Ben Busche
Cliff Garten
Daniel Iregui
Wendy Maruyama
Rebeca MÉndez
Ben Busche transforms urban spaces through the use of light. Busche heads the Madrid and Munich-based architecture+design studio Brut Deluxe; their ephemeral design projects occur around the world, producing ‘hypnotic astonishment’ for viewers and participants. Busche and his studio create these projects with an orientation towards social and sustainability issues. The results are captivating public artworks, highly functional public facilities (kiosks, bike systems, modular housing) and architectural icons. Light installations represent a majority of recent projects in Madrid, Lisbon, London, Berlin, Munich, Brussels, Geneva, Denver, Hong Kong, and a number of cities in China.
For 40 years, furniture maker, artist and educator Wendy Maruyama has been making innovative work that examines social causes. From her California studio, she creates works inspired by her Japanese-American childhood, her interpretation of her ethnic heritage, and observations of Japanese culture. Her Tag Project addresses the 1942 forced incarceration of Japanese Americans; ten groupings, each ranging from 12’ high and 3-5’ in diameter, contain replicas of the ID tags issued to 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Maruyama is a recipient of the California Civil Liberties Public Education Grant, several National Endowment for the Arts Grants, the Japan/US Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Grant.
Rebeca Méndez is best known for her commitment to design and art as a social force. Her initiatives bridge art, design and science, and demonstrate a commitment to the environment and a sustainable future. She is an artist, designer, professor and chair at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. She is also the founder of CounterForce Lab, where her research and fieldwork harness art and design to engage with the global ecological crisis and environmental injustice. Méndez’s diverse works develop within science, design and art through immersive installations, sound, video, photography, and drawing, with a special focus on posthumanism, eco-feminism, indigeneity, and environmental justice.
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Grimanesa Amorós
Nancy Baker Cahill
Carol Bentel
Kim Boganey
Daniel Canogar
Sakchin Bessette
Erik Carlson and Erica Carpenter
John Grant
Rodney Leon
David Lesort and Arnaud Giroud
Michael Mayer
Weaving technologies with impressions of history, acclaimed artist Grimanesa Amorós structures connections between moments in time. Amorós is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist interested in social history, scientific research, and critical theory. Her art conveys a sense of ephemeral wonder where past meets future, inspiring viewers to become agents of empowerment. She uses sculpture, video, and lighting to create works that illuminate our notions of personal identity and community. She spoke at TEDGlobal 2014, and was a recipient of the NEA Visual Artist Fellowship and the NEA Artist Travel Grant. She has exhibited in the United States, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. A vanguard celebrity creating with both technology and art, her work is inspired by the essence of the forces, identities, and systems existing in our environments. Baker Cahill is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free augmented reality art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and were profiled in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper.
Bold and experienced in realizing forms with fresh combinations of materials, Carol Bentel is a leading hospitality designer working in the field of architecture. As a partner in the studio of Bentel & Bentel, Architects/Planners, she has developed a reputation for bold, modern, creative and beautifully resolved design that incorporates art as a key element. The firm strives to create urban areas, buildings, interiors, furniture and other objects of daily use that are rapturous, believing that such sensually gratifying aesthetic holds value for both the individual and society at large. Bentel & Bentel projects have garnered numerous international, national and regional awards for design excellence.
Kim Boganey is vital to the nationally-recognized Scottsdale, Arizona public art scene. As Director of Scottsdale Public Art, she greatly influences the community’s creative, cultural, and economic vitality through creative placemaking, signature events, exhibitions, and installations. She also manages the city’s Art in Public Places and Art in Private Development projects. Boganey leads Scottsdale’s award-winning annual public art event Canal Convergence. Past positions were at North Carolina’s Office of Raleigh Arts, Phoenix Arts Commission and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been active with the American Alliance of Museums, Americans for the Arts and the Association for African American Museums.
Remembrance and fragility define the stunning projects of Spanish-born Daniel Canogar. Often, the contents of aging technologies (VHS tapes, 35 mm film, hard discs and CDs) are projected onto building facades. Canogar brings life back into these mediums, revealing the memories they hold within. Green-screen technology, recorded human performances and flexible LED tiles create data-influenced generative curving shapes. Canogar invites viewers to seek out multiple perspectives in the artwork and actively participate in a shared history. The heightened sense of attention brought about by his work allows memories to settle more deeply, helping viewers better face the challenges presented by topics such as climate change and the 24/7 news cycle.
