Sticky Wicket, 1978

In 1978 Parkin organized the watershed 10th International Sculpture Conference at York University in Toronto.

“This job was great fun. I was on the committee for the sculpture conference along with David Silcox and Nina Wright. I was assigned to organize all the programming and liaised with international artists. I made a list of every sculptor that I thought was good; I got their telephone number and called them. Everybody said, ‘You will never get Mark di Suvero, he never answers the telephone and he won’t let his agent to speak to anybody.’

“But I got him, and I told him that I wanted him to make a sculpture using a crane. He said, ‘What? How amazing!’ Then I had to figure out where to get a crane—I had a friend who had a construction business. I saw him in the subway one day, and I asked him, ‘Do you have a crane that we could use?’ He said, ‘Fine.’ Joyce Frankel, one of my best friends, owns Frankel Steel—so we got steel and beams from them.

“It turned out that rules prohibited di Suvero from running the crane by himself—he had to have a union member to do so. We found him a crane operator and for several days he made this piece on site. Sticky Wicket is still at York today—though it’s since been painted [orange].”