SOME view a strip of tire tread as trash. Brooklyn-based artist and puppeteer Chris Green envisions a crocodile. Wind turbines are zebra haunches. Pink flamingos arise from an amalgam of wood and bamboo, combs, spools of thread, flea market purses and plastic fly swatters.
Shaped by Green's fertile imagination, the oddly lifelike critters are among the many inhabitants of "Noah's Ark," a new play-oriented, hands-on, animal-centric realization of the flood story opening June 26 at the Skirball Cultural Center.
Five years in the making, the 8,000-square-foot, $5-million, non-religious permanent installation is a deliberate redefinition of the Jewish heritage institution as a destination attraction for families of all backgrounds, expanding the center's big-tent philosophy, says Uri D. Herscher, founding president and chief executive.
Skirball Cultural Center: An article in Saturday's Calendar section about the "Noah's Ark" installation at the Skirball Cultural Center misspelled the first name of Alan Maskin, a principal of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, as Allen.
"It enriches our mission by welcoming an audience that we hadn't welcomed with the same focus before, children and their extended families," he says. "It really is early childhood education while at play."
"Noah's Ark" was designed by Seattle-based Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects with Skirball architect Moshe Safdie. It occupies the entire second floor of the center's three-story, 3-year-old Winnick Hall wing, a previously vacant space. It encompasses an outdoor amphitheater and a "rainbow mist" installation by Safdie with environmental artist Ned Kahn.
At its core: an enormous walk-in wooden ark in two parts, filled with life-size animals -- and messages of community, character-building, cooperation and respect for nature based on the Hebrew story of Noah and the flood stories and myths of other cultures. The installation, developed by Skirball staffer Marni Gittleman, features educational and play activities in a setting of low-tech Victorian-era cranks and wheels. There are no representations of people, not even a Noah. ("Animals have less baggage," Herscher says.)
Life-affirming themes, Gittleman says, are underscored by the use of sustainable, fair trade, environment-friendly, found-object and recycled materials.
That's where Green, 35 -- tall and rail-thin, with an emphatic nose and hair whisked into startled tufts -- comes in. His dozens of repurposed- and found-object puppets and kinetic sculptures are only a fraction of the more than 350 animals on display, yet all agree that his are key to the installation.
*
Foreground concept
- New director at the Skirball Jul 10, 2003
- Learning Link to Skirball Cultural Center Feb 13, 2001
- Lavin to Be Interviewed in Skirball Arts Series May 26, 1999
