Monday, September 14, 2015

Balls For Hope!

When it's cloudy at the beach, it's time for Field Trips. Saturday was all overcast, so it was time to go check out the balls in MacArthur Park downtown. You might remember a few years back when all the lifeguard towers along the beach from Venice to Santa Monica were brightly painted in an art installation for the Projects Of Hope project. Well, they're back with another massive installation of giant beach ball type spheres placed in the lake in MacArthur Park.



School children and youth from all over Los Angeles hand painted all the spheres with brightly colored flowers and fish, and as the nearly 3,000 spheres float around, the look of the lake constantly changes. It's pretty surreal. And awesome.

When we approached the park, it was like when a kid spies the tall rides at an amusement park in the distance and gets all excited. I saw bright dashes of color through the trees and got all excited! The scale is truly impressive, and the riot of color instantly buoyed your spirits. Imagine being this little duck swimming around among all these colorful orbs - it's probably pretty cool.



A big Spanish language festival was also happening in the park, but the spheres were the main attraction. Folks from all walks of life were down there taking pictures, picnicking, and enjoying the mind blow that is this cool project.



When the spheres come out of the lake (the time frame of the project is kind of vague - says it's up for "four weeks" with no exact dates - so you'd better go soon!), they'll be distributed around to various  schools, hospitals, shelters and places like that to brighten and beautify their surroundings.



I love the Portraits Of Hope installations and their grand Christo-like scale. I also love the name of the project, as when you are there standing among all that color and unity and people coming together to make something beautiful ... you simply can't help but to feel hope.




And I hope you get there while it's there!











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