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When MFA candidate Rob McAdams tools his custom-built, chopper-style tricycle through downtown Columbia with prints and lithographs in the back basket, he’s not just peddling his art.
He wants you to see a world of wonder as he does through the eyes of a child on a trike.
“I equate riding my trike to seeing like a child with openness and curiosity,” said McAdams, who will graduate in May and created the Support Trike project as his final MFA exhibition. “Too often, we’re worried about our jobs or whatever is going on that we miss the good stuff, the magic in the world. You see some really funny, crazy things around, and I think that’s where the good stuff is.”
McMaster designed his black and chrome tricycle with its low-slung banana seat, high-rise handlebars, black-and-white tassels hanging from the handgrips, and a tinkling bell as the centerpiece of the project—“the big kick,” he said. But he also has created other visual elements to attract attention—T-shirts, trucker caps, and stickers featuring the Support Trike logo, with the word Support above and an image of a child’s tricycle below—that he gives away.
The stickers have made it as far as Iraq where American soldiers sent back pictures with kids. Soccer star Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra, shortshop for the Boston Red Sox, have T-shirts.
McAdams also hung a series of banners on the east wall of the Mellow Mushroom on Gervais Street and painted a mural on a low wall on the southwest corner of Henderson and Taylor streets cater-cornered from the Township Auditorium. Students in art faculty member Joe Milutis’ sound class created a catchy soundtrack, featuring metallic clanks, chains, and the trike’s bell in rhythmic syncopation, which the artist plays when he makes stops around town.
When people on the street put all the elements together, the project works. The first step is to get attention; the next is to make people comfortable with interacting and coming up to the tricycle to ask questions; and the third is to have those people relate the whole project to art.
“Ideally, a person going to lunch downtown sees a car go by with the Support Trike sticker and then later a T-shirt and a hat. Then they drive down Taylor Street and see the mural across from the Township. Hopefully, all these things will start to click together,” said McAdams, whose McMaster studio is littered with trike parts and a full-size kid’s red-and-white trike.
“It’s worked a couple of times where someone on the street has come up and asked if I did the banners on Gervais Street because there’s a kid on a tricycle. That’s the project working. It’s promoting an awareness of noticing in your every day activities cool or kooky things that are naturally and socially constructive.”
The kid in those banners is McAdams. They come from an 8mm film his dad made of him in the early 1970s when the elder McAdams was a graduate student in cinematography at the other USC, the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles where McAdams was born.
When the film starts, a 2- or 3-year-old McAdams appears from behind a bush, turns a corner too fast, and tips the tricycle up—his legs flying off.
“It’s a really scary moment, but then I land, and I laugh and giggle, and I wasn’t afraid to take the risk of going down hill and pedaling too fast. The consequence of that decision was life threatening at the moment, but the payoff was knowledge and experience,” McAdams said. “That’s how I think we become people, taking that childlike openness and curiosity—that way of seeing or looking at the world—and applying the knowledge we gain through the experience to our lives as adults. I think if you can combine those two then you can be whoever you want to be.
“That’s the person I want to be—kinda ham for the camera a little bit and be silly and fun and not be afraid to fail.”
McAdams, whose Web site is www.supporttrike.com, will pedal around town through the end of April, usually from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday–Thursday. He often stops at the plaza in front of the Columbia Museum of Art on Main Street and in front of his banners and mural.
“I try to take it as far as I can, but it’s just one little gear, and I sometimes get stuck places,” he said.
The artist also will be at the S.C. State Museum from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 1 as part of the Congaree Arts Festival and Artista Vista. Just listen for the bell.
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