Artist Pat Milbery goes extra public with ‘Heart of the Games’ 60th birthday present to town of Vail

GoPro Mountain Games resident artist Pat Milbery has a long history of creating public art projects in Colorado, but at this year’s event, he’s attempting one of his most public projects yet with “Heart of the Games.”

Milbery said he’s always liked the public element of creating a mural in a town, thinking of it as a front-facing feature that can be enjoyed by all. Public funds are used to pay for the piece, and the public is welcome to enjoy it whenever they want.

And that, Milbery said, for a long time, was his understanding of what it meant to create public art.

But in recent years, he has been striving to widen his concept of public art to include the public on not just the final product, but the process.

That’s because, after all, with any piece of art, for the artist, it’s the process that’s often the most rewarding.

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“The process is where the flow state is found,” Milbery said. “Artists are always chasing that feeling — once their pieces are created, they go back to engaging in another artistic process that will get them back to the flow state again. In a work of public art, to not involve the public in the process, it doesn’t give them the opportunity to enjoy what should be the most enjoyable part.”

In thinking about all of this, Milbery arrived at “Heart of the Games,” a 4-foot, heart-shaped time capsule sculpture that will be filled with mementos created by the public.

The public-participation part of the “Heart of the Games” piece began on Thursday, with Milbery handing out heart-shaped tokens to visitors to his GoPro Mountain Games booth, which has been set up in the Games’ CoLab area in front of Solaris. Milbery had 48 colors of acrylic marker pens available and a stack of wooden tokens at his table. Natalie Morton, 17, of Colorado Springs, created a colorful collection of monster characters she has been designing in recent months.

As an artist herself, Morton decided to include her monster characters as something personal to this moment in her life.

“Maybe I’ll come back some day decades from now, see those characters inside this piece and remember this time in my life,” she said. “I think art is an important part of life, and everybody has creativity in them, even if they don’t identify as a creative person. And a piece like this allows everyone to nourish that.”

Milbery said in addition to the creation of the tokens, “it’s the feeling of dropping it into the slot, hearing it clap against the other pieces and feeling that you’re contributing to something larger, feeling the collaborative energy in this special moment.”

Morton spent about 15 minutes creating hers before dropping it into the sculpture.

“It’s a beautiful thing, to spend time creating something and then immediately give it away,” she said.

The town of Vail has purchased the sculpture and will add it to the town’s public art collection at the conclusion of the games.

In readying the time capsule with required behind-the-scenes work, Milbery was forced to acknowledge that a work such as “Heart of the Games” will never be 100% public in its process, and that process isn’t always so fun.

“Ultimately, this piece is a time capsule, so we had to seal the polycarbonate and make it weatherproof, and that took specialized skills, it was a lot of work,” Milbery said. “But now it will withstand the test of time.”

The piece doubles a 60th birthday present to the town of Vail, which was incorporated in 1966. Milbery said the piece was built to last another 60 years, or more.

It was manufactured by hand off-site in Milbery’s studio, so in the final act of readying the work for the public, Milbery had to have the 4-foot piece moved from his studio in Denver to Meadow Drive in Vail.

As he started talking about how best to do that, “something just didn’t feel right about loading it into a truck and driving it up to Vail,” Milbery said.

He wanted to continue the public process with a final cherry on top — public transportation.

“So I called the Bustang to see if it would be too big,” he said. “They had no problem with it.”

Bustang driver Elana Lujan runs the Denver to Glenwood route four days per week. She said while it was the largest package she has ever seen loaded underneath the bus, there was still plenty of room. Town of Vail events manager Jeremy Gross was there to meet Milbery for the Bustang dropoff at the Vail Transportation Center when it arrived.

Gross and Milbery then dropped the first heart tokens into the sculpture on Thursday.

“I love the people I have met in Vail,” Gross’ token read.