First Friday past and future.

For starters, whether or not you made it to our grand opening the First Friday of August, we’d love to have you join us on September 3 from 6-9 PM for this next First Friday. Just like last month, we’re not the only studio open, so come and experience the art of the Hungerford Urban Artisans. We had a blast during our opening. Visitors posed with a mermaid sculpture we made for the event. Many of our guests also tried their hands twisting balloons. Come and see what we whip up this month.

What else is coming

It’s back to school time. While school hasn’t actually begun yet, I have had the opportunity to dust off the elementary school show already. I’ve been performing How to Catch a Mouse for years to the kindergarten through sixth grade crowd. The show last week was for a summer program run by the Rush-Henrietta school district here as one of their last special programs before the kids return to school. I have a few schools booked for the coming year, and I know many more are to come. Thanks go out to Young Audiences of Rochester and Young Audiences of Western New York for coordinating most of the school shows I personally present in Western and Central NY. The popularity of the show has been growing, and the number of other entertainers now doing the show in other regions of the country has also grown. Smarty Pants in Chicago, Jungle Jim Manning in New England and Annie Banannie in Southern California, are just a few of the people performing it now. Cathy Adams, Mike Iradi and Marsha Gallagher are among the names being added to the roster. So wherever you are in the country, let us know if you’re interested in bringing the show to your school. We may have someone ready to present it in your area.

Of course, it’s not just elementary schools that have Airigami presentations. We’re hitting a few colleges over the next couple months too. I’ll be doing some strolling entertainment over the next few days at Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College, and a sculpture installation next month at SUNY Oswego.

As always, check our calendar to see what we’ll be doing that’s open to the public.

Kasha Davis walks in the Rochester PRIDE Parade (photo: Pat St Clair)

What we’ve been up to

So what’s been keeping us so busy that I haven’t had time to blog? Aside from setting things up in the studio, we’ve had a chance to take part in some pretty cool events. In mid July we took part in the Rochester PRIDE parade. What a blast. We were surrounded by some really colorful people, so we did our best to add to the color. We were honored to make a costume for drag queen Kasha Davis, along with some other sculptures that were worn along the entire parade route.

Bicycle and rider made for the Ride for Their Lives

On August 20, the Surviving Parents Coalition launched the Ride For Their Lives. The goal of the Surviving Parents Coalition is to prevent predatory crimes through awareness, education, and legislation. We took part in the launch of this nationwide bike tour with an Airigami bicycle.

Rochester became a tour stop for TJam on the Road on August 27. Robbie Furman, Alberto Nava and Don Caldwell spent a day in our studio teaching professional ballooning classes. This isn’t the first time Robbie and Don have been here. Don was my co-lead and head monster maker on all four Balloon Manors, as well as assisting on other projects, and Robbie was also on the Balloon Manor crew. It was great having Alberto join us. The packed room told us that we need to host more classes. Kelly and I plan on teaching classes in the coming months. We’ve also talked to other local and out-of-town artists about teaching. We haven’t put a schedule together just yet, but don’t let that stop you from letting us know if you’re interested. Classes will range from beginner through advanced and will cover a variety of subjects. Let us know what you’d like to learn from us.

A fun addition to our offerings

I’m asked all the time about making my sculptures last longer. The only consistent method we’ve found so far is through photos. We’re now partnering with Picture Marketing, Inc to make that easier. We regularly create installation pieces that invite people to jump in and pose for pictures. The folks at Picture Marketing have a fantastic system for sharing digital images. They take the photo. All you have to do is go home and retrieve it on the web. Only you have access to your own photo unless you choose to share it. We expect that many of the events we participate in will be able to add this additional element to make Airigami sculptures last forever.

Visiting us in the studio

Don’t forget, we’d love to have you come and visit.  Just give us a call when you’re around and check with us before popping in. We don’t have regular hours, but we’ll do our best to meet you when you call.

The official invitation

If you can’t make it to the opening (or just can’t wait that long)

We’ll be showing work at two other events this Saturday, July 17, 2010.

