AT THE START OF SUMMER SHEILA LEFTWICH HAD PLENTY OF ENTHUSIASM but little real hands on experience in making art. Today, the 16 year old is the most accomplished welder among the eight high school students assembling the latest public art project at Creative Machines, Inc. on Tucson’s south side.

Sheila Leftwich - Learing to be an Artist

“I thought it was a really cool idea that we could become public artists,” she says of the project that pays the Ward One students $8 an hour for eight 20 to 22 hour weeks to create the Bike Church project due for installation at Granada and Davis in early August.

The project is the inspiration of public artist Joe O’Connell who runs Creative Machines and his collaborator Blessing Hancock, an artist and landscape designer, working with a $50,000 grant from the Pima Association of Governments and the Tucson Pima Arts Council.

Blessing Hancock andJoe O'Connell

To learn more I stopped by Creative Machines the other day. The first impression is of focused activity, real work and an infectious sense of fun that these kids who started from scratch a few weeks ago are really going to build this 12 by 12 foot steel framed structure filled in with hundreds of symmetrically placed welded bike frames, wheels and rims rising at its pinnacle to 22 feet and including colored acrylic windows lit by solar power at night and chimes made of bike parts that visitors can ring. What a project!

Bike Church Work in Progress

Bike Church Concept Drawing

O’Connell came to Tucson from Florida in 2001 and operates the multifaceted Creative Machines in 12,000 well laid out and well equipped square feet of under roof space at 3113 E. Columbia St.

“Public art has to be for the public,” he says. “If what we do isn’t popular, it’s failed.” He and Hancock have a with it, contemporary style, a social and environmental consciousness and believe that art isn’t complete until people join in.

“Art doesn’t have to be a finished product,” Hancock says, “but something people can participate in.”

Creative Machines Wondrous sculpture at Marana’s Public Library is an example. The steel panel cut with 1,000 English, Spanish and O’odham words is illuminated by intense colors at night, drawing the visitor into arranging phrases and sensing through language the overlapping cultures that have and do live in this part of the Southwest.

Wondrous Sculpture

Back at the project, 17 year old University High School student Leah Edwards is busy assembling bike parts. “When I heard I could have a job and do community art at the came time, I was sold,” she Edwards who is also active with the Animal Rescue Foundation and Habitat for Humanity.

Leah Edwards at Work

“Tucson is a great place to do public art,” O’Connell says.

And Creative Machines is a great place where public art is done.

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