Find the Falcons! See how local artists interpreted of The Maltese Falcon. The traveling installation will include work by Barbara Riegel Bend (textiles), Alan Honn (glass) and James Shoop (bronze).

Barbara Riegel Bend
As a fiber artist I am drawn to the rich heritage of cloth and the story it tells through its content, color, design, and cultural history. I work with fabrics that have their own integrity and voice. In my fiber sculptures I explore the interplay of cross cultural fabrics stitched side by side with a reconfiguration of contemporary ‘throw away items’ that share the pattern, color or texture. I look to these contemporary items, such as snaps, perm rollers, zippers, for their design elements and ability to attach and repeat thus creating a rhythmic pattern to sew on to these fiber sculptures.

Alan Honn
A Minnesota native, Al Honn worked as a professional glassblower in Boulder, CO and on Whidbey Island, WA before returning to settle in his home state. Currently, he is a studio artist and instructor at the Minnesota Center for Glass Arts and Foci Cooperative in Minneapolis. Exhilarated by the demands of the process, Al enjoys meeting the challenges of timing and intuition required to manage fluid hot glass. In the studio, he states, “it’s important to stay in the moment, open to the ever-present opportunity to defy gravity.” He cites appreciation for the material as his most significant influence and prefers the “glass cowboy” tradition of design and production by a single maker.

James Shoop
James Shoop has been a professional sculptor since 1983. He first started sculpting at his family’s foundry, Shoop’s American Bronze Casting. At the foundry, he was involved in producing sculptures for the awards and incentives market. For ten years he refined his skills at production molds, casting and finishing. In 1993, James moved to New York where he studied sculpture at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, and the New York Academy of Art. During this period, he concentrated on the study of the figure, and he broadened his commercial range by producing sculpture for the gift and toy markets. Today, James continues to work in the commercial toy market while expanding his portfolio of figurative fine art sculptures. For the past six years, James has been teaching figurative, portrait and anatomical acoche sculpture classes at the Atelier in Minneapolis, MN.