Sarasota Art Museum exhibition highlights 40-year career of Janet Echelman

SARASOTA, Fla. - In "Radical Softness" at Sarasota Art Museum, visitors are taken through visual artist Janet Echelman's 40-year career. 

"Walking into this exhibition, it's quite emotional to see four decades of my life unfold," Echelman said. "I see a connective thread throughout the things that I looked at."

Dig deeper:

Echelman is known for creating large, mesh sculptures that are suspended high in cities around the world, including the temporarily closed "Bending Arc" in St. Petersburg.  The exhibition features a full-scale piece, and several 1/9th and 1/20th scale models used in the research and creative process. 

"This is the first exhibition where you get to see the physical models that I make and the shadows they create," Echelman said. "These are ways I test things out to get a sense of how it feels."

In addition to the physical analog models, Echelman builds every sculpture on the computer, using programming that the artist built from the ground up. 

"In order to model these diamond-mesh forms, we have to calculate the exact angle, the weight, the stiffness, and how they interact with gravity. That's the only way to know where the form will be and how strong it needs to be. We analyze the wind. We analyze the weight of ice and snow on these forms, so math and geometry are the basis for our computer tools," Echelman said. 

The backstory:

The initial creation of the mesh sculptures happened kind of by accident. During a 1997 Fulbright lectureship in India where she planned to give painting demonstrations, she arrived in Mahabalipuram, a fishing village famous for sculpture, but her paints and equipment did not. 

"It forced me to embrace what was there, and I was in a fishing village," Echelman said. "I began making art with fishing nets, and the rest is history."

The exhibition also features Echelman's work in other mediums. She says they all connect and build the career she has today. 

What they're saying:

"The sculpture is about these webs of interconnected soft fiber that, when any moment in that form moves, every other part is impacted, that we're all moving together in this network of life within our planet."

What's next:

"Radical Softness" will be on display through April 26th.