Lisa Marie Thalhammer’s Equilateral Network art installation now graces the lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC Lisa Marie Thalhammer Hide caption
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Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Lisa Marie Thalhammer’s Equilateral Network art installation now graces the lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
The vast lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC has taken on a riot of rainbow colors in an artist-designed geometric mural Lisa Marie Thalhammer.
The installation, entitled Equilateral Network, was designed to create spaces for social distancing with its triangular grid. Unpainted stretches of lawn provide walking paths and equilateral triangles lined with pink define seats that are separated by a distance of two meters.
Thalhammer drafted the work in the fall of 2020 when social distancing was a pressing concern. The opening now coincides with Pride month, creating a colorful new space for gatherings in the newly opened city.
“I really wanted to do a piece that would bring balance and calm to the city, and joy and wonder,” says Thalhammer, who divides her time between DC and her hometown of Saint Louis. “You come and sit in the piece and it shifts the energy of the room.”
For her design, Thalhammer was inspired by Pierre L’Enfant, the French-American engineer and city planner who was commissioned by George Washington to draw up a plan for a new federal district along the Potomac. L’Enfant’s design persists in modern DC, where wide avenues intersect the city’s grid.
Thalhammer’s sketches of the design. Lisa Marie Thalhammer hide caption
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Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Thalhammer’s sketches of the design.
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Thalhammer liked L’Enfant’s use of stars and triangles in his city map – and was particularly drawn to the equilateral triangles that took shape in his designs.
“I really love the equilateral triangle as a symbol of justice, a symbol of balance in relation to our three governing bodies and their equality,” she says.
Other aspects of Thalhammer’s design came from another source: LGBTQ pride.
Have the pink triangles in their design special meaning, She explains. “Some of them go back to the Holocaust when gay men were identified with the pink triangle. And then it was used in ACT UP in the 1980s when people were protesting against AIDS and they didn’t have a vaccine against AIDS. The pink triangle in this piece is a bit of a reference to that historical identity of justice to me.
A crew from the museum helped spray paint onto the lawn based on Thalhammer’s design. Lisa Marie Thalhammer hide caption
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Lisa Marie Thalhammer
A crew from the museum helped spray paint onto the lawn based on Thalhammer’s design.
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Then there are the rainbows – a symbol of identity for LGBTQ people as well as a symbol of diversity. Thalhammer’s palette consists of a 12-color spectrum which, in her opinion, represents the intersection of people’s identities.
“We are very rarely just one as human beings, as human beings. Usually we are a multitude of different identities that all come together, and I find them all beautiful,” says Thalhammer, who identifies himself as pansexual.
Using a giant protractor mat, she laid out the lines she had first sketched on paper. She marked lines with pink string, supported by the Downtown DC Business Improvement District road team. A crew from the museum helped spray the special non-toxic paint onto the design using a spray machine. Another machine painted the lines, the same way lines are drawn on a soccer field.
The Thalhammer mural will last into the summer. Like colored hair, the painted design grows out over time – to keep it fresh, the work is repainted as the colored blades of grass are mowed.
And that’s not a work of art you can touch. A summer film series is planned on the site, and the museum is now open Friday through Sunday.
Lisa Marie Thalhammer posed in front of her LOVE 2017 mural on Blagden Alley in DC last summer. Lisa Marie Thalhammer hide caption
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Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Lisa Marie Thalhammer posed in front of her LOVE 2017 mural on Blagden Alley in DC last summer.
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Thalhammer hopes that the people there will walk around the room, exercise, do yoga and meditate. And she wants it to be a place where people can meet, in a year when many of the typical Pride events are canceled.
“I hope people wear fabulous gay pride clothes and take pictures there,” she says.
