When I was a kid, I loved the monkey bars in playgrounds, and we could never resist a tree with low branches to climb in.  We also used to hit balls that went into people’s backyards, and on detached garage and lower extended first floors roofs. This required fast climbing of fences; and very often, stepping on one guy’s back and then onto another one’s shoulders to get on the low hanging roof get the ball-and then climb down the same human ladder. We gloried in these physical achievements, and also had some bad falls and bruises . We all had to agree on the the same details of an alternative story about the injury to our inter-conversing parents! It rarely worked, but we did it again. At the same time, as I have said elsewhere, I always loved watching acrobats who stood on each other’s shoulder, were supported on each other’s knees while gripping each other’s hands and limbs.

These fond memories led me to want to design a set of “monkey bars” sculpted a series of acrobats building a human pyramid. I know that due to the cost and the overly cautious construction in today’s litigious society, that  it will never be used as a real playground climbing apparatus.  But it can be a great inspirational public sculpture, that carries and clear and important message.

I initially wired a set of acrobatic figures in a circle that to some extent was reminiscent of-  “The Dance” by Henri Matisse. Gradually, six figures were connected to shoulders, arms, hands, knees and feet.  As I sculpted the figures, they became connected in so many individual positions of strain and support. Every figure has at least four connections to other figures. Even their feet are pressed together, like roots of a tree to provide more strength and stability.. Each figure is critical to the support of all the others. It is the complete, totally cooperative focus of strained effort; by a group of people aimed towards a single major goal.  There is no single person who becomes the star or even the symbol of the groups achievement. All of them are better off, and safer, from their mutual enhancing strength.

Sometimes you become an observer of your own art. The sculpture began to look like the structure of a small hut or a tent. You could imagine that outdoorsman building this “lean to” from chopped branches and covered it with foliage as protection from a storm. I put on Bob Dylan”s “Shelter from the Storm” and I heard the lyrics speak even more –

“Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm

Come in she said……I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

‘Shelter from the Storm” again represents a distinct part of my artistic oriented vision of the world. It is the need for interconnectedness and mutual collaboration to achieve great things.

It is the total usage of every source of strength, that has been given to each person together-not individually-that being utilized here- creates and hold against all normal forces, to maintain this human structure…this protective shelter.

We live in a world where we think it is Steve Jobs-es, Jeff Bezos-es or Elon Musks singularly create the great societal development breakthroughs.  This is part of our serious societal problems, past the “us and them” of today’s political world. WE need we.

But, as John Kennedy said, “Great men are great not from their own achievements, but due to the people that they surround themselves with”. He also said, “We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s’ future.  And we are all mortal.

I want my sculpture to remind us that through mutual respect, understanding and seeing the gray within the black and white-our world will be better.