• We’ll be making strolling sculptures for the Rochester PRIDE parade on Park Ave at 3:00.
• We’ll have a sculpture on display at the Hunter Resch Foundation’s fundraising carnival from noon – 7 PM at Greece Baptist Church, 1230 Long Pond Road, Greece, NY 14626. (Proceeds Benefit The Hunter Resch Foundation in the fight against domestic violence.)

Airigami’s new home

Let’s begin on the local front. I mentioned last month that Airigami was moving into a studio in the Hungerford Building in downtown Rochester. We have moved in. The setting up of the new place is going a lot slower than I had hoped. Kelly and I wanted to focus on the move, but there’s been more than enough work to keep us busy without the distraction of fixing up the office. That’s made it rather impossible to just stop and play in our new space. On a positive note, the new studio does offer us all of the space we need to get things done. One thing we’ve already managed to do, even without all the fixtures in place, is shoot some video for some upcoming instructional materials we’ll be putting out. Prior to this, we simply didn’t have enough space to point a camera and have a clean shot of anything.

In my last blog post, I babbled excitedly about being amidst other artists. My excitement about that hasn’t changed. The building has a rather active group of creative individuals, called the Hungerford Urban Artists. I’ve now had a chance to meet a number of them. When I have some time, I expect I’ll be writing about some of their work. One of the best parts of this group is the monthly event they put on.  The first Friday every month brings an open house at the Hungerford. Many artists take part. Doors are open. Munchies can be found all over. Last month, there was tons of conversation. We were barely in the building and hadn’t expected to open our doors.  We didn’t feel we had anything to show yet. Our walls are still bare, even now, a couple weeks later. Still, we were inundated with questions about what we do. Other artists from the building, along with many guests from outside came to hang out and see anything we could show. We were able to quickly set up a monitor with some video of our interesting projects, and some of the gallery pieces we’ve made ended up leaning against walls where it was at least visible. Despite our ragged appearance, we seem to have even made a sale.

In the future, we hope to build a sculpture during each First Friday event. That is, starting in August. We thought we’d be ready for everyone to show up on July 2, but that was before we found out we’d be out of town. But that, in itself, is a story. Of course, you don’t have to wait for First Friday to come around if you want to visit and check out the artwork and books we have for sale. Just give us a call if you want to stop by. You can also preview some of what we have in the Airigami web store.

The summer is looking to be busy

So, why won’t we be available for the July First Friday? For the second year in a row, I’ve been asked, along with a small team of other artists, to entertain invited guests to the White House Independence Day celebration. Last year, a group of us, including Todd Neufeld and Buster Balloon, had an opportunity to install a giant American flag on the White House lawn. This year, our focus will be strolling and entertaining the crowd. Our pieces may be smaller, but we plan on making just as large an impact on the event. Hopefully we’ll be able to avoid the very confusing lost gun incident from last year. While this is my second July 4th event at the White House, it’s the third White House event I’m taking part in. There have been great stories to share from each, so I’m looking forward to this year’s event and whatever will come out of it.

Upon returning home, we’ll have to start planning the pieces we’ll be making for the Rochester PRIDE parade on July 17. Details still have to be worked out, but right now we’re talking about creating costumes that reflect the pride and history of the LGBT community in this region. This should be a really fun event to take part in. Of course, if that doesn’t already sound like a big enough project to keep us busy, we also offered to assist with a  sculpture for the Hunter Resch Foundation on the same day.

Upcoming dates

Don’t forget to look for interesting events on the Airigami calendar. Here are the next few events coming up.

• June 28 – Larry Moss and Robbie Furman teach at TJam on the Road in Fort Lee, NJ.
• June 29 – Larry and Robbie teach at TJam on the Road in Plymouth, MA. Details and registration at TMyers.com
• July 4 – Larry and Kelly meet up with Todd Neufeld, Laura Caldwell, and John Reid to entertain on the White House lawn.
• July 17 – Costumes made by Larry and Kelly will be worn in the Rochester PRIDE parade.
• July 17 – A sculpture made by Larry and Kelly will appear at a fundraiser for the Hunter Resch Foundation.
• August 6 – First Friday at the Hungerford. The studio will be open for visitors.

