Janet Echelman creates art the size of skyscrapers, usually hung between them. She and her team use polyester fibers with colored LED lighting and spectra fiber to create the memorizing pieces. Spectra fiber is a hand-spliced ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE). It is fifteen times stronger than steel and doesn’t hold water weight and reduces energy and heat build up.

Janet and her team spend upwards of hundreds of hours tying, knotting, and braiding pieces together, with a finish length of hundreds miles that includes millions of knots

She makes art that you can get lost in. The LEDS change colors and brightness due to time and sometimes weather. The art interacts with its surrounding and is made with its future surrounds and climate in mind. No two pieces are ever the same, she designs ideas in AutoDesk after doing research on the area.

Above shows the AS IF IT WERE ALREADY HERE, BOSTON, MA, 2015 piece created by Janet and her team. It includes references to the Boston highways, history of the Boston harbor. The piece does have different colors for day and night, however sensors on the LEDS allow the color to also be effected by the wind when the nets get moved by it. The dimensions of AS IF IT WERE ALREADY HERE was 245 ft. length x 130 ft. width x 120 ft. depth

In 2023, Echelman was awarded the Harleston Parker Medal, which recognizes “the most beautiful piece of architecture, building, monument or structure” in the City of Boston. She made history as the first time in its 102-year history that the award was given to an artist.

The image above shows NOLI TIMERE MILAN, ITALY, 2023

Noli Timere Milan translates from Latin to “don’t be afraid”, a reference to the Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, who she had worked with in the 1990s while they sharded a house at Harvard.

This piece is a traveling display that was deeply inspired by Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” and “The Lovers” by Picasso.

NOLI TIMERE MILAN is 73 ft. length x 26 ft. width x 12 ft. depth