The Art of the Brick

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blood and

blubber

dinosaur

I had my first solo show in April 2007. It was at the

Lancaster Museum of Art, in the rural and Amish town

in central Pennsylvania.

At the time the museum contacted me, I thought,

“Wow, what an honor,” with the simultaneous thought

that it would likely also be my last solo show. It was

early in my career, and I hadn’t yet built up confidence

in what I was doing.

I didn’t know what to expect, and I was a nervous

wreck. We had this whole sequence planned where

myfamily was going to fly in and see the show first

at 5

pm before it opened to the public at 6 pm. Since I

never expected to do another solo show, I called all

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you

with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the

kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you

jump to the skies. —Robert Frost

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my friends and invited them. So they were all there,

but I never thought anyone else would come.

At about noon that day, the director of the museum

called and said, “You’re not going to be happy, but

I’ve started letting people in. It’s freezing outside, and

they’re queued up around the corner.”

I was stunned. Usually the gallery saw 35,000 visitors

in a year, but my show had 25,000 in six weeks. The

Amish came, with their buggies and beards.

What blew me away most of all was that these nine-

year-olds came walking through. The show drew

in many families and people who’d never come

to an art museum before. Kids were asking me for

autographs in Lancaster cafés . . . it was bizarre. I was

so overwhelmed by the reaction to the show that I

wanted to give something back to the kids. So, in

May of that year, I started building Dinosaur.

I began creating a skeleton, something like you might

find in a natural-history museum. I was lucky in that I

had some serious experience in the subject. I had a

middle school science teacher named Al James—Mr.

James, at the time—who was an amazing teacher and

would always go the extra mile.

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