Honeycomb Harmonies Art Installation Returns to Plummer Park this Weekend

Mar 30, 2024

Honeycomb Harmonies art installation, featuring hands-on painting and music-making activities, returns to Plummer Park, located at 7377 Santa Monica Boulevard, this Saturday, April 29, 2023. It’s the second of three events. The last one is scheduled for Saturday, May 20, 2023 at West Hollywood Park, located at 647 N. San Vicente Boulevard. Painting activities will take place from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. during all scheduled event dates.

The West Hollywood iteration of Honeycomb Harmonies is a continuation of a project that was previously presented in San Diego. Keenan Hartsten collected tires and wood from around San Diego County and transformed these materials into a stage for a musical playground. The reclaimed tires are assembled into vertical stacks measuring six-feet tall, bolted together internally, and weighted at the bottom to create columns. Pipe structures for making outdoor tents are used with angled connector pieces bolted together to form a large hexagonal overhead framework measuring 20-feet across, with shade sails to cast a hexagonal imprint of shade to shield visitors to the installation from the sun.

The art installation includes various hand-built musical structures for open participation, including a six-foot hexagonal prism xylophone that serves as the centerpiece, a six-foot baritone xylophone, five-foot alto xylophone, four-foot metallophone, a series of wooden structures that support glazed ceramic pots at various heights to produce bell tones, pan drums, and various handheld percussive elements. The wooden notes on the xylophones are all made of reclaimed wood taken from torn down homes, beachside hotels, green waste bins, and trash piles. All these instruments are tuned together to the scale of B-flat Major, a scale known for its joyful, quaint, and cheerful sound, evoking a sense of aspiration and optimism for a better world.

Keenan Hartsten is an artist, musician, and designer living and working in San Diego, California. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of California San Diego. Utilizing concepts, forms, and techniques across a spectrum of disciplines, Hartsten creates playful installations, objects, gardens, and collaborative community-based projects. A proponent of the reusable, his work often focuses on the materiality of discarded objects and re-imagines worlds of texture, color, and sound that offer new temporal perspectives. Hartsten has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Helmuth Projects, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Quint Gallery and most recently was commissioned by the City of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture for a temporary public artwork.

The City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division delivers a broad array of arts programs including Art on the Outside (temporary public art), Arts Grants, City Poet Laureate, Free Theatre in the Parks, Human Rights Speaker Series, Library Exhibits, Summer Sounds + Winter Sounds, Urban Art (permanent public art), WeHo Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, and WeHo Reads. For more information about City of West Hollywood arts programming, please visit www.weho.org/arts.