Erik Carlson and Erica Carpenter lead AREA C Projects, a Rhode Island-based public art practice. Backgrounds in multimedia installation, audio composition, architecture, performance and experimental technique result in artwork that reveals unexpected points of commonality, inviting individual and communal engagement. Art and activism are important concepts, and their work often incorporates text-based works built with tools such as collage and découpage. Evolving across a varied portfolio of installations, interventions and curatorial projects, their collaborative approach incorporates elements of poetic method into the physical design process. Carlson is also a musician and composer; as a result, sound and light are integral to the AREA C artworks.
Cliff Garten connects people to places and infrastructure through sculptural material, social history and ecology. The result is a decidedly elegant public space occurring in plazas, memorials, atriums and more. Illuminated sculptural forms create energy between objects, generating interest in public activity, reframing our private lives and creating a sense of place. The I AM A MAN Plaza, a large-scale experiential public sculpture, pays homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike. The strike brought King to Memphis, where he was assassinated. The I AM A MAN statement came to represent racial inequality and the struggle of the working poor in Memphis and beyond.
John Grant’s taste, problem-solving skills, and knowledge about public art make him a creative revolutionary. Formerly serving as Director of Denver’s Public Art Program, Grant oversaw installation of 147 permanent artworks, revamped maintenance procedures, standardized contracting processes, and brought the City’s collection to national attention. In 2000, he founded Public Art Services, a creative consultancy that works with artists, helping them realize grand projects that engage communities, define spaces, and encourage dialogue. His creative design and project management skills, used in major public art installations by leading artists, makes clear his belief that public art is the common language that defines a community.
Montreal-based Daniel Iregui harnesses the capabilities of interfaces while creating public installations that are anything but ordinary. His interactive sculptures, immersive spaces, and architectural interventions use technology as both tool and aesthetic. In 2010, Iregui founded Iregular, an interactive content creation studio. Iregular creates audiovisual installations, large-scale sculptures, architectural projections and scenographies, while experimenting with geometry, light, sound, algorithms, communication protocols, AI, and machine learning. Their recent project, ANTIBODIES, uses motion-sensing technology and AI to reflect on the monotony of Zoom calls. The work highlights modern security risks, self-awareness, and our own absentmindedness while pretending to only pay attention to the screen before us.
Memorials designed by Rodney Leon help us acknowledge the impact as well as the tragedy. History matters. Leon designed the African Burial Ground National Monument and The Ark of Return United Nations Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, both in New York City. In these and many other installations, Leon integrates culture and history into the process of making architecture and public space. As principal of Rodney Leon Architect PLLC, he has made the design of sacred and cultural places of memory a primary focus, with expertise in memorial design, cultural planning and faith-based community development.
Joy and sophistication emanate from the ideas of David Lesort and Arnaud Giroud, who founded the creative studio PITAYA in 2006. They consider light to be a versatile material that reveals and shapes the forms of their objects, and when installed, brings forth new perceptions and new experiences to the viewer. Their focus is on “design by the multitude,” a process that identifies a new space and makes it both poetic and fantastic. Lesort and Giroud believe PITAYA’s lighted objects and sculptures, their stage design expertise, and the setting are all critical and complementary inputs that when combined, create the final piece. PITAYA, located in France, has exhibited worldwide.
Michael Claudius Mayer, mosaicist and Managing Director of the glass design enterprise Mayer of Munich, is trusted with grand plans. He maintains the 174-year-old company’s reputation by employing only the highest quality standards to continuously develop new artistic and architectonic expressions in the field of stained glass and mosaic. Over the last decade, Mayer has transitioned clients from religious institutions to leading contemporary artists and designers, including Ann Hamilton, Peter Marino, William Wegman, Kiki Smith, Nick Cave and Diana Al-Hadid — creating unique contemporary projects and making the artists’ visions come to life. In the process, the Studio has transformed public spaces around the globe.
