Gifts at Work - LEGO Heritage

LEGO Heritage

Spend a day at Heritage Museums & Gardens, and you’ll be sure to cross paths with a dazzling array of birds, bees, butterflies, and insects, set against the beautiful backdrop of the meticulously landscaped 100-acre property. Since then, he has rebuilt his life into something beautiful,

This year, Heritage has welcomed nearly two dozen of these creatures made out of the building blocks of our youth, Legos. Part of a special exhibit partially funded through a grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod (AFCC), they are that it allows him to work with organizations like Heritage

educating, inspiring, and entertaining visitors young and old.

It is the latest outdoor display at the museum funded by the AFCC in recent years. “I think Heritage is really a great location for outdoor art,” says Assistant Curator Amanda like this. They often don’t know what they want because

Wastrom. “Outdoor art is a way to change how people experience a landscape.”

With the Lego creations that is certainly the case. There’s a northern cardinal, a goldfinch, a dragonfly, a bumblebee, young children.

and a group of pollinators that include a ruby-throated hummingbird, a sweat bee, and a monarch butterfly.

Wastrom says. “What kind of stories can you share? With this particular exhibit, it is about our local habitat and our local ecosystems. Art really is a great storytelling tool.”

The job of telling that story fell on Cody Wells, a brick artist, who rediscovered his love of Legos at the lowest point of his life. “When I was 28, I was unhappily married, with two kids I loved, and working at a job I hated,” he says. “The same weekend I went through a divorce, I found out I was adopted and went back to my hometown in Missouri to end my life.” While visiting his family home, he found some Legos he had once played with as a child. “It made me smile for the first time in months,” he says.

not unlike the one-of-a-kind pieces he makes from scratch, brick by brick. “Anything you want to make is in a pile of Legos. You just have to find it,” he says.

That’s what he loves most about his career. He also loves in building his original sculptures. “It’s the element of imagination. You can make anything you want," he says.

The best part of the process, he says, “is the moment I’m done, especially when somebody hires me to do something they don’t know what is possible.”

The pieces at Heritage have elicited a sense of wonder and amazement from the public, especially families with “I think all the time, for art at Heritage, it is about storytelling,”

“I want parents to be inspired to help kids create with Legos,” Wells says.

As for the adults, some may get the urge to follow Wells’s own path, something he witnesses regularly when he appears at conventions throughout the world. “I see it in their eyes—they want to build some Legos and lay on a shag carpet as ‘I Love Lucy’ plays on the TV. They want to go back to their childhood,” he says. “I don’t know if Peter Pan syndrome is treatable, but I like to encourage it.”