By Alec Clayton
Artist Dave Sederberg who lit up the night for Winter Solstice with the astounding “Glowhenge” project is now at work with a group of local artists on an eight-week street-art project for the LoveOly Summerfest scheduled for eight Saturdays in July and August in downtown Olympia. Sederberg has pulled together a team of artists to create six to eight visual art installations, leaving open the option to repeat up to two or more weather resilient pieces.
Artists accompanying Sederberg for the project include Jill Carter, Carrie Ziegler, Eli Sterling and Linda DePertuis. As of this writing, the installations include:
July 10/Week #1 Love Oly by Carrie Ziegler, an approximately seven-foot-tall red heart-shaped ring on a pedestal with the letters OLY on the bottom edge created in collaboration with Shon Forsyth. This will be a theme piece for the event and will be up every week. “As we come out of the pandemic, finally feeling ease when connecting physically with friends and neighbors, I find myself even more deeply rooted in the Olympia Community,” Ziegler says. “I feel cared for and incredibly grateful for this place. So when Shon and I were brainstorming ideas for this project, I thought it would be really fun to make a giant ‘I Heart Oly’ sign that people could take their pictures with. Shon loved the idea. Little did we know, the festival was called Love Olympia! We dropped the I at the request of the organizers.”
July 17/Week #2 Rotoflections by David Sederberg. This installation will be five, approximately 36-inch tall motorized, slowly rotating, multi-faceted, mirrored sculptures, placed on 24-inch tall, four-by-four-foot platforms. Sedeberg says it will give moving reflections of the immediate architectural surroundings, people, the sky and the sun, between which, the public can walk and interact.
July 24/Week #3 Critter Mixers by Jill Carter, featuring three to five, three-cube stacks with different characters painted on the sides of each one by Carter and her team that then can be rotated to change up parts of each character, creating multiple combinations that people can spin to mix and match to find the combination of various heads with different bodies and legs, twenty different characters can be remixed into hundreds of different critter combinations. “Some of the characters we are creating so far include: an astronaut deer, a ballerina squirrel, a shrimp waiter, a clown opossum, a kayaking blue heron, a farmer bear,” Carter says. She is teaming up with local artistic youth, Whitney Sederberg, Alex Geerson, Leontine Finch, and visual artist Lori Campbell with support from Olympia Family Theater to create this and an overhead flag installation, “Blessed with Color,” comprising 256 colorful layered chiffon flags hand-sewn by Olympia-based Costumer Kathleen Anderson.
“When thinking about making a festive decoration for the LoveOly Summerfest, I felt it was important to have layers of different colored fabrics, I wanted to remember that we are all multilayered and colorful . . . celebrating the multiple layers of downtown Olympia, reemerging after our long hibernation.”
July 31/Week #4 Batik Flag Plaza by Linda DuPertuis. This installation will consist of eight custom-welded triple flag poles for a total of 24 hand-painted batik flags creating a large circle in the middle of the block. Flags will echo the style of the Procession of the Species (no words or symbols) highlighting the flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest in brilliant colors.
Aug 7/Week #5 City Blocks by David Sederberg, featuring three to five, 10-foot- tall stacks of large blocks, brightly painted with different artists painting each block. This will be the tallest installation in the series.
Aug 14/Week #6 Not yet scheduled.
Aug 21/Week #7 Gathering of the Species by Eli Sterling. Sterling is the founder and driving force behind the Procession of the Species. His installation will feature several of the marquee pieces of the procession such as the Sun, the Lion, the Rhinoceros and Zebra.
Aug 28/Week #8 Not yet scheduled. It is to be a not-yet contemplated piece or a creative combination of previous installations.
Sederberg says, “Eli, Jill, Carrie and Linda are a dream-team of artists” and that one or two more primary artists may be added.
LoveOly Summerfest is an Olympia Downtown Association event. ODA Executive Director Todd Cutts says the idea came out of Dine Out Week in 2020. “We branded Summerfest as the community’s passion for downtown – art installations are a part of that. Cutts had previously worked with Sederberg’s company Pacific Stage and after seeing Sederberg’s “Glowhenge” he invited him to put together a project engaging local artists.
“I was surprised to get the call, and that they made the choice to include visual art in the event,” Sederberg says. He proposed bringing in other artists to do a series of pieces that would be different each week. “And suddenly I had less than 40 days to come up with multiple ideas and had to reach out quickly to multiple artists who have experience in working big and fast and see what we could create in such a short time span.
He reached out to Angel Nava, Arts Program Specialist with the City of Olympia. She provided a list of artists, and Sederberg sent out messages to artists with whom had worked before.
LoveOly Summer Fest will include an activities area sponsored by SnowShoe and produced by the Hands on Children’s Museum. There will be musical entertainment by The Black Tones, plus jugglers, contortionists and street musicians and a Biergarten featuring craft beer from 3 Magnets Brewing Co. and Well 80 Brewhouse.
WHAT
LoveOly Summer Fest
WHEN
Saturdays through July and August starting 10, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
WHERE
Olympia Federal Savings Entertainment Area, Capitol Theater outdoor stage, Downtown Olympia, 5th Avenue and Washington Street
HOW MUCH
Free
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