For the 2025 Creative Pinellas Arts Annual, I created a deeply personal photography-based installation called “Papi’s Garten” (Dad’s Garden). It’s an homage to my artist father Günter Westphal, who died this May and whose birthday is today (December 5th).
Factually, “Papi’s Garten” is a row of concrete construction block pieces to which I image-transferred photos of plants growing out of cracks between concrete. The installation is placed on the ground against a wall to enhance the experience of either seeing what exists in the margins – or not.
Throughout December, the installation can be viewed at the Gallery at Creative Pinellas: 12211 Walsingham Road in Largo, Florida.
The photographed plants grow in the margins, between the sidewalk and the concrete wall of the train overpass along the street where my father had his studio and apartment in the Münzviertel neighborhood behind the main train station in Hamburg, Germany. He photographed plants along that wall often and in 2012 had a solo exhibit focused solely on plants growing along that wall called “Blätter so zart”* (leaves so delicate).
The catalog of that exhibit, I tucked behind the installation during opening night at Creative Pinellas.
My father died in May in our family home in Haselau, Germany. I spent the summer in Germany clearing out his Hamburg studio and organizing his belongings and art. On my last day in Hamburg, I took these photos along that same wall on the street of his Münzplatz studio and apartment.
A few weeks ago, back here in St. Pete, walking home from planting pollinator plants along Central Avenue, I came across a pile of tossed out concrete blocks on my alley. Immediately, I knew what I had to do for Arts Annual 8: create “his garden” here in Florida and share his beliefs that all beings should be treated equally with dignity and delicacy and approached from a perspective of ethics and aesthetics. The dandelion growing out of the cracks between the sidewalk and concrete train overpass wall deserves this just like the rose in the garden.
He taught me to look in the margins, to look closely and recognize the beauty – and capture it for others to also see… Beauty can easily be overlooked and harmed if we don’t stop to pay attention.
Because the installation is on ground level against a gallery wall, to fully experience the piece, the viewer will have to come down to be on eye-level with this life on the margins. Or maybe the experience is to walk right by and not even notice it.
With this installation, I hope to evoke what I gleaned from my father with his gentle and conscious approach to photography and his demand for an ethic/aesthetic perspective. He got on eye-level with his often unassuming subjects. He suggested we be as gentle as a breath as we move around leaves and nature with our camera, as we should be when we interact with people, nobody above and nobody below.
By chance (or by fate or by muse’s power) there are 13 pieces of concrete. It was 13 years ago, my father had his exhibit of plants growing along that sidewalk and wall. A concrete brick for each year we had left.
Today, is my father’s birthday. He died 6 months ago. I miss him terribly. Everyone who know him does, I’m sure.
Other blog posts about my father:
Günter Westphal: Obituaries – Nachrufe
TRANSLATED from taz: Artist on Aesthetics as Empowerment: “Meeting at Eye-Level”
Meet Günter Westphal (Visual + Social Artist) – In A Minute Portrait (Week 240)
** Last year, I had the title of the exhibit in my father’s handwriting tattooed on my arm, where I could see it as I hold a camera. The tattooist was Reid Jenkins, an extraordinary painter and friend who would have connected well with my father and would have had great conversations had they ever met and spoke the same language.
All photos taken by Luci Westphal, except the ones showing Luci.