Creative Industry: Outdoor Public Art Festivals

Project: Ai Weiwei Installation at Nuit Blanche

How do you stay true to an artist’s vision when tasked with rebuilding one of their works? Well, that’s a tricky question given the best of circumstances. What about when the art piece is a sculpture made up of thirty-two hundred bicycles assembled outdoors? Let’s also make it thirty feet tall, about twice the height it’s ever been. And let’s say the artist is under house arrest on the other side of the world and you don’t speak the language of the install crew that’s been sent to work with you. That and more is just what Joe Sellors was up against in 2013 when Ai Weiwei’s sculpture Forever Bicycles was featured in front of Toronto’s City Hall as part of Nuit Blanche. The answer, like I’ve seen in many projects with a lot of risk and uncertainty, lay in a project manager’s ability to build relationships and engage in open and effective communication - and Joe was up to the challenge.