This ten-foot tall cash register was designed and built by Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle (pictured inside the register) with help from Bill McCormack, Smarty Pants and Barbara Levinson.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Kelly and I were building a cash register for the PMA Blur conference. I’m happy to say it was a huge success. The Promotion Marketing Association presents the Reggie Awards each year at this annual conference. The Reggies are given for promotional campaigns that were successful at the cash register. As far as I know, our register was the largest representation of the Reggie to date.  At ten feet tall, it was big enough for everyone at the conference to take turns posing for photos inside it. Thanks to all of the folks at PMA for the invitation to attend and install our piece, and a huge thank you to Donna Declemente for introducing us to the organization.

Pepsi Refresh Update

We appreciate all the support everyone gave in our effort to win a Pepsi Refresh grant. Looking at our web stats, our YouTube stats and just talking to so many of you, we’re truly convinced that we had more unique votes from individuals than almost all of the other projects. With 13,000 people viewing our video so far, we know we got attention and quite a bit of interest. According to the rules Pepsi established, we’d be automatically re-entered in the voting for the month of April, but we simply refuse to stretch this out any longer. We want to say “Thank you” to Pepsi for the opportunity.  We think it’s great that they’re offering money and supporting many worthwhile projects. However, it’s time for us to step aside and not annoy our supporters any longer with requests to vote.  There are much more productive things all of us can do with our time at this point and the last thing we want to do is harass people that are trying to help us out. Thanks for all of the votes.  We’ll go back to more traditional means of fundraising and will make sure that Elastic Park happens some day.

Mark Verge, Elastic Park's chief dinosaur designer, took first place in the large sculpture competition at Twist & Shout 2010 in Chicago with this life size spinosaurus.

Last month I sent out a note asking everyone to vote online so that Elastic Park could receive a Pepsi Refresh grant. Thanks so much to all of you that helped.  It almost worked.  We were pretty high up in the ranks for a while and ended in 22nd place. Out of 204 entries, that’s not too shabby. And we were high enough that our entry was automatically resubmitted for March. We were close enough, I know we can make the top ten this month to get this show on the road. I have to admit, I was ready to let the whole thing drop just a few hours ago when I learned we didn’t win in February.  But the huge number of votes so far today has already pushed us into the top ten.

The Pepsi voting site is set up to allow (encourage?) people to vote for their ten favorite projects on a daily basis. That means we need as many people as possible to vote every day. A number of people asked last month for daily reminders to go vote. We’ve set up a  mailing list for people that want that daily reminder. I will not send a reminder to my regular mailing list since I don’t want to annoy everyone.  If you want to vote for Elastic Park and would like a daily reminder, please write to me directly or visit the sign-up page. If, and only if, you sign up for it, you’ll get a reminder once a day that it’s time to vote.  We’ll keep you informed on where we’re standing and any interesting dino updates we can give you.

A special thanks to the Pioneer Balloon Company and Glue Dots for their support in getting this thing going. If there are any other businesses that would like to jump in and help us out, we’d greatly appreciate the support.

Vote for Elastic Park right now.

Get daily dino jokes, pictures, and reminders to vote.

Other recent stuff

I just returned last week from the annual balloon twisting convention, Twist & Shout.  This year it took place in Chicago and WGN was on site.  I got to talk a bit on the air about Elastic Park, but there was a much more amusing television moment than that.  Eleven entertainers woke up early in the morning to climb inside of balloons for the camera. Ten did it successfully.  Watch the clip and see for yourself the craziness in a hotel full of balloon artists, clowns, and magicians. (This isn’t actually the clip from WGN but from another camera that was running at the same time.)

Go to the WGN site and look for “Balloon Convention” to see the clip that aired.

Mini triceratops made with a few twisted Qualatex balloons and a few Glue Dots to help out.

