Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened

John Higgins likes to think of the six-metre-tall pencil on his front lawn as a piece of pop art.

“When you think of pop art, you think Andy Warhol or Claes Odenberg. I mean, these are these iconic artists. They take a simple object in bold shape and colours, and it’s fascinating how humans relate to it, ” he told As It Happens guest host Stephanie Skenderis. 

“That’s exactly what this is.”

Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins’ house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener. 

“It’s fun. It’s joyful. There’s no agenda. It’s not a commercial event. There’s not a ticket or anything,” Higgins said. “But through word of mouth, I think, people come and they really have fun.”

The giant pencil was once a giant tree

Saturday marked the fourth annual pencil sharpening event. But the sculpture’s origins date back to 2017, when a sudden and powerful windstorm hit the city and ripped Higgins’s beloved oak tree from his front lawn.

The tree, he says, was about 180 years old.

“It was very very hard to see that happen,” he said. “Very sad, I’ll say.”

He remembers the oak’s severed trunk amid the storm’s debris in the aftermath.

“It looked very, you know, almost sinister —  just marred wood at the top and looked, kind of, at night time, like a broken skeleton.”

So he and his wife, Amy Higgins, decided to turn it into art. They enlisted wood sculptor Curtis Ingvoldstad to transform it into a replica of a classic Trusty brand No. 2 pencil.

“Why a pencil? Everybody uses a pencil,” Amy said. “Everybody knows a pencil. You see it in school, you see it in people’s work, or drawings, everything. So, it’s just so accessible to everybody, I think, and can easily mean something, and everyone can make what they want of it.”

As soon as they conceived of the pencil, Higgins says they came up with the idea of sharpening it. So Ingvoldstead also crafted a to-scale pencil sharpener for the task. 

“It’s about four feet large [and] weighs a hundred pounds,” Higgins said. “We hoist that up, and turn it around a few times and the pencil gets sharpened.”

‘Life is too short’ to miss the sharpening

The first year they did this, Higgins said, a few hundred people showed up, mostly from the neighbourhood and surrounding area.

But over the years, he says, it’s grown through word of mouth and social media. Last year, he says about 1,000 people attended. This year, he estimates the crowd was in the multiple thousands, with people coming from out of state, and even other countries.

Some people dressed as pencils or erasers. Two Swiss alphorn players provided part of the entertainment. The hosts commemorated a Minneapolis icon, the late music superstar Prince, by handing out purple pencils on what would have been his 67th birthday.

Rachel Hyman said she flew from Chicago on Friday for the event, which a friend told her about.

“Some man is sharpening a pencil on his lawn and this is what happens?” Hyman said Saturday while dressed in a pencil costume. “Yeah, I’m gonna be part of it. How can you not? Life is too short.”

A ritual sacrifice 

You may be wondering why a giant sculpture of a pencil would even need sharpening. Higgins says the tip, while not made of lead of granite, gets worn down by the weather throughout the year.

But, mostly, he says, it’s for the symbolism. 

“This is a community pencil. With the sharpening, there’s a chance for, you know, renewal, a new beginning, a promise for writing another note,” he said. “People love that message.”

With each sharpening, the pencil gets shorter and they lose a part of the artwork. Ingvoldstad, the sculptor, says that’s the whole point. 

“Like any ritual, you’ve got to sacrifice something,” Ingvoldstad said. “So we’re sacrificing part of the monumentality of the pencil, so that we can give that to the audience that comes, and say, ‘This is our offering to you, and in goodwill to all the things that you’ve done this year.'”

So how many years until it’s nothing but a little stub with a bright pink eraser? And what happens then? 

“We don’t have answers to that, and we’re fine with that,” Higgins said. “But for today, for this moment, we’re going to take what we have and make the most of it.”