The Palisadian-created art installation that Angelenos driving down the 10 freeway have seen atop the Los Angeles Convention Center for the past six months will be uninstalled on Sunday, November 10.
The project, titled Shaping LA, was created by Portraits of Hope, a Palisadian-founded, nonprofit program aimed at conceiving and developing “one-of-a-kind motivational art projects that merge the production of dynamic public art works with creative therapy for hospitalized children and civic education for students of all ages.”
Shaping LA has famously become part of the Downtown Los Angeles skyline while raising awareness to its creative therapy that more than 800 hospitals, schools, after-school programs and social service agencies have been a part of.
Co-founder Ed Massey involved his entire family in the project, according to his wife Dawn.
“Like most of Ed’s public works, we as a family are … all hands on deck,” said Dawn, describing how their daughter, Georgi, a junior at Palisades Charter High School, and their son, Felix, a college student in New York, spend their holidays and weekends working on the Portraits of Hope projects.
“What’s so cool about this project is that so many Palisadians, kids and adults, worked on Shaping LA,” she said.
The colorful and triangular display of art consisted of a 31-panel installation that spanned four football fields in length, as an estimated 20 million vehicles per month drove past it.
“It’s been really incredible because the project … was 13 years in the making,” Ed said in an interview with the Palisadian-Post. “We were very excited to see that scale of a canvas go up.”
Ed said it was satisfying to see the reaction of the close to 7,000 participants when they saw their work become part of the LA skyline exposed to millions of people.
The logistics to installing the artwork included putting special railings around the canvas so visually disabled artists could feel their way around and be a part of it.
“I had sketched out the concept to transform the Convention Center wall into a geometric pattern … [The 13-year time frame] wasn’t because of political hurdles, it was more of the timing and couldn’t wrap my head around it,” Ed explained.
He hopes Palisadians will take the opportunity during its final days to drive by and take in the scale and meaning of the masterpiece one last time.
Now, Ed will focus his efforts on a personal project dealing with homelessness while the Portraits of Hope program focuses on a new waterborne project in cities around the world that have yet to be determined.
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