
Lego Art
Small plastic bricks anchor this Off Book episode, which follows three artists who have pushed LEGO past the toy aisle. Sean Kenney builds large-scale mosaics and sculptures from the pieces, working the way a painter would with color and grid. Nathan Sawaya, a former corporate lawyer turned full-time brick artist, talks about leaving that career to sculpt human figures and objects out of LEGO, work that later toured as The Art of the Brick. Alex Kobbs uses the bricks differently, animating them frame by frame into stop-motion video, treating each minifigure and set piece as a puppet. Interviews with all three are intercut with footage of their work in progress: mosaics assembled tile by tile, sculptures taking shape from thousands of individual studs, and animated scenes built one photograph at a time. The episode's interest is in the argument each artist makes for LEGO as a legitimate medium, one with real constraints of color, scale, and geometry that shape what they can make.