CultureNOW - Meeting Place: Jackie Ferrara and Washington State Arts Commission

Meeting Place

Jackie Ferrara has sought in her work to combine art, architecture, and location. The artist has completed multiple site-specific public works, including an amphitheater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (1999). Her work is also visible locally in the New York Subway, a project for the MTA Arts for Transit. Grand Central: Arches, Towers, Pyramids is a series of mosaic walls at five locations including both track walls of the Times Square/Grand Central shuttle, and the passageway to the Number 7 train. Ferrara's Canal Demonstration Project, a collaboration with landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, in Phoenix, Arizona won the 2001 Tucker Award for Design Excellence, Building Stone Institute. The piece, made from local sandstone, water, and planting, runs along the Arizona Canal. In addition to her public work, Ferrara has also been commissioned privately. In 1998, she and architect William Bialosky completed Lap Pool and Bath House for a family in Coconut Grove, Florida.

"My public art projects started in the eighties. Before then the pieces I was making in my studio were imagined sites built out of interlocking lengths of wood. I was constructing table top pieces and small floor works of pyramids, courtyards, arenas, theaters, archways, loggias, wall and floor sections, passageways, pool houses and towers. Interested in mathematical systems, I used incremental progressions to create structures. Repeated permutations of surface openings made slits of light, causing dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. To make the transition from small, table top places to actual real ones in the environment was a thrilling evolution.

As a public artist I am committed to resolving the issues of what public art means and what it should provide; to enhancing our surroundings and the experience of the public; to discovering new and unexpected ways to impact public spaces; to meaningfully interface with the site.

I think of what I do as creating places. My sources lie in architecture and landscape architecture, in graphics and design, in mathematics, cinema and theater. I look for connections: spatial, visual, historical, environmental, and architectural. And I look for ways to integrate different kinds of information, sometimes apparent, sometimes subtle, but always intending to offer an experience of unfolding discovery. I believe in the dramatic potential of the site and seek to heighten it so that encountering one of my places invites participation, a reason to stop, investigate, and absorb.

The look, use, and users of the site influence my designs. They determine the form, function, materials, and dimensions of the work. Visually and conceptually I seek rational and compelling interaction with the site and its community."

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Artist
Jackie Ferrara

Client
Washington State Arts Commission

Dates

Installed, 1989

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Description

The design added the L shaped platform, floor, and seating elements to the planting enclosed rectangular space. The floor is a concrete grid inlaid with squares of slate. Benches and cubes, some concrete and some steel, interact with each other and with the markings on the floor. The windows on the long side of the platform look out through the city streets to Puget Sound.

Courtesy of Jackie Ferrara

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Location

Seattle Convention Center
800 Convention Place
Seattle, WA 98101
United States

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