Artwork-in-progress addresses sustainable question on car hoods

Collaborative artist Joe LaMantia sits beside a pile of Sharpies and a question in the center of the Jordan Hall Atrium. Above the Sharpies, a banner, designed by children in the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, asks, “What are your ideas 4 sustainability?”

Students flood past the question, past LaMantia and past the answers written on white-painted car hoods. Once in a while, someone stops.

“Finally, I had an idea,” said sophomore Torrey Byrd, picking up a Sharpie and drawing the polka-dotted word “Vote.”

She’s looked at the artwork-in-progress every day on her way to class and planned to vote early.

Two weeks into the five-week-long project, the car hoods are covered with brightly colored messages and designs ranging from humorous to specific: “help small apartments recycle!” “Shower with a friend” “Give a Hoot! Don’t pollute! mkay?”

LaMantia’s “Dreams for a Sustainable Future” is one of the Themester’s events for its fall theme, “Sustainability: Thriving on a Small Planet.”

The collaborative art project invites anyone to participate in the creative process. Without the involvement of others, the car hoods would be blank.

“It’s coming alive each time someone puts a marker to a car part,” LaMantia said of his project.

One of LaMantia’s missions as a collaborative artist is to demystify art. Art becomes mystified, he said, because people are far removed from the creation of things.

By inviting everyone inside the creative process, he said he hopes people will better understand their own creative potential.

His idea of collaborative art formed through the years, and was furthered by his experiences as an activity therapist for a mental institution and as a part of a crew installing art exhibits in Boston.

As an activity therapist, he realized the significance of playing games.

“I realized that people, no matter what mental state they may be in, will play a game unlike being in real life,” he said. “People become more of themselves when they play games.”

Installing artists’ exhibits gave him a sense of involvement in the process, however slight.

“I felt that I was part of the show,” he said. “I knew it, but not too many people knew it.”

He now lives in Bloomington, which he has populated with collaborative works in public spaces. One of these pieces is the “Flying ‘V’ guitar” on the corner of Seventh and Walnut streets.

Involving a community in an artwork carries a sense of spontaneity and of openness that LaMantia still finds beautiful.

“What makes me so happy is how people are willing to give of themselves,” he said. “To pick up a pen and write something down.”