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LAFAYETTE — Maya Uppal, 7, snaps a photo of 20 parasols dangling from a 20-by-16-foot wooden archway a few houses down from her own, while two other neighborhood kids play with bamboo pulleys that lift and lower the umbrellas.
The Lafayette Elementary second-grader is documenting an untitled art project she helped construct with friends and fellow residents of the cul-de-sac on Beechwood Drive while nearly two dozen people gather, though not too close, for drinks, snacks and community to celebrate its completion.
She holds the images she just made, printed straight from her blue Fujifilm Instax, in one hand as she points to one of nine wooden mosaics she spent two days creating with her dad while sheltering in place amid the coronavirus pandemic, comparing the experience to building a puzzle: “It was fun because I like puzzles.”
The moment Uppal reveled in during the archway’s Thursday night debut is why her neighbor Steve Beresford-Howe conjured the idea for the piece and presented it at one of the community’s recent happy hours, where the group sat six feet apart in a big circle around a fire pit, caught up and shared s’mores.
“I wanted something that would be both structurally robust and would feel light, something that would be over us and feel light,” says Beresford-Howe, a contractor-turned-collaborative artist whose work in the past decade has include ephemeral projects such as temples at Burning Man. “I wanted to create something that felt like the world had air and space and joy, not heaviness and burden and fear.”
Each piece of the work Beresford-Howe chose spoke to those themes, as well as the temporary nature of the sculpture and the pandemic that inspired it. In fact, the artist flagged down a garbage truck driver while making a supply run to a local hardware store so he could learn in advance how big the sculpture could be and still fit inside the truck’s hopper when it came time to deconstruct.
“I was starting to gather materials and I thought, ‘Before I decide on final dimensions, I need to find out how tall this has to be,’ ” he says.
Nailed to one of the archway’s pillars is a note recognizing essential workers such as garbage truck drivers most likely to haul away the impermanent art on an upcoming Friday morning: “This sculpture is dedicated to health care providers, and the first responders in the fire and police departments. The people who know about risk, and go to work every day.”
Video: Burning Man artist Steve Beresford-Howe collaborates with Lafayette neighbors on archway amid coronavirus pandemic
Starting at the base, the mosaics the neighborhood kids pieced together are made of recycled wood Beresford-Howe picked up at the Petaluma ranch of David Best, whose signature cuts on past Burning Man temples are unmistakable.
In adhering to social-distancing guidelines, Best donated hundreds of the custom wood designs for the archway and allowed Beresford-Howe to select them from his barn while the two communicated in a video chat. Beresford-Howe envisioned mosaics specifically because he wanted to allow neighbors a safe way to work individually as they contributed to the collaborative project — and give the youngest participants a break from screen-gazing and a chance to interact with the physical world.
The archway pillars are made of recycled Douglas fir gathered at Concord lumberyards. Beresford-Howe retrieved the parasols and bamboo plywood pulleys used to lift and lower them — so cars can still enter and exit the cul-de-sac — from a previous art project he designed for the public art nonprofit Flux Foundation. The LEDs atop each parasol were ordered from Amazon.
“There’s something about paper parasols that is both delicate and joyful and fragile — it’s easy to use them as a medium to create something playful and light,” Beresford-Howe says, adding that the hanging feature served the subtle and dual purpose of encouraging the neighborhood kids to look up from their screens while admiring and playing near the sculpture.
When it came time to assemble the archway, custom-motorcycle designer Charlie Montgomery, Beresford-Howe’s next-door neighbor, lent his driveway to the cause.
“Until we find a vaccine for this, well at least we can throw out a little art into this world and get together,” Montgomery says during the unveiling, which let him get to spend more time and get to know neighbors such as Maya and her father, Vijay Uppal.
“It was just a great way to kind of bring some normalcy to an otherwise unnormal situation, and the kids especially loved it … it kind of allowed them to be creative and interact with each other a little bit,” Uppal says, adding that before the neighborhood happy hour where the cul-de-sac agreed to the collective art project, he was spending days with his daughter playing baseball and riding bikes.
Standing under the archway surrounded by his neighbors, Beresford-Howe agrees with Uppal and explains why the piece works:
“I got my community back.”
