Park Bench Stories has finished traveling, ending at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY in 2020.
Many of the pieces are now available for purchase with prices starting around $750.
For more information about purchasing a piece from Park Bench Stories,
please contact Leni Levenson Wiener at Leni@LeniWiener.com.
In addition, there is a full color catalog available of all 40 pieces, with each piece occupying a full page;
Park Bench Stories is a unique exhibition depicting people sitting on a park bench, but the bench is unseen and left to the imagination of the viewer. What makes these pieces so unique is that they have no boundaries, the edge of the figure is the edge of the artwork–standing out from the wall and casting their own shadows.
I have always been an observer of people, and I am especially drawn to quick glimpses into the lives of strangers, little snippets that tell their own stories. My camera is always with me, and I save all my photos in computer files for later use. At some point I came to realize that I had collected dozens of photos of people sitting on benches—people all over the world. These people would become the basis for this exhibition. The photos themselves span several years and several continents.
Every one of these pieces, whether a single person, a couple or more people occupying the same space–tell a story. The people have been removed from their environment, even the bench itself is left to the imagination of the viewer. You need to tell your own story about each figure. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? The answer may not be the same for everyone who sees the exhibition. I like it that way, because every person who views the works brings a little bit of their own life experience to the stories these artworks tell.
Below are just a few images from the venues in which Park Bench Stories was exhibited between 2015, when it opened at the Grants Pass Museum of Art in Oregon to December 2020 when it closed at the National Quilt Museum.
