This video celebrates my interest in bringing art to ordinary people, built into a Public natural areas. This generally involves very large structures in spaces where folk can gather. Such works are best shown in a location that’s fascinating in itself with contours and form to which a sculpture can relate challenge or complement.
Coast of California, in Long Beach, California, where I already have one monumental sculpture, “Puff of Wind”, that commands and complements the landscape.
Coast of California, in Long Beach, California, where I already have one monumental sculpture, “Puff of Wind”, that commands and complements the landscape.
However, all of the sculptures I show in this video are tentative and would be modified, if that would be fitting, to the new location once commissioned for a specific location. I chose to place my new works either side of a road going to a popular beach.
The sculptures and new sweeping bold infrastructure are original designs of one artist, myself, Asher Kelman, available for private or Public installations.
The video shows how seemingly limited roadside areas can be transformed with walkways and plazas to allow folk to wander the entire new sculpture garden experience.
For Public Art, local folk and tourists must be be free to enter at no charge. The walkways can invite exploration of the landscape beauty with easy interaction with sculptures or to simply walk on to the beach or some other public facility. I wish to uplift everyone and hopefully inspire a few to invent and imagine a better and healthier world.
The works shown are available for sale or for commission from modest priced miniatures to shelf models, free standing interior forms to ambitious monumental Public Art. The largest forms weigh tons but the smallest, can be just a few ounces or pounds in weight, more within reach and best suitable for indoor display.
The Long Beach Museum of Art rear location abuts on the hillside above Junipero Avenue. This provides as fascinating opportunity to have an engaging live water feature that straddles the sculpture garden and Museum of art borders. An ideal option would be a formation of Corten rusted steel in the form of giant rocks over which the water would cascade. It turns out that Corten can be readily bonded by welding to stainless steel. So certain upper surface can be highlighted with stainless steel so the water fall would be very dimensional and would sparkle in the sections flowing over stainless steel.
Below the falls would be a large hillside pool with naive Californian plants and ducks.
hillside.
There will be benches and grass as places to stop and relax. A place to rest, admire and meditate. The location will be alive with sunset lights, viewable from both the Museum of Art and the Hillside from Junipero Avenue.
For your repose; the passer by, Long Beach offers a seat to you
In addition to have crowds of visitors that are constantly circulating, others will be on their way to the beach, to swimming, fishing, boating or volley ball.
The sculpture garden needs a number of small locations with tables and seats, where groups of family or friends can gather privately to relax or celebrate. So we have designed a number of sites on the hillside below the Long Beach Museum of Art, with Cabanas giving sun protection and generous dining space.
They will enjoy panoramic views of the entire Sculpture Garden and the adjacent beach and ocean. We imagine that these locations will be in high demand for special occasions and will be booked in advance and perhaps a fee to cover maintenance and clean necessitated.
When two people meet, we trade ideas in a conversation. Perhaps one person needs something or wants to make a proposal. How does such a that transaction proceed.
Here, the artist presents a conversation: a man making a proposal to a woman he likes. Each person expresses, as least in part, what they really want to achieve, but presents that in the post attractive way. The person listening has to hear out the other person but also to try to determine what’s left unsaid.
So a conversation is actually a struggle. Here, one person, might have power and resources and the other, for example, beauty and self-worth. The latter has to be acknowledged, accommodated, nurtured not merely bought! The male might boast his resources, ideas, dreams, wishes, wants and accomplishments. The woman, hanging on his every word looks for nuances that reveal a character capable of commitment and irrevocable sharing. The conversation is not what’s said, but what is expressed and discovered despite that actual meanings of the particular words
The one parson might be looking for immediate advantage. The other may want longer term commitment.
Out of a good conversation, each person, in the end should know the other’s full intent and reliability. Out of that comes the possibility of agreements that outlasts todays transient needs.
