DC -- Natl Building Museum -- Outdoor Exhibit: Equilateral Network (by Lisa Marie Thalhammer):
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Description of Pictures: An Enormous Rainbow Mural Graces The National Building Museum Lawn During Pride Month
June 5, 20218:00 AM ET
Laurel Wamsley
The wide lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has taken on a riot of rainbow hues in a geometric mural designed by artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer.
The installation, titled Equilateral Network, was designed to create spaces for social distancing with its triangular grid. Unpainted sections of lawn provide walking paths, and equilateral triangles lined in pink define spaces for people to sit, separated by six feet of distance.
Thalhammer designed the work in the fall of 2020, when social distancing was a pressing concern. Its opening now coincides with Pride month, creating a colorful new space for gatherings in the newly reopened city.
"I really wanted to do a piece that would help bring a balance and a calm and also a joy and a wonder to the city," says Thalhammer, who splits her time between D.C. and her native Saint Louis. "You come and you sit in the piece and it shifts the energy of the space."
To create her design, Thalhammer took inspiration from Pierre L'Enfant, the French-American engineer and city planner who was tasked by George Washington with creating a plan for a new federal district along the Potomac. L'Enfant's design endures in modern D.C., where wide avenues cut angles across the city's grid.
Thalhammer was fond of L'Enfant's use of stars and triangles in his plan for the city – and found herself particularly drawn to the equilateral triangles that took shape in his designs.
"I really love the equilateral triangle as a symbol of justice, as a symbol of balance as it relates to our three bodies of government and how they're equal," she says.
Other aspects of Thalhammer's design came from another source: LGBTQ pride.
The pink triangles in her design have particular meaning, she explains. "Some of it goes back to the Holocaust, of gay people being identified with the pink triangle. And then it was also used in ACT UP in the '80s when people were protesting against AIDS and not having a vaccine for AIDS. So the use of the pink triangle in this piece, for me, it's a bit of a reference to that historic identity of justice."
Then there are the rainbows – a symbol of identity for LGBTQ people, as well as a symbol of diversity. Thalhammer's palette is a 12-color spectrum, which she says represents the intersection of people's lived identities.
"We're very rarely just one thing as people, as humans. We're normally a variety of different identities that all come together and I think they're all beautiful," says Thalhammer, who identifies as pansexual.
Using a giant protractor mat, she set out the lines she had sketched first on paper. She marked lines with pink twine, aided by the street team from the Downtown DC Business Improvement District. A crew from the museum helped spray the special non-toxic paint onto the design using a spray paint machine. Another machine painted the lines, in the same manner lines are painted onto a football field.
Thalhammer's mural will be in place into the summer. Like hair that's been dyed, the painted design will grow out over time — to keep it fresh, the work will be repainted as the colored blades of grass are mowed.
And this is no hands-off work of art. A summer movie series is planned on the site, and the museum is now open Fridays to Sundays.
Thalhammer hopes that people will walk through the space, work out, do yoga and meditate there. And she wants it to be a place where people can gather, in a year when many of the typical Pride events are canceled.
"I hope people get dressed up in fabulous gay pride attire and do photos there," she says.
The above was from https://www.npr.org/2021/06/05/1003402046/an-enormous-rainbow-mural-graces-the-national-building-museum-lawn-during-pride-
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. IP Address: 3.135.200.211 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
EQUIL_210620_28.JPG: "Equilateral Network"
An Artistic Social Distancing Lawn Art Design
Lisa Marie Studio
By LOVE Mural Artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Sponsored by the DowntownDC BID
In partnership with the National Building Museum
Tasked with creating an outdoor artwork that would allow visitors to safely enjoy being together while social distancing, Lisa Marie's design pieces together a series of pink equilateral triangles and walking paths, comfortably spaced 6 feet apart from each other. Inspired by Pierre Charles L'Enfant's use of sacred geometry in his original 1791 city plan for Washington, DC, Lisa Marie chose to focus her design on equilateral triangles as symbols of balance and justice. The use of color is also an important element to this artwork, as rainbow spectrums and pink triangles are both historic symbols of identity and gay rights activism. Artist Lisa Marie states that, "This balanced, steady and strong geometry is highlighted in a proud pink amongst a healing full-color rainbow spectrum and is meant to inspire feelings of calm, unity, peace, equity and joy."
EQUIL_210620_68.JPG: That was unexpected!
EQUIL_210701_53.JPG: "Equilateral Network"
An Artistic Social Distancing Lawn Art Design
Lisa Marie Studio
By LOVE Mural Artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Sponsored by the DowntownDC BID
In partnership with the National Building Museum
Tasked with creating an outdoor artwork that would allow visitors to safely enjoy being together while social distancing, Lisa Marie's design pieces together a series of pink equilateral triangles and walking paths, comfortably spaced 6 feet apart from each other. Inspired by Pierre Charles L'Enfant's use of sacred geometry in his original 1791 city plan for Washington, DC, Lisa Marie chose to focus her design on equilateral triangles as symbols of balance and justice. The use of color is also an important element to this artwork, as rainbow spectrums and pink triangles are both historic symbols of identity and gay rights activism. Artist Lisa Marie states that, "This balanced, steady and strong geometry is highlighted in a proud pink amongst a healing full-color rainbow spectrum and is meant to inspire feelings of calm, unity, peace, equity and joy."
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!