Breathe With Me Creates Communal Art at UC San Diego

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt.

 

One of the hundreds of participants in Breathe With Me, a collaborative event by Danish artist Jeppe Hein, the newest addition to UCSD’s illustrious Stuart Collection.

 For over forty years, the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego has been commissioning site-specific, permanent artworks for the campus, beginning with  Niki de Ste Phalle’s colorful Sun God in 1983.

The 23^rd addition to the Collection is something different: it includes 90 canvasses featuring the brushstrokes of hundreds of participants--1,200 UCSD staff, students, and visitors--all encouraged by artist Jeppe Hein to breathe deeply as they added their blue acrylic strokes to this latest version of his world-wide communal art project Breathe With Me on a very special three-day weekend in late October.

 

Portrait of the Artist and a Breathe With Me canvas.

“With every new work, I ask myself how I can move people…and how I can bring people closer to each other and to themselves.”--Jeppe Hein.

A quote from the artist’s introduction to his book Nothing is as it appears, illustrated with his painted impressions of yoga asanas and photos of some of his international installations. 

Breathe With Me has also appeared at the United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Central Park in New York City, and Maurice and I were lucky enough to be able to breathe, brush, and chat with Jeppe Hein at UCSD. He’s a delightful conversationalist, with a great sense of humor, but what he shared about the origins of BWM was not all good news. 

“In 2009, I was doing installations all over the world,” he said. “I was on 143 flights that year, to different locations, and suddenly, on one of those flights, I had a panic attack; I couldn’t breathe. When I got off the plane, I tried to phone my wife, but she wasn’t home. So I phoned my mother; when she heard how I sounded, she said: ‘Breathe with me’, and I did.”

It took years to get himself together. “I was diagnosed with Burnout,” he said. “I’d been looking for things outside myself; I had to find a new way to live.”

Yoga helped him find his way, to open his heart, face facts long buried inside himself, and find joy and a real feeling of interconnectedness in his work and his life. 

“This is not just an art project,” he said. What he offers is a challenge: to completely concentrate on what you are doing, while knowing that you’re sharing the experience with others.

Jess Berlanga Taylor, Director and Curator of the Stuart Collection,
with her companion Kai.

The 90 BWM canvases created here will not be permanent outdoor installations like the rest of the Stuart Collection. Since they’re weather sensitive, they’ll all be indoors, used for instructional purposes by various departments and not yet on view to visitors. 

Meanwhile, there’s a link to information on Jeppe Hein, which will soon be updated to include an interview with him, locations where campus visitors will be able to see the Breathe With Me canvasses, and more videos to give a better feel for the experience.  
https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/hein.html

And if you’d like to try to feel the experience right now, here’s a how-to from the artist.

Breathe With Me Instructions

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net.