The Art of Collaboration & Compromise

Janet Echelman is an internationally renown artist, who sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Her experimental work bridges across various disciplines such as Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineer, and Computer Science. Her TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has inspired many. Echelman received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts along with multiple Fellowships such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, and Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship. She has taught at MIT, Harvard University, and Princeton University. Her project in Boston is one of our personal favorites! We were thrilled to speak with Janet and learn about her path, process, collaborations, and lessons learned. Take a look below.

How did you get to where you are - an international and prominent artist?

Janet Echelman

I’m a visual artist working in the public sphere, creating light-weight soft sculptures that adapt and change with wind and light. How did I get here? One step at a time. Everything about my trajectory as an artist has been incremental - a combination of intense planning while being open to things not going as planned and following where things take me. My partner observed that one of my most essential skills is being able and willing to “move the goal post”. If I set out to achieve something in one direction and suddenly something else interesting happens, I will explore its possibilities and follow whatever is unfolding. I think that openness to what happens organically has served me well.

What challenges have you tackled along the way and how did you overcome them?

This career is only for those who cannot bear the thought of doing something else. Once I made my peace with the fact that the life of an artist - with all its challenges and difficulties - was one I couldn’t live without, I could accept the hardship, without expectation of success. In my 20s, I moved to a village in Bali for 5 years, where I could focus my time on developing as an artist and keep my living costs within whatever I earned from selling my paintings each year, however little that was. The key for me was to carve out enough to learn to hear and develop my own voice as an artist. That is an ongoing experience. I am still trying to set new challenges and explore things I don’t know how to do. I need to keep myself on the edge artistically. Making my first sculptures was terrifying. I really had no experience or skill sculpting, and I’m not one of those people who’s naturally handy at making things. I had to face my fear. 

As my projects have increased in scale to skyscrapers and city blocks, I keep encountering terrifying challenges. Collaboration is how I get through these things - reaching out to colleagues in other fields who are experts in engineering, lighting design, landscape, and architecture. Collaboration is the life blood of my joy, and being able to work with so many talented individuals expands the language with which I can speak as an artist. I am always learning from colleagues, and what we create together is definitely greater than what I could create myself. 

Have you experienced any advantages or disadvantages of being a woman artist in the public sphere?

I grew up with 3 older brothers and a strong single mom, who had to conquer her own fear when she divorced at forty and suddenly had to transform from housewife to a career supporting herself and four kids. I don’t consciously think about my gender. I notice it mostly when I go to interviews for major commissions and discover I’m the only woman there. I just speak my truth. I believe in what I am offering, and they either want it or they don’t. Luckily, at the moment, there are more people wanting my art  than I have time to create, so the goal now is to try and push the boundaries of my art further, to build the most innovative projects that can enable my art to keep growing and refreshing itself.

Any lessons you learned in the process of collaboration?

Compromise is a big issue - how to know when to compromise and when to draw the line. I try to be very compromising in areas that aren’t critical to the integrity of the art, so that when I need to draw a line, people respect it. I sometimes need to remind the team that we all share the goal in preserving the integrity of the art. 

The trick I ask myself is if I make this compromise, does it kill the reason I’m making this art? Will it meaningfully diminish my aesthetic intent? If the change is only mild, I compromise. If it is critical, I have to be willing to walk away.  And this dynamic flows through almost every project, as there are hundreds of decisions in any projects that actually gets built in the public sphere.

Have you had to walk away from a project?

It’s rare, but yes. And I’ve felt at peace when I had to. The times I’ve regretted are when I should’ve walked away earlier but didn’t. It always bites you later, and I chastise myself for not listening to my inner voice earlier. If the compromises mean the quality of the endeavor becomes something that I don’t want to be associated with, then I need to stop. The truth is, when I draw a line related to the artistic integrity of the design, the whole group decides that the aesthetic decision is right. That has been my experience, at least recently, that everyone mobilizes together to make the work a success.

How have you managed to jump scales in your work?

Gradually, step by step by step, and with a little bit of luck to get the first big break. You need experience building bigger and more complex things before people will believe you can build something monumental. So doing lots of temporary, small-scale projects until I was gradually given bigger opportunities was essential. Given that no one had built fiber sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers before, I had to prove not only that I could do it, but that it could be done at all. Temporary monumental projects opened doors to more permanent civic works. That has been my strategy - to bootstrap and prototype at full scale to prove it is possible.

I actually couldn’t get a real commission in the US for a long time. My first big break came in Europe, where I installed my first major permanent work in Portugal in 2004. I learned everything on that project, and thought that was going to open doors everywhere. But I still couldn’t get another commission for 5 years. I was at the precipice of giving up, when two came in at the same time, and it’s has been rolling ever since. 

I guess the message to younger designers is if you love what you are doing, get prepared to hunker down for awhile while you refine your skills in whatever intermediary projects you can get. Keep your ideas alive and growing, but be willing to pivot and follow your discoveries. I started on a grant in India as a painter when my paints went missing before my big show. If I hadn’t decided to work with the materials at hand – which in a coastal South Indian village was fishnet – my career wouldn’t have grown the same way.

Do you have a project that really resonated with you?  

It’s always the one I’m working on next! But, the project on the Boston Greenway was dear to my heart. Reshaping and drawing across airspace in the city was very exciting. The way the sculpture transformed in different weather - in the rain, in the morning light, at night with glowing illumination, the way people changed their lunchtime walks to pass by it - that was really meaningful to me. There was a grassroots website created, where people shared photos of the artwork in different weather and different times of day from different vantage points -- with tips to get onto a nearby public viewing roof deck for free. It was exciting to watch it unfold. I heard many meaningful things. A woman who lived in the neighborhood told me she felt safer now that the sculpture was there. Creating intentionality and humanizing a space brings attention and safety. It poses the question about how safety can be improved by not only investing in more police officers, but also investments in public art. I overheard an interview with the curator of Design Biennial Boston, which was on the Greenway at the same time. He looked up and pointed at my sculpture saying, “When I look at that, I can no longer say that anything is impossible.”

Any final words of wisdom for young designers?

I ask myself every day as I walk into the studio: How can I grow as an artist and how can my art grow? If you believe in your dream, nourish it. Think in microsteps as ways to test and prove your concepts, and be willing to pivot as you discover things along the way. As a young designer or architect, you can start with experimental, temporary small-scale projects for proof of concept, and this is the best way entice people to invest and build them. Believe in your ideas, however humble. Treat them with respect, and nourish them.