Big Bambú Glasstress Special Project
The first exhibit of the Big Bambú series was on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY last year, it ranked 4th in total attendance of a contemporary art exhibition internationally and the 9th highest attended exhibit in the entire history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The central aspect of the ongoing sculpture in Venice is a 50' tall hollow tower of bamboo, with a trail spiraling up to the top reaching a 20' wide roof top lounge/Altana (there will be limited access). The Starns and their crew of rock climbers will continue to lash together bamboo, sustaining the spiral upward until the closing day of the sculpture, June 15th. As Big Bambú is about the continual evolution of living things, in addition to 2,000 fresh poles harvested from a farm in France, Doug and Mike have cut several of the Fragments out of the Metropolitan installation. The Starns: "We are grafting a new Big Bambú and using 1,000 poles from the Met as stem cells, the Venice piece will still be the Metropolitan piece but also a new one, Big Bambú is always growing and changing and becoming something new-- as we all are." The Starns' Venice location is the former United States Consulate and is next door to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal. This is the first time it has been used as a location for a collateral exhibition since the famous triumph of American art in 1964 as the Annex to the American Pavilion when Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize. It is currently the home of the Venice campus of Wake Forest University.
Additional support for travel provided by ALTOUR. |
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