The Art of the Brick

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bottle CaPs

toYs for tots

After I’d become a full-time artist but still wasn’t

making quite enough to pay the bills, I got a

call from Coca-Cola, who asked if I would create

art for them out of bottle caps. One was a big

portrait of their polar bear. It was giant: six feet

tall and a couple of yards across. When they

hung it up in the Coca-Cola museum, it replaced

the Andy Warhol Coca-Cola art. I smiled at that:

a Sawaya replacing a Warhol. That one was

straightforward enough and came out great.

Coca-Cola’s other request was a gigantic,

30-foot-long train made from bottle caps. It

was for Toys for Tots, an organization run by

the US Marine Corps Reserve that collects

and distributes toys for the underprivileged

atChristmas. Coca-Cola was a supporter of

Toys for Tots and wanted to open the program

at a holiday event at the Coca-Cola museum

inAtlanta.

The train was for a great cause, but I went

through a special kind of hell to make it. To

begin with, I was living in New York City,

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in an apartment where I could make LEGO

sculptures. But a 30-foot train? There was no

way I was going to pull that off in New York,

so where would I go? As luck would have it,

my aunt and uncle had just bought a farm in

Decorah, Iowa, in the middle of the country,

and they had a gigantic barn. Coca-Cola

wanted this train there before Thanksgiving, so

I spent a month over October and November in

a freezing Iowa barn with 100,000 bottle caps.

Before building, I did all this math and science,

trying to figure out all the surface areas, all the

angles. I thought I did a pretty thorough job.

For the project, however, Coke supplied all the

bottle caps, unused and brand-new. Which was

fine, but I hadn’t considered one thing: When

a bottle cap comes from the factory, it still has

that little ring attached, the one you break off

when you open the cap. So that adds 2 or 3

millimeters to every bottle cap. And with over

44,000 bottle caps, which is how many I ended

up using, that’s a big difference. So there was a

lot of adjusting going on among the mice and

chickens in that large, cold Iowa barn.

When I was finished with the train, I had to go

back to New York. So I left it in my uncle’s barn;

Coca-Cola’s event agency was going to send

someone to pick it up. I explained to Coke’s

people that it’s a piece of art, it’s made of bottle

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caps, and they had to be careful. Naturally, they

said, yeah, yeah, we’ve got professionals; no

problem. But they ended up hiring a couple of

local guys who were more used to moving farm

equipment. My aunt called at one point and

said, “Well, the guys are here, but Uncle Fred’s

really concerned; they’re handling the train really

rough.”