Loti Pencil

The Loti Pencil is a twenty-foot sculptural pencil created by Minneapolis artist Curtis Ingvoldstad and installed along Lake of the Isles Parkway. It has become one of the city's most warmly regarded public artworks, drawing crowds to the lakeshore with a combination of absurdist humor and genuine craft.

The sculpture's annual sharpening ceremony has grown into a genuine neighborhood event. By its fifth iteration the gathering had expanded to fill the parkway, with boats on the lake joining the audience on shore. The ritual of ceremonially dulling and then resharpening an enormous wooden pencil has no practical purpose whatsoever, which appears to be precisely why people keep coming back for it.

Within the ongoing Minneapolis Art series, the Loti Pencil represents a strand of public art that earns its place not through institutional commission or civic programming but through repeated, voluntary public affection. Earlier instalments in the series have tracked murals, temporary installations and gallery work across the city; the Pencil sits apart from those in that its story is less about a single creative act and more about what happens when a neighborhood decides, year after year, that something is worth celebrating.