Thanks to everyone that’s been helping us in trying to get a Pepsi Refresh grant. We’ve got a little over three more weeks to keep the votes going. It’s been fun to see so many people rally behind us. In fact, we have two big partners that I need to thank for all of their support, both in this campaign to get the grant and in the products that make these projects possible. Pioneer Balloon Company (Qualatex Balloons) and Glue Dots International. I’m excited to have both of them pushing for us. And to make things better, they’ve both announced new things that I’ll be using. I haven’t gotten any of the new Glue Dots Dot N’ Go dispensers yet, but I’ve been wanting a convenient dispenser for these things forever. Right now I’m just buying the big industrial boxes of dots. We use that many of them on the big projects that I suppose the industrial boxes aren’t a bad thing.  But something small to carry in my balloon bag will be nice. On the Qualatex front, my order of mocha and blush 321s just arrived.  Yeah!

We’re doing reasonably well on the campaign to get the grant, but still a bit behind where we need to be. Over 200 projects appear in our category and we’ve been holding our own, hovering just below the top ten.  Unfortunately, we need to be in the top ten at the end of the month.  With just a little more of a push, we can move up a couple of spots.

So thanks to the community that’s always been there for me.  All of the BalloonHQ members and guests have been doing an enormous amount of work in pushing this. Please, keep voting on a daily basis.

Of course, I realized yesterday how silly it was to just be calling people, tweeting and asking for votes when the whole point of this was to make an art project possible. The fact is, the phone calls, tweets and requests for support were stopping me from actually creating art. When that idea struck me, I forced myself to take a break from my desk and actually create something new. It’s small and fairly simple, and far from the 30-foot long version of this cretaceous creature that Elastic Park will show, but it is a dinosaur. I’ve spent so much time over the last few months on plans for the big exhibit, I never actually stopped to make any small dinosaurs.  So, here we are.  A cute little triceratops. A few heart balloons, a few twists, and I felt much more relaxed. I have to remember, I left my life as a programmer because art made me feel so free and relaxed. Gotta focus on doing more art.

Of course, always wanting to get things right, I finished this and then wondered if I picked the right color for my little triceratops. After all, there was just a paper published (well, at least one that I just read about) on dino colors. At long last, it seems that we have real scientific clues as to the coloring of  the prehistoric dinosaurs. I may have to do a little more research before some five-year-old points out my errant creation. At least I know most five-year-olds will take a little time to get up to speed on the new color information since most of them aren’t reading the New York Times. But who knows. They put some pretty cool things in the Weekly Reader these days and dinosaurs are always a hot topic among kids.  Maybe I don’t have much of a head start on them.

Don’t forget to vote daily for Elastic Park, the multi-thousand-square-foot dinosaur exhibition made entirely out of balloons.

Read more about Elastic Park.

Vote for us to get $50,000 in funding to launch this traveling show.

Pepsi recently announced their intent to give away over a million dollars a month for community projects.  The public will determine where the money goes. All you have to do is visit the Pepsi site to cast your vote. Each person is allowed to vote every day during the voting period (February 1-28, 2010). Please vote and spread the word. The more people we get to support the project, the better our chance of launching this national touring show.  After voting, please ask your friends to do the same.

If you missed it before, here’s the summary:

Elastic Park is an exhibit, featuring a unique blend of art, pre-history, and pop culture. The multi-thousand-square-foot, interactive exhibit (scalable to fit available space) was inspired by Michael Crichton’s popular novel, Jurassic Park.

Balloons are the medium used to create the exhibit. The unusual medium draws a very diverse crowd both for the construction phase and the display phase. This is important since all large scale Airigami creations are community-based art projects. Community members are invited to participate in the 100,000 balloon creation, working alongside an international crew of skilled artists.

Visitors will walk among the creatures of the Triassic through Cretaceous periods, as described in Crichton’s work. An audio tour with custom music and actor’s voices will guide everyone through, describing the creatures, the art, and telling the story.

Like all major Airigami projects, Elastic Park is about the community. It would be cool if it was just an artistic display.  But we’re taking it much further.  We’re inviting the public to take part in the construction as well. So once we get the funding, we’re going to be asking all of you to join in and help turn our plans into the most incredible dinosaur exhibition seen in the last 65 million years.

While things can certainly change, we expect the first stop on this tour to be Exploration Place in Wichita, KS. This is a fantastic science museum with just the right family-friendly atmosphere for us to work in.

