Work produced as a 2019 Socrates Sculpture Park Fellow and was included in the Socrates Annual Exhibition 2019.

‘Monument to Your Stinky Tree’ is, in short, a sculpture about a man’s love for a tree. A tree that is actually a pretty invasive weed..

Only two blocks away from Socrates, a particularly resilient 60 ft tall Ailanthus Altissima tree lived to the ripe old age of 75 (they don’t typically live past 50). Isamu Noguchi saved this tree from being chopped down with the other weeds when he purchased the building that is now the Noguchi Museum. Noguchi’s beloved tree became the centerpiece for the Museum’s courtyard.

Ailanthus, ‘Tree of Heaven’ or ‘Stinky Tree’ is known to “grow out of a sidewalk”, described as easy to hate, but just as easy to love, and it has become a symbol of urban resilience, resistance, strength and determination. Before Long Island City was rezoned- from an industrial to residential neighborhood- I imagine the landscape being much like where live/work in Northeast Philadelphia, the foul smelling tree littering industrial corridors, poking its way through cracks in the concrete.

My sculpture is modeled after Noguchi’s 1980 sculpture, “The Spirit of the Lima Bean”, commissioned by a real estate developer, whose wealth was built on lima bean farming, for his office park which was built on one of his family’s lima bean fields. The impressively large interlocking boulder sculpture, on its own, serves as a nice monument to the changing urban landscape