I remember when I was in middle school, so many of my classmates were using and combining these small beads to create colorful works of art. Today when I was walking home from East River Park, I saw a small store near my apartment that was displaying a bunch of cool bead art in its windows and wanted to share this unique style of art.
Bead art is essentially using several individual small beads (about 2 cm tall) and connecting them with small amounts of glue (or string) to form a cohesive, larger image. You can kind of 
think of bead art as a new form of mosaics. Often bead art recreate popular images or icons seen in other places especially from video games and television shows.
The aspect I enjoy most of bead art is how it can create images that look almost digital. Many works of bead art have this sense that they are pixelated. They make me feel like as if I was looking at something from an old video game created in the 1990s or something created using a digital image program.
Overall, I really like the idea that, similar to a mosaic, you can use small fragments to create a cohesive image. Beads were objects that I viewed as insignificant especially with how small and disposable they are. However, bead art can really make a person appreciate how useful and creative these tiny things can be.
Last Thursday during my lengthy 4-hour gap between classes, I went down to meet my dad for lunch at his office. He works in the World Financial Center, which is conveniently located right next to the newly opened Freedom Tower. Each time I visit him, I am awed by the beauty of this large, spiraling building, along with the heart wrenching 9/11 memorial that seems to dig into the earth infinitely.
This day in particular was a special day because at my dads building there was an exhibit that was unlike any other that I’ve seen before. Upon taking the down escalator to the plaza, I was stopped in my tracks by a series of sculptures made out of cans of food.
After walking over to them, I realized that they were all part of a competition called Canstruction. In particular this was the 22nd Annual Canstruction NYC Design/Build Competition. This competition is run to raise awareness of the role the food banks play in communities all over the country. Canned food in particular is one of the most important things for food banks.
There were about a dozen sculptures of all different sizes and themes. I admire them because it looked like whoever made them spent a lot of time and hard work to make these perfect. Also taking what most people think is just a metal container that is used to store food and turning it into a piece of art is truly fascinating. The winners of the competition are decided by the public on their Facebook page as well as by 5 jurors who have the final say. Voting ended yesterday Thursday November 14th and the winner was Hungry to the Core, my personal favorite. Other than “Hungry to the Core”, other sculptures included a seal with a beach ball on its nose, an owl, and a thinking man.
This was definitely a great surprise for me to be able to see this as it was not there for long and was not the art I am used to seeing. I hope that next year I am able to see the new contestant’s sculptures as I am curious what else could be made out of cans of soup and sardines.
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