Thanks for your help. We’re looking forward to, once again, populating the planet with pre-historic dinosaurs.

Instructions for voting: Visit http://www.refresheverything.com/ElasticPark. If you don’t see the “vote for this idea” button on the page, you may have to sign in. There’s a link on the bottom of the page to sign in or to register with the site.  When the page refreshes, there will be a big white “vote for this idea” bottom on the top right side of the page. (You shouldn’t have to jump through any extra hoops to vote.  You should be able to just see the vote button when you visit the page and then you should be able to just sign in when you click on it, but a number of people have reported that the site behaves very inconsistently.)

This undersea sculpture was part of Balloons Around the World and was on display at Barnes & Noble in Pittsford, NY. Participants in this project included Larry Moss, Kelly Cheatle, Karyn Dolan, Sheryl Watts, Amy John, Mary Ann Jakubowicz, Rose Hasan, Tim Bourke, Lois Sprague, Brent Chmura, John Barthelmes.

Before going to ArtPrize, I was asked what I’d do if I won.  I answered that I’d take a day off. Whether I won or not, I was fairly certain that  I’d have more than a few projects to work on as soon as I returned home, and more than a day off wasn’t going to happen.  Sure enough, by the time I settled in after the trip, the list of things I was already looking at doing was too long to manage, and since I didn’t win, I couldn’t hire staff to do it all for me. Well, I’ve been back for a couple weeks now, the list keeps growing, and I’ve been bad about updating the blog with recent happenings. So here are just a couple of quick notes.

Balloons Around the World just took place last week. This is the annual event where artists in different cities around the globe join in just for the sake of sharing the fun and wonder of balloons. The crew that was working with me in Rochester was fantastic. Everyone just dove in to the undersea project. I was grateful for all of their help, and as I looked at them, all I could think was, “with friends like these, who needs anemones?”

Balloon Engineer just went on sale at B&N. Larry's newest book, included in a kit with a pump and balloons, has instructions for ten famous landmarks, from Niagara Falls to the Great Sphinx.

What makes Balloons Around the World exciting for me is the interaction with the community. While we don’t get to build Balloon Manor  this year, BATW was still a way to do something in the local community that brought a number of artists and community members together. Anyone that knows me is familiar with my passion for community projects. These projects provide a way to share my art with a wide audience. They give me a way to see people that don’t otherwise think of themselves as artists get excited about art. They get people working together doing something they’ve never done before. Of course, I’m always looks for ways to take that into other communities.

With that interest in community art, I was thrilled to get an invitation to speak at TEDxRochester on the subject of community art. For those unfamiliar with TED, it’s an organization devoted to “Ideas worth spreading.” From conferences to downloadable talks, TED is about sharing ideas. The ideas don’t have to be limited to any particular area and talks aren’t meant to be just directed at any specific audience. The folks at TED have now made it possible for others to offer smaller, local, TED-like conferences, called “TEDx”. It may not be quite the same as the official TED conference, but it will be fun.  I’m excited about giving a TED Talk.

Random notes:

My work was recently featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Mona T-shirt (front)

In a recent post to this blog, I mentioned a quote that I found about my work. I thought the quote was funny and needed to be shared, so I posted a phony T-shirt containing it.  To my surprise, a number of people wrote in asking if they could buy the shirt.  Not wanting to disappoint, I went ahead and made shirts which a number of people wore around Grand Rapids during ArtPrize.  I took it a bit further and made it a more artsy shirt. The quote, “Larry Moss is a hack. I see no dachshunds”  is found on the back. The front contains my rendition of the Mona Lisa. The shirt is available from the Airigami gift shop until I run out of them.

It’s been a long few days.  Thanks to everyone that’s been following the Venus project.  It’s been fun.  I’m looking forward to seeing what other artists  have done for ArtPrize.  But right now, I’m tired. If you’re in Grand Rapids, come see the final sculpture this week.  It will be around until the end of ArtPrize, but these are balloons.  You know how that goes.  They won’t look as sharp a week from now.

I’ll write more soon.  Right now, I’m going to sleep.

Photo by Jay Pike