Thursday, June 29, 2023
We didn’t need to ramble far for this unique adventure. Mid-morning we headed to Pleasant Valley Promenade in North Raleigh to take in Nathan Sawaya’s LEGO®, art exhibition, ART OF THE BRICK. For the next two hours, we were mesmerized as we walked through rooms full of realistic and fantasy LEGO creations. It is quite incredible how Mr. Sawaya utilizes a common toy that millions (including myself) enjoyed as a child into a medium for serious art. The art displays varied in size, the largest encompassed an entire room and included many individual components. Most of the art work incorporated ten of thousands of LEGO blocks while the larger ones utilized hundred of thousands of blocks. The displays, especially the flat works, were best observed at a distance to blur the pixilated effect of the.blocks. In fact, it was uncanny how renderings of paintings such as the Mona Lisa, morphed from a crude blockiness at close range into a realistic reproduction at a distance.
We highly recommend this exhibition if you have an opportunity to see it; it’s well worth the $5 entrance fee. A photographic sampling of some of the many and varied displays follows.
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| Aloha / Hello Pencil |
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| Crayons |
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| Andy Warhol |
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| Think |
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| Ball and Jacks |
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| Yellow (front) |
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| Yellow (back) |
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| The Kiss |
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| My Boy |
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| Gray |
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| Classical Statues |
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| The Scream |
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| Mona Lisa |
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| The Starry Night |
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| Pretty in Pink |
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| Tyrannosaurus rex Skeleton (6 meters long) |
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| Red Towel and Flip-flops |
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| Angelic Janie |