San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles Installation

A few months ago I participated in the San Jose SubZero Festival by creating a visitor participatory semi-permanent art installation (yes, a mouthful!). The three banners are now up on the exterior facade windows. These were created quickly in a month and a half and originally I designed them to be banners hung higher up, that is why they do not fit perfectly in the windows.

There are a lot of things I would do differently now, but it was a good learning experience. I would love to expand and refine the concept of this project next year for Earth Day. I think it would be stunning to have all the windows covered in strands of only the woven diatoms and plastic bottle bottoms with some solar led lights illumination. I have started to conduct Earth Day assemblies in schools and envision an extension project in which students create the diatoms to be strung and hung in the museum windows. I'll be brewing on this idea.

Two of the banners got tagged. I kind of like it. Bu the things that stands out to me most is that the banners do not fit neatly into the windows and there are not enough participatory diatoms attached. Many people walked away with their creations and did not add them to the banners.



































































Below: Details of the elements the visitors created. I love the colors and textures. Each of these represent a diatom, a unicellular organism found in water. The plastics are all recycled and collected from creek clean ups and from three different schools in Cupertino and San Jose.