A word with Matthew Mazzotta, Westside Urban Park artist

Matthew Mazzotta has built a national reputation with quirky urban art pieces. Now he’s been selected to create a piece for the new Westside Urban Park in downtown Boise, which will begin construction this summer.

Often described as a social practice artist, Mazzotta received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology and a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow.

His prior artistic pieces include the Busycle, which was designed as a passenger-powered urban transit project. Various Busycle spin-offs are now commonly seen around the country, including one in Boise that tours the pubs in downtown.

Other works include the Cloud House, which creates the sound of rain on a tin roof using user-powered rocking chairs, and Park Spark, which digests dog poop into methane to power street lamps in a public park. The Park Spark earned Mazzotta the label “the man who made the dog poop lamp.”

The Idaho Business Review interviewed Mazzotta when he was in Boise on Jan. 21 to talk to City of Boise representatives and the public about creating art for the new downtown park that will be built at the southwest corner of the Bannock and 11th Street intersection.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you feel about getting branded as the dog poop lamp guy?

Before that, I did a project called the Busycle. It was about looking at public transportation in a different way. Public transportation is always planned from the top down: who gets a bus route or who gets a subway. We wanted to make a piece of public transportation that was built from the bottom up instead: powered by the people, built by the people and going where the people want to go. You see them around now as tourist attractions where everybody’s pedaling. But the (original) Busycle was years ago before all that became part of the street culture.

That project got a lot of press, and everybody then asked me the same question: How did I feel about being known as the Busycle guy? And then it became: How did I feel about being known as the dog poop guy? … I’ve had a couple of names. I’ll probably have a few more. It won’t end with being the dog poop guy.

Just about every one of your projects had some kind of environmental or functional theme to it. Is everything you do like this?

I would say that I’m an activist using artistic sensibility. … There’s always an underlying message or underlying experience. It could be an environmental theme or it could be about social issues, but that’s always the crux of it. It’s about bringing ideas into the public discourse. How do you get conversations started about the world we live in now? With all the polarization, how do you get ideas to seem fresh again? How do you get people that usually wouldn’t participate to start speaking together? That’s what I want to do. It’s exciting to provoke the conversation.

A Guggenheim fellowship is a big deal. How did you feel about it? Do you feel it added anything to your art practice?

I function a lot outside of the art system. I am usually asked directly by communities to work with them. The art world is not really there. Often these communities just say, ‘We saw what you did. We’ve shown it at our city hall or in a community meeting, and we want to work with you.’

Because I am mostly outside that system, I was very impressed that the Guggenheim Foundation would care about the work I was doing. Also it shocked me a little bit. Everybody was so happy for me because everyone knows that name. It reached the New York Times, and people were telling me and all  my family, my town and people I know. Guggenheim surprised me with the award; but also, I was really surprised by people’s reactions to it. It was a nice surprise.

Do you think getting the Guggenheim has helped your reach at all? Has it opened up new venues for you or created a greater demand? Have you noticed a difference?

I’ve not noticed anything, but that’s not to say there is no difference. I mean, my goal is to grow my (art) practice every year. I think in some ways it is helping me by putting me on different people’s radars. That’s a good thing for an artist. Absolutely.

Where did you grow up and how did you get started in your career?

I grew up in northern New York in a small town called Canton. It used to have a large dairy industry and a lot of farms — more cows than people at one point. It has one university and a college as well, and the town next door also has a college. So it’s like a weird place. It’s 18 miles from the Canadian border, so it’s above everything. The closest city is Ottawa, Canada. It’s in the northern foothills of the Adirondacks.

So how did you end up going from a little northern New York town to Atlanta?

When I was a kid, skateboarding was the greatest thing in the world. I remember, for me, it was all about art and skateboarding. My parents were like, ‘You’re definitely gonna go to college,’ but it was my mom who figured it out. She found a liberal arts school paired with an art school, the Art Institute of Atlanta. The liberal arts college was the Oglethorpe University. She said, ‘I think this is going to be great because you want to go somewhere warm so you can skateboard. This has a dual degree program. Go there.’

So you went there?

I went there one year and dropped out. Then I traveled around the United States in a van, visiting everywhere. Eventually everybody looked at me and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ No one was happy when I dropped out, but I think it was a good move because it gave me more experience. I took a job doing welding and fabrication. It kind of supercharged me, and I actually got skills. The artwork I made on my time off is what I used to apply to get into the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s where I got my undergrad (degree). Then I went out on my own for a while and did carpentry and some other things. Eventually, I applied to MIT, to their visual arts program where I did my master’s.

You are doing a lot of social activism things in Atlanta.

Yeah. (Atlanta) was the first time I had seen the homeless situation. It was just so shocking to me that we can walk by these people. We didn’t have that in my small town at all. I was like, wow, this is crazy. What are we going to do? So I got involved in some groups (addressing homelessness) … That was definitely the start of it all.

I saw that I had a privilege to be able to contribute. I thought I could make a difference and eventually got into protesting. But (later) I thought there was an even better way, and that’s where I became an artist doing these socially engaged works.

So how has your perspective on social activism changed since then?

I made a direct challenge to myself: Instead of going out on the street with a protest sign, I thought, how can I reach someone with an idea that I’ve thought about a lot? How do can I transmit that in two seconds? How can I get people to engage? It’s very difficult. So I started going into it as artwork … I think that art plays a huge role here.

Art is how you can make something into such a spectacle that people who have problems with each other end up sharing in the same space or having an experience together. With art, you can make people so curious that they can build community or move together on an issue. So that’s been my whole strategy: If you got an issue, how do you present it? I think that art plays a large role in how people can digest an issue.