In this work, sensuously curved stainless steel tubes form both a man and a woman. The former has a flamboyant main of hair made of a spiral of blue glass. The woman has a receptive open arc of curved steel with yellow glass ovals representing her supply of eggs to be fertilized. That’s what women uniquely posses, a reproductive system that invests all its energy on one pregnancy at a time with high risk to herself. The male, by contrast, is free to move off and thats why understanding true long term intent is so much more important for the biological woman than the interested male seeking to bond with her.
Celebrates her independence from masculine measures of worth, rank and power. Is the woman really made from a spare part of a man? Could woman be another parallel, but different kind of creature, exchanging gifts and devotion with her mate of choice?
“Gateway” shows a sequence of open arches. There’s a very fine cooling mist in the summer. It provides spaces with relief from the sun during the day. Evenings, it’s lit with romantic light welcoming folk for a leisurely stroll.
This work signifies the transitions or portals in life between stages of our journeys, childhood to teen, then to young go for thrills young adult, to marriage and one new challenge and adventure after another, until future is seen in the eyes of grandchildren. That’s the last “portal”.
An abstraction for imagining things anyone is to free make with simple things at home: card, ribbons, glue and chalk.
This simple structure was formed from a necklace sprayed with glue and dusted with white chalk and scanned by 3D with just an iPhone and then decorated as an example of how one can be empowered to use everyday things one already owns and represent them in a new way to intrigue others as art.
Adam holds the globe. This is both educational and inspirational. I want to stimulate children to think on a large scale, beyond the limits of origin of birth, village, city and language. I also hope this will create the idea that our planet is something very precious for us to protect!
At the summit of Junipero Avenue, behind the single artillery gun of World War II defense, is the location for a water moat surrounded monumental public artwork standing 30 Ft high.
Its made up of curved open arched ribbons and tubes of mirror-polished and glossy red stainless steel. Vertical Modigliani-like skinny forms congregate between the curved tubes and ribbons.
It shows a convoluted path of life, round, (feminine) meeting a flamboyant ribbon, (the swagger of men as new fathers or when they shoot a deer)!
This major work is meant as a favorite location to sit, relax and meet friends. There’s a water fall pouring from the central very large stone sculpture platform bathed in water, falling to an impressive surrounding protective moat with lily pads and ducks.
Sparked by the sight of “Ritlite” rocks near the village of Lyuti Brod, Iskar Gorge, Bulgaria. The formation fused in my mind with the view of a reclining woman in the once shocking eponymous painting by Gustave Corbet. We see the abstract form of the birth of humanity. It reminds us of the simple path we all take to get into this world. So this epic hillside sculpture of magnificent textured steel shows respect and gratitude to woman for the origins of all lives.
What is feminine? Many folk today have diverse opinions. The artist seeks to pay homage to the powerful role of the human female in the biological continuation of all human endeavor. Because there is, today, no longer an absolute necessity for any woman to commit her body to nine months of pregnancy, we are in danger of under recognizing the existential necessity of new births and therefore the role of the woman as life-giver.
A man can contribute towards a new life by his donation of gametes, but the woman has to totally commit her body to the creation and sustenance of that new child. We have to ask ourselves, how can we encourage women to take on this burden when gender equality allows them, to pursue rewarding lives in business, trades and professions. Perhaps society has to provide a security framework to recognize and support these women who are still willing to raise children to be the next cohort of contributes to our ever demanding social needs.
40 Ft wide cantilevered welcoming granite platforms extending from the ocean side of Junipero Avenue providing residents and tourists unique viewing access of the sandy breach, the wheeling gulls, whales, The Queen Mary, tankers, ships to and from the Port of Long Beach, sailboats, and sky flyers sailing by. They’ll have plantings, interesting sculptures to stop and enjoy and unique seating
For eons, since creation of planet earth, iron has been delivered by meteorites in the form of rocks with pyrite crystals. I am enthralled by such deposits as they are mistaken for genuine veins of gold, “Fools Gold”. But pyrite tarnishes with exposure to air and has to be polished every week or so to keep its gold hue. I have made giant 10 ft pyrite-like eggs with parts of the surface missing to review the same crystal geometry, but in spectacular mirrored stainless steel.
