KPLU Local News
(2010-03-21)
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Artist Mimi Allin.
Photo by: Paula Wissel.
Imagine coming into the office and seeing a ballet dancer twirling around or a poet hanging out in the board room. Should art in corporate offices be more than paintings in the hallway?
Mimi Allin thinks so. To that end, she convinced a Seattle firm to adopt her for a month.
On the day I visit, Mimi Allin has spent all night at the office, working on a project she calls "No Swimming." She giddily points out the sharks.
"There's a fin emerging from the concrete," she laughs.
These shark fins are soft. They're made out of foam and covered in blue velvet fabric you want to touch. Allin has positioned them in a circle around a chair, with a portable CD player next to it. A large sign says, "LISTEN."
When you put the headphones on, you hear Mozart. That people should take a few minutes out of their work day to sit amongst cloth sharks and listen to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is just one of the things Mimi Allin has dreamed up as the poet-in-residence at NBBJ Architects.
"I feel like there's this need to stop working a little bit. They work so hard and they're so efficient and there's really nothing wrong with it, but let's take a break and refresh our spirit," she says.
It's hard to say if it's working. Many of the architects, receptionists, marketing people and others who work here are not stopping to listen. They glance over, smile, but keep walking.
"Maybe they'll come back later," Allin says hopefully.
NBBJ isn't paying Allin for this. She got an arts grant from the city of Seattle, then went looking for a corporation or company willing to adopt her as a resident poet.
She acknowledges feeling a little frumpy here in her green cords and sneakers among all the designer dresses and Italian shoes.
And, there's another thing that sets her apart.
She gets to work in a rowboat. She rows it across Lake Union most mornings. She says she decided to make it an element of her corporate poet project because, well, it just seemed romantic.
"This is a magical place. You can't just drive up and walk in the door. You've got to get here by some special means," she says.
Allin once worked as a summer climbing ranger at Mount Rainier and has helped sail boats to the South Seas. She says rowing to her job at NBBJ givers her the chance to connect with nature.
In her 1 month residency at the South Lake Union architecture firm, Allin the poet seems intent on tweaking conventional workplace behavior.
"Because really that's my job to do the thing you can't do. I want to do the unthinkable, not revolting, but what can't you do here and let's do that," she says.
Her first week at NBBJ she took chalk to the concrete columns, writing what ever came to her mind. Then she laid sixteen hundred feet of blue painters tape in a continuous line across the lobby floor, up the stairs, around the corner and by dozens and dozens of desks. She covered every inch of it with prose.
"My intention was to write the architecture, whatever that meant," she says.
Looking out of the building at a public, but empty space below, she writes:
"Where are the sarong vendors and fruit sellers? Where are the artists at their easels? Where are the laundry lines, the folding patio chairs in faded plaid, the ball game on the transistor radio?"
One day, Allin brings in an old overhead projector and spends the day writing letters on the transparencies to the Architects from the building.
One letter begins, "Dear Architect, I had a dream the other night there were tomatoes and carrots and grapes growing on the roof."
In another letter she writes, "Dear Architect, Thank you for the flowers."
This isn't the first time Mimi Allin has pushed the envelope of what being a poet in modern society means. Since earning her masters in creative writing, she's often looked for new ways of connecting with the public through her art.
For an entire year, she spent every Sunday at a desk she set up outdoors at Greenlake with the word poet on it. When someone came up, she would ask them what their specialty was.
"People would answer in very creative and interesting ways like that their specialty is seeing the silver lining in clouds," she says.
There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm at NBBJ for having Mimi Allin around. As we're standing next to the shark installation, NBBJ principal Rysia Suchecka walks by and, unsolicited, says this is the best thing that's ever happened in this office.
"She brought such a lightness of being, so much whimsy, so much poetry, but also, I think, intellectually we are so stimulated," she says effusively.
But,like a lot of others here, Rysia has to run off to a meeting and doesn't have the time to stop and listen to the music in the shark pool.
Allins poetry residency hasn't been without its challenges.
Still she hopes the NBBJ experiment will be seen as a pilot project that other companies and artists will want to emulate.
"We buy art and hang it on the wall. We value what that art can say and convey. So the idea of owning live art, what would that do?" she asks.
What it could do, Mimi Allin believes, is remind us all that there's a soul and spirit that needs tending, even at the office.
Mimi Allin's NBBJ poet-in-residence blog
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