Toying around pays off for artist

PARK CITY

Five years ago or so, Nathan Sawaya quit his day job as a New York City lawyer so he could stay home and play with Legos.

You can imagine that conversation:

LAW FIRM MANAGING PARTNER: You're leaving to do what???

Evidence of how it all turned out can be seen in the main exhibition hall here at the Kimball Art Center, where stacks of Legos spread here, there and everywhere are proof positive that your play can be your (art)work.

All the stacks were left there by Sawaya, whose 29 sculptures built entirely by the little plastic Lego bricks will be on display in the Main Hall through Nov. 15.

They're attracting quite a crowd. Young. Old. In between. Regular patrons of the arts. People who haven't been in an art museum in years.

"Everybody can relate to the Lego," says Erin Linder, director of exhibitions at Kimball, who notes that more than 800 people attended the exhibit's opening reception — sort of like the Jazz getting a sellout.

Another 500-plus turned out last Saturday for a Lego-building contest that was won by a team of four from nearby Parley's Park Elementary School for their Lego-sized version of Delicate Arch.

The winning team included 8-year-olds Tanner Higman and Wyatt Pike, 10-year-old Shane Huling and the old-timer of the group, Reese Adams, who is 11.

In their own way, the kids are following in the footsteps of Sawaya, who spent numerous hours as a boy growing up in Oregon producing artwork out of Legos.

Even as he got his education and landed a real job, the joy of Lego building never left him, and he never left it.

His foray into full-time sculpturing has turned him into the most popular, well-known tiny plastic brick artist since a Danish carpenter and toy maker named Ole Kirk Christiansen started the Lego Co. in 1932. (Lego combines the Danish words "leg" and "godt," which translate to "play well.")

Sawaya has built, among other things, a life-size tyrannosaurus rex, a 7-foot replica of the Brooklyn Bridge and a 10-foot model of Donald Trump's designer hotel in Dubai. On an appearance on the "Late Show With David Letterman," he assembled a mosaic portrait of Letterman's stage manager, Biff Henderson. On "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central, he presented host Stephen Colbert with a life-size Lego of himself. He's been on "MythBusters" and the "Today Show," and he decorated an entire bedroom out of Legos for the TV show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."