Ries Niemi Industrial Artist - Current Projects

Current Projects

Many of the projects I work on are very large and complicated, and I am often brought on board early in the design phase. This means I may design a piece which doesnt get built for quite a long time- sometimes 3 to 5 years later.

Recently I was asked to design a piece for the front of the Bellevue Art Museum, in Bellevue Washington.
I came up with the Walk Thru Purse, a handbag so big you can walk right into it. Bellevue is a town of super shopping, and this is a super sized consumer good. 5' x 10' x 14' tall, it has a door at each end.

For the fall of 2007, it sat in front of the museum. It is taking a vacation right now, as there is a sculpture show occupying its spot, but it should be back by summer.

Read about it here.

In Downtown Phoenix, Arizona, I have designed a fence for the Van Buren Station of their proposed Light Rail Line. The dense downtown train platforms leave no room for freestanding sculptures, so my fences run the length of the north and south bound platfoms- several hundred feet in all. I am again using electropolished stainless steel, which is an ideal outdoor material for hi usuage public spaces- it is virtually indestructible, and very easy to maintain. This is a sample panel of the fence- there will be almost 350 linear feet of these panels, in groups of 5 to 7.

I made a sample panel, in heavily forged stainless steel. It is 2 feet tall and 4 feet wide. Here is a picture of it, lying on my concrete driveway. We will be making something like 80 of these panels, each unique.