with “swim-ins,” leading to the 1957 Supreme Court case ruling which upheld the rights of all citizens to enjoy the use of the municipal beach and swimming pool, regardless of race, without discrimination.

And there was also a personal aspect. I had family on both sides of Tampa Bay going back to the early 1900s, from the time before the Gandy Bridge was built in 1924. As a child, I remember my grandmother telling me stories about signs in St. Petersburg that read “No Coloreds, Jews or Dogs.” It was a different world. I’ve been discussing this history with museum directors in St. Pete.

The title Bending Arc is really important to me, and it embraces the goal of the new pier, to welcome everyone – all ages, all backgrounds.

And frankly, if you think about the colors of my sculpture – hues of blue like the sky, in a full gradient from white to black. If you observe carefully, you’ll see that when any single knot moves, all the other knots are affected. For me, it becomes a chance to contemplate the inter-connectedness of all of us as members of the human race, and our shared destiny as we interact with nature. We are all inter-woven and braided and knotted together – just like the sculpture.

The net interacts with the wind, and its ever-changing choreography, and it becomes clear that we are all together in this dance with nature.

St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman (yes, he’s there) was among those monitoring lighting tests on “Bending Arc” this week. Photo: Todd Beatty.