Balloon Artist Will Sculpt Colossal Creatures At Peabody Museum

NEW HAVEN — Internationally recognized balloon artist Jason Hackenwerth will sculpt a menagerie of colossal inflated creatures at the Yale Peabody Museum on Friday and Saturday, June 16 and 17, from 11 am to 5 pm. He will create his whimsical giants in the Great Hall of Dinosaurs while engaging visitors in an ongoing dialogue.

On Sunday, June 18, from noon to 5 pm, the completed sculptures will be suspended among the dinosaurs, where they will be dwarfed only by a 68-foot Apatosaurus, and remain on view through Sunday, June 25.

Viewing is free with museum admission of $7 adults, $6 seniors, and $5 children 3 to 18 and students with ID.

Mr Hackenwerth blows, twists and shapes inflated plastic into magical configurations, drawing inspiration from the plant and animal kingdoms. Using a jewel color palette and varying shapes, he experiments with how light passes through balloons and creates shadows. Some of his designs are so large he literally has to wrestle pieces into place. He buys balloons by the caseload: 5,000 at a time.

A painter, sculptor, installation artist and performance artist, Mr Hackenwerth has gained an international reputation for his work in party balloons: balloon bouquets on Venice’s canals; gigantic balloon bugs strolling the streets of Paris; a floating balloon zoo in London.

In addition to the special event at the Peabody Museum this month, Ms Hackenwerth has will also be performing on the New Haven Green for the city’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas on Sunday, June 18, and has solo shows opening this summer in Chicago, Seoul, and Los Angeles.

Mr Hackenwerth has an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art & Design, where, in his senior year, he was awarded a fellowship to travel to New York and work out of a studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Moving there permanently in 2003, he gave his colorful balloon sculptures a debut on the New York subways.

“The way graffiti artists tag, I was doing that with balloons,” he said.

For his New Haven project in June, Mr Hackenwerth was commissioned by Site Projects and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Site Projects was established in 2001 by a small group of New Haven arts advocates whose goal was to bring nationally and internationally known visual artists to the city by commissioning temporary pieces of public art.

Located at 170 Whitney Avenue in New Haven, the museum can be contacted for additional information at 203-432-5050 or Peabody.Yale.edu.