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Shaun tells the story of how his idea for an acclaimed public work
started with a mistake. Working on a commissioned sculpture for a
beer company during an art residency program in New York in 2005,
he spilled wet concrete on an old sweater that had been a gift from
his wife. In an effort to save the sweater, he let the concrete dry. “The
next morning,” he says, “I pulled the concrete out and found that the
fibers from the woolen sweater had become embedded in the con-
crete.” He set aside the concrete chunk for a day or two, and “began
to recognize that this chance happening revealed a really interesting
potential. And the potential was that if you cast concrete over woolen
objects or fabrics, a residue of the fabric is going to get embedded into
the concrete.” This led him to an entire series of works where he cast
concrete over woolen gloves, hats, and socks, then pulled the objects
out, leaving a negative space in the concrete along with fibers from
the clothing.

A year later, Shaun was awarded a commission to do a major pub-
lic art project, a sculpture in a Charlotte park. The city sponsors
wanted something highly durable and vandal proof to be built on a
low budget. He and his assistant went around the community collect-
ing clothing from the people who lived around the park. They then
cast a long winding bench out of concrete, into which they embedded
and removed the community members’ clothing, leaving overlapping
impressions of the community’s personal belongings in the bench as
it stretched through the park.

“The idea for that project,” Shaun says, “could never have come
had I not recognized the potential in that first mistake. And, to me, it
is an example of how one thing can lead to another, and to another. If
you trust the process and you let the process play out long enough—
sometimes over years—your solutions to problems will be more in-
novative because you’ve got a richer pool from which to draw. If
someone had sat me down and said, ‘Well, design me a public art proj-
ect,’ and I hadn’t had that experience in New York, I don’t think that
the solution would have been nearly as interesting.”

Of the many lessons from Shaun Cassidy’s work and teaching,
here are some that are especially relevant for new venture founders:

American Management Association • www.amanet.org