(gentle music) [Les] A sculptor is anyone who makes things.

You gotta use your hands and talk with your hands.

It's really what it is but something three dimensional comes out of that.

(gentle music) Shapes are just like words.

(gentle music) Yeah.

Shapes are my words.

(gentle music) I'm Leslie Bruning.

I'm a sculptor living and working in Omaha, Nebraska.

[Narrator] In Downtown Omaha the Hot Shops Art Center is part of the city's thriving art scene.

Inside is a collective of studios where artists of all types work and collaborate.

Les Bruning, one of its founders, is a sculptor known worldwide for his bold designs and vibrant colors.

(gentle music) [Les] Both my mom and dad grew up on farms in Missouri and from that generation they made things.

And so growing up I made things.

(gentle music) [Narrator] Today he's speaking to a group of students who traveled from Kearney to get a peek inside the world of a professional artist.

I went to Nebraska Wesleyan and I had kind of a boring freshman year, you know, because I was taking biology and things that I wasn't sure why I was in class.

My sophomore year I signed up for a ceramics class and the rest is history.

[Narrator] The students are here as part of a grant from the MidAmerica Arts Alliance for which Bruning has been commissioned to create a mobile.

[Les] Baked on.

Metal is heavy and so most people don't ever think of metal as being light, but if you're making mobiles and using metal, you can make 'em seem very light and fluid and a lot of that happens with how things balance.

(guitar music) [Narrator] When finished, the mobile will hang in the Merryman Performing Arts Center in Kearney which was originally built in 1926 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[Les] I went out to see the space and took pictures of it and looked at it from different angles and thought about, you know, how it's gonna fit in that space.

(guitar music) [Narrator] His goal is to capture the spirit of Nebraska, and he was inspired by an unlikely source.

(guitar music) Well, the central part of it is a tumbleweed.

(guitar music) If you look at pictures of tumbleweeds or look at the real tumbleweed, you'll see they're translucent, they're dry, they're airier, they're sort of hostile looking.

(guitar music) One of the themes that I've always used when I talk about art is a theme of chaos and then what do you do with chaos?

Well, that's what creation is.

It's creating something out of chaos.

(guitar music) I think tumbleweeds are chaos because they're untamed.

I mean, they've been trying to kill those things for hundreds of years (laughing) and they can't do it.

(guitar music) They just randomly go wherever they want, you know, so that's really chaos.

(guitar music) [Narrator] The piece called Nebraska Symphony manages the chaos through a delicate balancing act creating a kinetic sculpture in constant motion.

Yeah.

One of the ideas is that wind affects everything in Nebraska and so- [Narrator] The main structure of the piece is a spiral invoking the tornado-like dust devils Bruning remembers chasing as a kid while growing up in the panhandle of Nebraska.

(guitar music) [Les] The thing about a mobile is you want it to be able to move, but you don't need fast movement.

Each one of these has a loose connection so that it self-balances.

(guitar music) Now, just the movement of the air in the building opening the door will create a light movement in it at all times and then it'll gently go up and down this way.

(guitar music) That's the Nebraska wind.

(guitar music) All right, we got all these on.

Yeah.

Always have to twist them to get them on.

[Student] Yeah, I'm saying- [Les] Look at that one.

Isn't that nice?

[Student] Cool.

[Les] Today was installation day, which is always sort of the climax of many months of work.

Mainly it turned out how I envisioned it, but I didn't know how I was going to get there when I started.

(guitar music) Probably, I want it like this.

(gentle music) [Sophia] It was super exciting because just seeing the idea first and then finally getting to see it was a huge thing, I think it's really cool that we gotta see how it was broken down into pieces and how we could assemble it all together rather than just like a drawing on a piece of paper.

(gentle music) [Student] I think the concept of like doing like wind in like Nebraska, I guess like kind of like exploring that as a concept is really cool.

(guitar music) (guitar music) [Anais] It's really iconic to like Nebraska and I guess just the Midwest in general, like wind, and it's like the tumbleweed and the empty landscape.

(gentle music) One thing I find interesting is like the use of glass, though, because you don't really like associate that with the tumbleweed, I guess.

It's very like delicate, but I think it worked out well.

(gentle music) What surprised me most about the finished piece was how big it was because I thought it was gonna be like a medium size like chandelier kind of thing, and it's pretty big.

[Denise] We knew we had this soaring two-story lobby that deserved really a wonderful piece of art and the fact that it's kinetic and it catches the light, it's just wonderful.

(guitar music) Like I tell my wife, the easiest thing I do is go to work (guitar music) because I'm completely free at work, (guitar music) but it's always take it to the end and do it right.

(guitar music) (guitar music)