Blog / 2026 / The Best Laid Plans of Orangutans and Artists
July 7, 2026
You can see First Zoo at the Philadelphia Zoo right now! It’s installed just on the other side of security at the main entrance. There’s no ticket purchase required to see it.
If you visit on August 8th I’ll be there with both a coloring page and some stickers to give away as part of the Zoo’s Firstival!
Philadelphia Zoo
3400 W Girard Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Open: daily from 9:30 AM to 5 PM
Firstival: Saturday August 8th at 11 AM
Besides the first zoo, I also painted the first steamboat and the First Continental Congress. Learn about all three #1 sculptures that I painted for 52 Weeks of Firsts here.
Plan your art-and-history tour of Philadelphia with this interactive map.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In the black and white sketch, everything looked fine. Everything looks fine, right? Even in color, it seems to work.
At least I thought it did. Until I started to turn the design into a much larger painting on the side of a number one statue.
This ONE is part of 52 Weeks of Firsts, a public art project in Philadelphia celebrating some of the ways that the US’s first capital was first in the nation for other things as well, including the first zoo, which is what this artwork represents. This ONE is covered in animals that all represent firsts of their own, like the first successful birth of an orangutan in a US zoo in 1928.
It wasn’t until I’d gotten pretty far along in the painting of the orangutan mom and baby that I realized they weren’t quite reading right. It probably had something to do with the shape of the backwards number one and how I’d decided to compose the image with some parts of the animals not showing. I decided I needed to move the angle of the adult’s right arm, while also shifting the set of the shoulder. And then I added a left hand and redid one of the feet.
This is the last part of the last ONE that I finished for 52 Weeks of Firsts. I made three ONES in all: First Zoo, First Steamboat, and First Continental Congress. I’d been painting the three big number-one-shaped sculptures for five weeks at this point, and I was wiped out. These pieces completely took over my life, my studio, and basically my whole apartment.
Because that’s the thing: since pretty early on in my career, I’ve made mostly compact art that fits in the little studio spaces that I carve out of the modest apartments my partner and I rent, limited by our budget to around 150 square feet of workspace. There’s nothing wrong with compact art, not really. But, as this orangutan design and final painting make clear, small versions of images can get away with things that big versions can’t.
I don’t want my work to get away with things anymore. I want to make more big paintings.
Maybe this post made you think of something you want to tell me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!
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