Beneath the Leafy Crown (Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park)
Documentary
Michele Oka Doner’s largest works of art have a way of getting under foot. That’s because she’s probably best known for her beautiful floors..in the Miami Airport and now in the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. Oka Doner achieves a fantastical quality in her floors through the use of rich dark terrazzo embedded with thousands of cast bronze pieces and dusted with effervescent mother of pearl. One could easily get lost in her work both literally and figuratively.
A project of this magnitude takes teams of people and in this case, it took three distinct teams in three different cities to bring this piece to our feet. This video follows the process from Michele’s New York studio, to a foundry on the fringes of Philadelphia and on to the corridors of the Meijer Gardens where everything came together at the hands of the artist herself and a specialized flooring company out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. To fully experience a floor by this incredible artist is to never see the world beneath your feet the same way again.