Natural pyrite crystal are made up of tightly packed, interlocking almost perfect cubes of shiny reflective “gold”, creating mirrored surfaces that reflect everything from myriads of points of view!
Thus, these sculptures interact every second with whatever moves around them. They constantly change as we look at them!
The crown of the Sculpture Garden: An impressive monumental public plaza, 30ft high, with sculpture, children frocking in water and breathtaking views of the Pacific. This will become a grand destination location that will be known world wide: Celebrating our love for imagination, art and pushing the boundaries of what magnificent ideas we can each make happen inspired by reflections in water of children playing & the views at sunset though lit wheat stalks of the fiery sunsets over the Pacific Ocean. Above in Bluff Park a new spacious ultramodern Fine Art Exhibition Building is imagined with parking for the entire beach; below, adaptable space for art shows, Weddings and other celebrations to be rented out by the City.
What is feminine? Many folk today have diverse opinions. The artist seeks to pay homage to the powerful role of the human female in the biological continuation of all human endeavor. Because there is, today, no longer an absolute necessity for any woman to commit her body to nine months of pregnancy, we are in danger of under recognizing the existential necessity of new births and therefore the role of the woman as life-giver.
A man can contribute towards a new life by his donation of gametes, but the woman has to totally commit her body to the creation and sustenance of that new child. We have to ask ourselves, how can we encourage women to take on this burden when gender equality allows them, to pursue rewarding lives in business, trades and professions. Perhaps society has to provide a security framework to recognize and support these women who are still willing to raise children to be the next cohort of contributes to our ever demanding social needs.
Woman, generous, arms full of resources for her family
In “REUNION”, (the sequel “SUEÑO”), we experience the consequence of investing generously in education.
By instilling knowledge, skills and values in the young, we provide an engine for societal development and equity.
It’s these children who’s tiny bambo shoots have grown meters high, that guarantee our continued freedom. That growth demolished any “jail walls” allowing the imagined migrant to be united into loving arms.
The work started with the concept of a jailed migrant at the border. However, I realized it was not needed to show that pain just the hope possessed by youngsters, confident of a better future.
Here, a girl and boy plant and water bamboo shoots that will one day be powerful enough to break down “jails” and liberate the oppressed.
This demonstrates our trust that problems we cannot solve immediately, the new generation face and find solutions. It is after all, the education of children with good values that provides our certainty of a better future for all.
Lauds personal devotion and effort, day in day out, to delivering on one own passion! As she stands “on point”, her neck and back arched, we see effortless grace. But decades of harsh athletic training cost her body: perfect fitness. Foremost, lasts perhaps, a decade and the younger dancers displace her. That, in a way is the life for butterflies
A simple derivative of the Rubik 24 segment twistable “Snake”, offers to passers by “Greetings and salutations for a great day!”
“Daughter and son of man Find your mission, The oceans beckon, Your boat will carry our dreams”
Asher Kelman 2016
0 Ft high sculpture of a gaff-rigged sailboat, moving in the wind, riding waves on beautiful waves, inspired by the curls on Venus in the painting, “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli
Such sail boats are a tradition on the Atlantic Coast in Maine and Massachussetts, where even teenagers can sail out on the ocean. In event of very rough winds, just one rope releases the single gaff-rigged sail and the boat is now able to ride out the raging storm.
Installed at 1, Junipero Avenue, Long Beach California
We imagine a teenage couple transfixed at the Statue of Liberty and then magically transported in “The Puff of Wind” across the USA to Long Beach, California, where the great “American Dream” meets the Pacific Ocean! The Art exalts all to strive for their own dreams: for that alone makes America great!
All my work our destiny depends on recognizing and nurturing individual education, worth, opportunity and effort!
Our art is intended to uplift, enrich inspire individual potential and success.
Two facing giant mirror-polished “breaking waves”. Is inspired by the biblical tale of the Exodus from Egypt, with the miracle of safe dry land between towering waves