Sakchin Bessette leads the world-renowned Moment Factory in a quest to amaze, inspire and bring people together. Serving as Executive Creative Director, Sakchin Bessette and Moment Factory offer a collective sense of wonder at concerts, retail settings and public spaces. Since co-founding Moment Factory in 2001, Bessette has spearheaded the creation of 450+ multimedia exhibitions worldwide. His groundbreaking architectural installations use innovative storytelling to produce memorable interactive experiences that foster human interaction. He leads a diverse group of multi-disciplinary artists by providing guidance, vision and inspiration, encouraging them to collaborate in new ways, create with passion, and continually evolve.
Virginia Lung and Ajax Law
Joe RichÉ
Marci Reed
Yanoe x Zoueh
James Tapscott
Carmen Zella
One Plus Partnership Limited is a Hong Kong-based interior design firm established in 2004 by Ajax Law and Virginia Lung. Their cutting-edge designs and daring visions keep the global design industry amazed; they have designed 80+ cinemas, restaurants, retail stores, performance spaces, sales offices and commercial offices — each unique and futuristic. Their work has garnered more than 750 international interior design awards, including the International Interior Designer of the Year Award, the first ever Asian design company to win this honor. This audacious design team also exhibits in renowned worldwide exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale.
Daniel Popper’s unforgettable larger-than-life sculptures inspire awe and wonder. From his studio in Cape Town, South Africa, Popper has traveled the globe creating an array of sculptures, installations and stages. The internationally renowned artist specializes in interactive art, public art, stage design, installation art, and interior design. He founded Pop Productions to focus on creative concept design, innovative advertising, decor and stage design, spatial planning, lighting solutions and sculpture. His projects blur the lines between art, sculpture and brand activation creating never-before-seen innovations. Popper’s majestic figures are often created for top festivals such as Electric Forest, the Rainbow Serpent Festival, and AfrikaBurn - and become tourist destinations themselves.
Marci Reed provides insights few others can match. In 2017, Marci became Executive Director of the Architects Foundation, the philanthropy of The American Institute of Architects (AIA). Marci leads the Foundation’s work to attract, inspire and invest in a diverse next generation of architects to positively impact the profession’s evolution. The Foundation’s home, the historic Octagon Museum in Washington, DC, features exhibits that support the Foundation’s mission. Since 2016, The Octagon has exhibited the CODAaward winners. In 2021 Marci commissioned i was here to permanently commemorate the lives of the enslaved people who built and lived in the Octagon.
Straight-talker Joe Riché is a leader in the industry of making art. Riché founded Colorado-based Demiurge LLC, a company that designs, engineers, fabricates and installs monumental-scale sculpture and architectural projects. The design development process is key to the company’s success and has helped to create well-loved installations that speak to the culture, history, architecture, and environment of the place. Riché and his innovative team develop new techniques that allow them to realize the artist’s vision, including artists such as Jim Hodges, Will Ryman, Mark Reigelman, Jeanne Quinn, and Miki Iwasaki. Riché’s own work has been exhibited in solo, museum and public art venues.
Ryan “Yanoe” Sarfati and Eric “Zoueh” Skotnes push the boundaries of augmented reality in large-scale public murals. Yanoe x Zoueh, based in Los Angeles, are an interdisciplinary collaborative team experienced in varied styles of painting. They easily navigate between graffiti, traditional portraiture, representational imagery, sculptural imagery and abstraction. Their installations and murals, occurring worldwide, show their keen understanding of mass and space and their ability to translate multidimensional modalities into dynamic, unidimensional artwork. The 15,000 sq. ft. Majestic (Tulsa, OK) is the world’s largest augmented reality mural.
Emphasizing the value of nature and simplicity, James Tapscott makes art with an endless variety of natural elements. An Australian land and light artist, he blends the synergy of natural aesthetics with a heightened sense of space, creating sensory experiences that are felt as much as they are observed – complimenting the aesthetic of architectural spaces and natural settings. Man-made products such as LED lights, fluorescent tubes, steel, fiber optic cable and cloth, when combined with natural materials such as fire, salt, wind, water and wood, mimic the flow of a river, a solar eclipse, tidal movements and even the crystalline structures of drilled Antarctic ice cores.
