Plaster-casting and arm-wrestling don’t actually go hand in hand

Text
UrbanAtomy Citylab
Leadership High School
1999

I was invited to give several sculpture workshops as part of the “Citylab” program at a new charter school in downtown San Francisco. There were considerable time and budget constraints, but it seemed like a wonderful opportunity to work as big as possible, and to work out on the street, since it’s often hard to do that in a traditional classroom.

The students and I experimented with intersecting body-oriented sculpture with their urban environment (hence “UrbanAtomy”). We did life drawing on a large scale, made plaster-bandage body casts, made life-size paper sculptures over human armatures, and intervened with downtown advertisements by installing cut-paper figures and designs over the posters.