Kurt Perschke's RedBall Project

The ball and a Metro bus, the same agency that funded the project in St. Louis. At the time, the site was the future location of a MetroRail station.

Initially mounted on the second storey of a court building, the ball was rolled down the street by a crew of assistants and volunteers to it’s first official installation in that overpass that began the idea. Popular with the local art council, it was to remain there for almost two months. Though many other sites were proposed, the ball would have to wait for Barcelona to fulfill it’s sculptural and mobile potential.

The RedBall was first inflated on August 27, 2001 amid much nervous excitement and anticipation. This test took place in a fabulous Bi-State facility. The ball debuted at 15 feet high, 250 pounds, and was created using over 530 sq. ft. of 32 oz. pvc fabric. The material and construction of the ball is the same process used to create inflatable river rafts. A blower is needed to inflate the ball, which was discovered at Liberty Tool in Maine, destination for sculptors everywhere.

RedBall began as a requested commission by Arts in Transit, an award winning public art bi-state agency based in St. Louis. I was asked to choose among a series of sites and propose a temporary work. After being drawn to an unlikely underpass lacking the glamour of other possibilities I worked through a series of ideas, trying to figure out how to make evident my pull to this particular place. In a late night sketching session, after many failures and in a moment of frustration to realize the compressed potential of the site, I jammed a gigantic ball under the bridge to make myself laugh. Excited, intrigued, and having nothing else I liked, I showed the sketch to my project manager the next day over ice cream at Crown Candy. She laughed too, and thus began the RedBall Project.

That first site was really the start of it all, one experience with a hunk of concrete in a lonely drive by place that led me to realize the way I see. The ball is in some ways a surrogate or point of access. I have become interested in the notion of advocacy, as a sculptor in urban environments the question is not always building new objects but seeing what is already there, and finding the means to transmit that visualization.

Though this work seems to be about an object, it isn’t. As much as the physical presence of the piece on the street is an undeniable magnet, the work exists only in relation to site and location. The ball exists to facilitate the imagination of where it might go, where a passerby might think of squishing it in. This transference is as much a part of the work as its formal nature, or the kids bouncing off of it.