At the forefront of democratizing and revolutionizing public art, Los Angeles-based art consultant Carmen Zella is a creative thought leader; she focuses on public art so that all people can experience the creative splendor of our humanity in its highest form. As founder and Chief Curator of NOW Art, Zella’s progressive approach intersects art, architecture, technology and culture. With an instinct for collaborating with new, emerging and internationally acclaimed artists (Refik Anadol, Nancy Baker Cahill and others), Zella’s artistic style reflects the era of the artist and the cultural pulse of communities. Zella’s 2021 LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light (Los Angeles) garnered a Best of the City Award, and was featured in Zella’s TEDx Talk ‘The Healing Power of Public Art.’
Daniel Popper
Anthony Rowe
Forest Stearns
Installation artist Anthony Rowe never stops learning. His UK-based Squidsoup is an international group of artists, researchers, technologists and designers working with digital and interactive media. Rowe’s novel and intuitive forms of interaction produce immersive and emotive experiences that merge the physical and the virtual. Squidsoup’s work has been seen by millions at the Sydney Opera House, the Salisbury Cathedral, Burning Man, and Ars Electronica. Rowe won a 2021 CODAaward with Squidsoup for SOLA. Created to lift the spirits of health workers in the time of COVID, it consists of 300 collimated light sources, enveloping visitors in a wall of sunshine to lighten these dark times.
With his art already in outer space, Forest Stearns is a star. As Principal Artist at DRAWEVERYWHERE, he produces unique artworks connecting artists and institutions while pursuing his passion of collaboration. Stearns is a prolific illustrator, an arts educator, creative facilitator and community builder, always “leaning in” to bring other artists into unique situations where they share creative permission in common conversation. Stearns is the Creative Innovation Consultant and Artist in Residence at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, CA. He has created illuminated drawings and hand lettered scripts on every surface available. His portfolio includes sketchbooks, building murals, and laser-etched drawings on Earth-orbiting satellites and rocket ships!
2021 is behind us, thank goodness, and thoughts of the future must be reframed in a deliberate fashion. For this reason, CODAworx is especially proud to present the 2022 Creative Revolutionaries. They define, more than anything else, a sense of courage.
It is supremely important to recognize the creative professionals who are leading the way in affecting change. These are the individuals who have changed the way we interact with art through novel applications of materials, technology, execution and the use of space in the urban landscape. They create placemaking commissions that raise awareness about environmental and social issues. Through their professional practices, they have quietly caused a paradigm shift in our perception of the nature of art.
Our amazing community of creative professionals is flush with individuals who have devoted their careers to making the world a more beautiful place. But in the past few years, public art projects have become stronger, deeper, more meaningful. Their beauty holds messages; these artists/activists and their collaborators create artwork that promotes action.
For the third year, CODAworx has gathered together this list of 25 leaders of the artistic revolution to shine a spotlight on their efforts – which reflect so well on the entire industry of commissioned art professionals. The list of Creative Revolutionaries includes the magicians whose diverse works serve as mirrors of our world. They implore us to be bold, to be fearless. To create lives that facilitate connection, empathy and engagement.
And above all, they show us how to flourish, to grow and develop in a vigorous and meaningful way. And how to live with a sense of courage.
Toni Sikes
CEO — CODAworx
It is supremely important to recognize the creative professionals who are leading the way in affecting change. These are the individuals who have changed the way we interact with art through novel applications of materials, technology, execution and the use of space in the urban landscape. They create placemaking commissions that raise awareness about environmental and social issues. Through their professional practices, they have quietly caused a paradigm shift in our perception of the nature of art.
Our amazing community of creative professionals is flush with individuals who have devoted their careers to making the world a more beautiful place. But in the past few years, public art projects have become stronger, deeper, more meaningful. Their beauty holds messages; these artists/activists and their collaborators create artwork that promotes action.
For the third year, CODAworx has gathered together this list of 25 leaders of the artistic revolution to shine a spotlight on their efforts – which reflect so well on the entire industry of commissioned art professionals. The list of Creative Revolutionaries includes the magicians whose diverse works serve as mirrors of our world. They implore us to be bold, to be fearless. To create lives that facilitate connection, empathy and engagement.
And above all, they show us how to flourish, to grow and develop in a vigorous and meaningful way. And how to live with a sense of courage.
Toni Sikes
CEO — CODAworx
These Creative Revolutionaries Lead the Way for Positive Change
