The 2025 coffee-table book Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman devotes 300 full-color pages to the works of the Tampa-born artist, whose elevated woven sculptural installations appear in 38 cities on four continents.
The book’s editors pay special attention to Bending Arc, which was created for the St. Pete Pier, and installed there in 2020. In photo after photo, the 424×280-foot net-like sculpture billows in the St. Petersburg breeze, 72 feet above the ground, its form ever-changing. The artwork’s strong PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene) twine fibers, 180 miles of them (with 1,662,528 knots), are blue and white. At night, an LED lighting system changes the piece’s colors, mood and profile.
Bending Arc arrived with great fanfare and floated over a grassy field, near the Glazer Family Playground, for almost four years…