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The snail moves slowly and patiently, representing the importance of moving gradually and safely toward a target.
In 2016, Spartanburg Art Museum launched its first large-scale public art project, Lighten Up Spartanburg!, in which 28 six-foot-tall fiberglass artbulbs were painted and sculpted by local and regional artists.
The success of this downtown project grew our awareness that residents and tourists alike loved the artbulbs, so Spartanburg Art Museum has decided that bringing more public art to the City of Spartanburg will be a permanent component of our contemporary art programming.
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In 2020, Spartanburg Art Museum is bringing internationally renowned artist group CRACKING ART all the way from Milan, Italy to Spartanburg, South Carolina!
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39 brightly-colored plastic snails, ranging in size from 3 feet to 10.5 feet tall, will grace our thriving downtown from
February - August 2020.
image courtesy of Cracking Art
The Cracking Art movement was born in 1993 with the intention to radically change the history of art through a strong social and environmental commitment. The revolutionary use of plastic materials investigates the close relationship between natural and artificial reality. The group dimension doesn’t limit each individual artist’s creativity: each member of the movement also works independently to develop their own interpretation of contemporary problems and tensions.
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The name “Cracking Art” comes from the English verb “to crack”, which express the state of being split, broken, cracked, or crashed. This catalytic cracking, as the name suggests, is also the term for the chemical reaction that occurs when converting raw crude oil into plastic. For the artists, it represents the instant when something natural becomes artificial and is the reason why they seek to seize that very moment in their art form.
Their philosophy connects common reason to individual meditation, creating installations with animals that appear unexpectedly in everyday places. The surprise of seeing an ordinary subject made extraordinary through its super-size, vivid color, and form, attracts the attention of passersby, inviting people to re-examine their perspectives on urban life while inspiring them to play with our cities while mentally and physically re-building them. Recycling plastic removes it from its toxic role in nature, and communicates, through and unconventional language, the importance of paying strong attention to our planet.
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image courtesy of Cracking Art
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