The Urban Flower Field Project
Summer Internship Project with Amanda Lovelee and Ed Charbonneau
When the Pedro Luggage building in downtown St. Paul was demolished in 2011, it left a gaping hole in the streetscape the size of a quarter block. In the summer of 2014, Public Art St. Paul artist-in-residence and MCAD alumna Amanda Lovelee brought together a team of artists from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and environmental scientists from the University of St. Thomas to re-imagine the site as an urban flower garden. MCAD faculty member and alumnus Ed Charbonneau along with his studio mate Jeremy Szopinski designed a 9,000 square foot mural for the site using the Fibbonaci sequence as inspiration. The work is meant to evoke the arrangement of sunflower seeds within a flower head. MCAD interns assisted Lovelee and Charbonneau in bringing their vision of a new, dynamic public space to life in the heart of downtown St. Paul.
This project won a “Great Places 2014” award from the Sensible Land Use Coalition.
Project lead
Amanda Lovelee ’10, MFA
Muralist team
Ed Charbonneau ’06, MFA
Jeremy Szopinski
Lead MCAD intern
Abby Kapler ’16
Additional MCAD interns
Nikki Ivanovsky-Schow ’16
Mirandy Lardinois ’15
Kathryn Warren ’16