Las Vegas Phoenix: A Public Art Installation

Chad Brown

Chad Brown spends his days on his art: painting, sculpting with wood and oil clay, and designing new projects. Previously, in the evenings, he was a popular mixologist behind the bar at the Castaneda. These two worlds converged during the massive fire of the spring and summer of 2022, followed by monsoon rains and devastating floods. The Castaneda helped with feeding those displaced by the twin disasters, and night after night, people who had lost everything told him their stories. Night after night, he tried to find words to give them some hope. Finally, he envisioned a sculpture of a Phoenix rising, as a symbol of the recovery of the people and their communities who have lost so much.

When he listened to their stories and then told them of the Phoenix sculpture he envisioned, it did seem to raise their spirits, and so he proceeded with drawing up the plans. He started a fundraising page under fiscal sponsorship of Fractured Atlas that is 100 percent tax deductible. He asked the mayor and city council about the possibility of erecting the 18-foot sculpture in Plaza Park. They listened and expressed some enthusiasm for the project.

Phoenix Initial concept drawing

Listening is a theme in Chad’s life. He listens to the art he makes as it guides him in the creative process. Raised in Plano, Texas, he rejected what he calls the shopping personality of suburbia. “If that was the projection of the world,” he said, he “…found it deeply entrapping and terrible.” By the time he was six, and continuing until he was twelve, he spent most of his time in a wild place nearby he calls The Creek. There he learned to listen to nature, and he says that is what formed him.

Chad’s interest in art started in second grade when the teacher sat a boy named Aaron on a stool in the middle of the room and told everyone else in the class to draw him. Chad already had an interest in negative space and used that skill to draw Aaron using a purple crayon on a piece of manila paper. The teacher hung the drawing in the front of the school, and Chad said, “That of course made me curious about me and art, and any art classes, I went into them.”

His family did not encourage his interest in art. His father was an engineer, and sent the message there is no money in art. Chad was good at math and science and problem-solving so he enrolled at Texas Tech as an engineering major, taking art classes along with engineering. About that experience, Chad said, “The most gifted students were allowed basically to work on a Nascar. And I found that to be so, so low bar for dreaming and all this hard work to work on a Nascar? You might as well tell me to design a cog wheel over and over a hundred times. I just was bored. In engineering you have to stop with what you are defined to work on but with art you can work on whatever you want to, so that the aspect of dreaming, creating, really just kept pushing me back toward art. It hasn’t been an easy walk with art, but it is the walk I’ve chosen.”

Part Native American, Chad also chooses to walk the red road of spirituality. It started with a sweat lodge in South Dakota ten years ago, and he returns there as many as ten times a year, to take part in a prayer group led by a medicine man. He is also a sun dancer. These practices amplify his ability to listen and to recognize signs. And it was this listening and observing the signs that led him here, and that inspired the idea of the Phoenix rising from the ashes as a sign of hope for the community.

Asked if he writes, Chad said no, but when he does write, it’s almost like broken poetry, but that he hasn’t written a lot of poetry. Then he added, “At one point during my graduate school somebody said that ‘painting is a visual wing of the House of poetry.’ I think so.” 

Interior breakdown of phoenix structure

Phoenix scale measurements and detail

Chad’s training in engineering helps with the planning of his sculpture projects. This project in Las Vegas, N. M. is not his first civic installation, nor the tallest. In 2008 when an economic recession hit Las Vegas, Nevada so hard that people were talking about it being the end of Las Vegas, Chad made a sculpture in response to that, a 37-foot-tall agave plant called Those We Call Century, that was chosen to stand inside the Clark County Government Center. 

Before we ended the interview, Chad showed me the designs for the phoenix, materials he is using, the steam box for bending the wood, and talked about the challenges of fundraising for the project. He had hoped to have it finished by May, but with a shortfall in funding, it appears it won’t be finished until September.

The design is beautiful. I would call it the visual wing of hope.

Some of the proceeds from Las Vegas Lit’s new collection, Up from the Ashes We Rise, will go to the Las Vegas Phoenix sculpture. To donate directly to this public art project, click on this link: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/las-vegas-phoenix. See details about the project here.