We — Sean Healy and Joe Thurston — believe that public art plays a vital role in the intellectual wellbeing and collective imagination of a community. By seeding art throughout a civic landscape, the people who work and live there can benefit from the kind of nourishment that only art can provide. By spurring them toward the playful work of reflection, interpretation, and dreaming, public art can teach us about ourselves while enriching our connection to the world around us.

As a multidisciplinary artist team, we benefit from a wide spectrum of skills when fabricating and installing public art. Our experience spans sculptural steel, film and light projection, rear projection media systems, glass curtain and glass panel walls, cast glass and resin, and suspended sculpture, executed within both indoor and outdoor environments. We have collaborated with many design-build teams and architects, including Los Angeles-based Morphosis and Dallas-based Page Southerland Page. All of our projects — which have ranged from $6,000 to $295,000 — have been completed on time and within budget

Because the best public art connects with the audiences that interact with it, our practice always includes a process of collaboration with the public. For the Wayne L. Morse Courthouse project in Eugene, Oregon, which received an Excellence in Design award from the U.S. General Services Administration, residents were interviewed to ensure the final work reflected the true character of the community. For the F.B.I. Headquarters project in Houston, Texas, agents and other employees were surveyed to understand what Bureau membership meant to them. These findings were then used as foundational source material for a work that portrayed the Bureau in a warm and deeply personal light that starkly contrasts with stereotypes of agents as cold and unfeeling. As a result, the piece was honored as one of the 40 best public art projects of 2009 by the Americans for the Arts. Most recently, we installed a work in Portland State University’s architecture building, using an iconic plumb bob to create a visual bridge between a floor of classrooms and an adjacent floor of studios. While stressing an essential relationship between theory and practice by connecting the two floors, the plumb bob, as symbol, was also chosen to encourage students to strive for a “true” orientation in their work.