Dear Commons Community,

As summer vacation nears and we start thinking about where to bring the kids or in my case, the grand kids, you might consider an exhibition, The Art of the Brick, at Discovery Times Square, by artist Nathan Sawaya.  It  is a critically acclaimed collection of intriguing and inspiring works of art made exclusively from one of the most recognizable toys in the world — LEGO® bricks. The Discovery Times Square exhibit is the world’s biggest and most elaborate display of LEGO® art ever and has been named  ‘One of CNN’s Ten Global Must-See Exhibitions.’   In varied forms, this show of Sawaya’ s work has appeared in other cities and toured internationally but has never been shown in New York.   Here is an excerpt from a New York Times review:

“… it is difficult to walk through this exhibition and pass a version of Rodin’s “Thinker” (4,332 pieces) or see Mr. Sawaya’s own life-size piece “Blue Guy Sitting” (21,054 pieces), and not smile in amazement at the ambition and or admire the skill. We can examine “The Thinker” to see how pieces deftly weave a knot of relations among the face, bent arm and closed fist. And if we blur our vision while looking at “Blue Guy Sitting,” we see that rigid, rectangular blocks have molded an embodiment of relaxed contentment.

Some constructions are alluring for other reasons. The dinosaur (80,020 pieces) impresses with its scale, occupying an entire gallery, its snapped-together plastic pieces resembling fractured fragments of fossilized bone. And the Moai figure from Easter Island (75,450 pieces) is large enough so that you almost don’t have to blur its pixelated construction mentally to imagine the original’s sculptured curves.”

Discovery Times Squre is on 44th Steet between 7th and 8th Avenue.  The exhibition runs through  January 5, 2013.

Tony