Bryan Ohno is hoping to reverse the downward spiral of homelessness with a soaring sculpture in Lake Union Park.
Ohno is an art-project developer, gallery owner and president of Urban Art Concept (UAC), the organization coordinating the project that focuses on humanizing everyday space with art.
His project, called “The Spiral of Hope,” is the first in what is called the “Finding Home” series. The extended art project seeks to promote awareness of family homelessness among artists and art viewers, and will provide artists with an opportunity to respond to issues of poverty with socially conscious artwork.
Aside from bringing more attention to family homelessness, the spiral has a personal significance to Ohno, who, as an art student in college, did a similar project.
“[The project] was very uplifting,” he said. “The memory was very strong, and when I heard of the many families that were homeless and the phrase ‘spiraling out of control’ or ‘spiraling down,’ it meant something entirely different from what I thought a ‘spiral’ meant. I wanted to make it positive and immediately felt it was the right thing to do.”
A universal symbol
Construction began April 27 and is continuing on weekends. The installation — which will open May 18 and close June 17 — will feature a 300-foot-long sculpture made of thousands of recovered tree branches collected from local parks and private woodlands throughout Seattle.
UAC interns, volunteers, community members and families who have experienced homelessness will construct the 12-foot-tall structure.
Berry Mitzman, the director for Seattle University’s (SU) Project Homelessness, said SU and UAC started talking last fall about bringing more awareness to family homelessness by other means than a journalistic approach. They contacted Ohno about the possibility of incorporating art with increasing public awareness of the issue after seeing how some of his previous art projects had sparked conversation within communities. Mitzman said he was looking for other ways to start discussions about the issue and how to reach out to the community in unexpected ways.
“Bryan was already working with Seattle Parks department to bring public art into the parks this year, and that began discussion with him that led to the idea of the ‘Spiral’ art installation,” Mitzman said. “I thought it would be interesting to have him create art to bring awareness to family homelessness.”
As a partnership among Seattle Parks and Recreation, Seattle University’s Project on Family Homelessness and Urban Art Concept, the project will emulate the spirals often found in nature and architecture, but it will spiral up to serve as a metaphor for hope and opportunity, Ohno said. Visitors will be able to walk through the labyrinth-like spiral, entering through the spiral’s suspended entrance and twisting toward the living tree at the center.
“We quickly started thinking of ways of how to do something that would bring people together,” Ohno said. The idea was that incorporating art might inspire community members to come together to make something.
“We came up with the idea of creating a universal symbol, the spiral, and wanted to make a monumental spiral made of fallen tree branches and make it a part that’s relatively new to history but have it start to shape its own identity. What a way to start an art project,” he explained.
Opening up conversation
In an urban setting such as Seattle, Ohno said people’s experiences are often horizontal or vertical in terms of the architecture found there, especially in downtown areas. However, he said the spiral’s inherently different nature will be attractive to people and invites them to join the larger conversation he hopes will stem from the project.
Its location will also help draw people in. Victoria Schoenberg, of Seattle Parks and Recreation, said the renovated Lake Union Park is located in one of Seattle’s most vibrant neighborhoods, at the south end of the lake.
“The park is a brand-new, regional amenity,” she said of the park’s 2010 completion that included $5 million worth of amenities. “It’s a beautiful, new space that can be seen from anywhere, and in a neighborhood in Seattle that’s new and vibrant and has lots of new stuff happening. There’s a great visibility in that space, so it’s a part of the city that has a lot of energy to it, and we’re happy to bring things like [Ohno’s] spiral to it to support that energy.”
So far, more than 50 people have participated in the project. Ohno is also reaching out to about 300 artists in the community — writers, painters, musicians, sculptors and people from various other artistic fields — to invite them to participate in creating the installation.
“This is the magical part: In making art together, it opens conversation,” Ohno said. “Just like when people go and have a family meal together, it’s a process that makes it OK to talk and open up. And we felt that, if we could bring artists from different disciplines in, then they could have this experience and maybe bring it into their work later on. The goal is to keep the dialogue going artistically, because artistically, it allows for different, creative ways to reach people.”