Carin Mincemoyer
Category: Artist/Individual
Discipline: Public Art
Program Affiliations: Artist Roster
Carin Mincemoyer's work ponders the ways in which humans try to embrace, struggle to control, yearn for, reject, and alter the natural environment. Encompassing sculpture, installation, public art, and design, her creative practice includes work in diverse materials including wood, metal, discarded packaging, and live plants. Her work has been recognized with grants and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the International Sculpture Center and the PA Council on the Arts. She has been awarded public commissions in Pittsburgh, NYC, and Philadelphia, and her work has been exhibited at venues including the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NY, and SPACES in Cleveland, OH. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA from the University at Buffalo.
Commissioned by the Allegheny County Airport Authority.
Shy Canopy is an 80 foot long sculptural installation that is inspired by the act of looking up into a tree canopy in the sunlight. Suspended under a skylight at Pittsburgh International Airport, each of the 13 modules consists of a wooden spaceframe structure with multiple suspended elements that reference leaf clusters. The forms of the spaceframes take historic regional bridge trusses as a starting point, while the leaf cluster shapes suspended from them reference the leaves of White Oak and Sugar Maple, two of our area’s most common trees. Both the spaceframes and the leaf clusters hang from swivels which allow them to turn, making the air currents visible. The sculpture changes subtly over time and adds soft movement and a bit of color to the space.
The title and overall form of the sculpture was inspired by Crown Shyness or Canopy Shyness – a phenomenon seen in some forests where trees maintain a gap between their leafy crowns and those of their neighbors. Scientists are not completely sure why this happens, but some think that it may be a sort of social distancing for trees, the gaps slowing the spread of disease and leaf-eating insects.
Commissioned by City of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the Office of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy.
This commissioned artwork is installed on the fencing surrounding a new community swimming pool in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Fishtown is a former fishing village on the Delaware River, and many residents continue to celebrate the neighborhood’s ties to the water.
This installation is inspired by water’s ability to camouflage and make the everyday mysterious, as well as the enduring aesthetic appeal of the river’s ever-changing surface. Shapes in the water’s surface as depicted in paintings and photos of the Delaware River are mounted on the fence surrounding the pool, activating nearly the entire 250′ length of the fence. The arranged shapes resemble camouflage, referencing the camouflaging character of the water’s surface. The artwork makes a conceptual link between the pool and the nearby river while also referencing the area’s history as a river town. The organic shapes break up the geometry of the fence, add pops of color, and provide some visual screening from the street.