Whereami is a playful, wayfinding sign rising 16-feet into the air and featuring 37 student-designed arrows all pointing in different directions. It was a collaboration with sixth through twelfth graders at the Bruce Randolph School located in the Cole neighborhood. Walczak & Heiss visited the school and challenged students to create their own arrow designs that pointed to sites meaningful to them.
Each of the arrows selected for the project points to a unique location—everywhere from as close as downtown Denver and nearby playing fields to locals as far and diverse as Germany and that of the Sand Creek Massacre, a site 252 miles away that marks the murder of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Local history is also represented as one arrow nods to Daddy Bruce Randolph, the namesake of the school, by pointing to Daddy Bruce Barb B Que Ribs.
To go from the students’ 2-dimensional drawings to the 3-dimensional metal artwork, the drawings were scanned and traced in a CAD program. From there, Allentown-based DiBello Metal Designs made the stainless-steel and orange powder coated arrows. All of the arrows are carefully balanced on a singular pole, which proved to be an engineering feat as each one needed to remain clearly legible. The artists explained that, “it makes this kind of prickly looking, confusing, jumbled wayfinding sign. The piece is not really about letting it be pointedly about a location that somebody knows, but about a kind of personal connection to a place.”
Images by Wes Magyar