Large hanging art installation coming to MSP’s Terminal 1 in 2025

Travelers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport can pause and admire a giant hanging art installation starting in 2025.

The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) unveiled the design concept for the new sculpture on Monday in Concourse G of Terminal 1, where it will hang from the rotunda and span about 40 feet.

The airport’s Arts@MSP program commissioned artist Kipp Kobayashi to design the statue in 2022.

For the past year, Kobayashi has been planning the installation. He interviewed more than 1,000 people at the airport, local events and during a visit to the Twin Cities Pride festival last year.

He asked everyone the same question: You’re offered a one-way ticket wherever you’d like to go; who knows when you’ll return. All the necessities and modern conveniences will be there. What three things would you bring along?

He got a range of answers: A teddy bear, a cooking pot, an indestructible family photo, a grandmother’s jar of buttons.

Most people’s answers went back to ideas of home and family.

“I think those values really stood out, things like people talking about relatives and families and portraits of family members,” Kobayashi said. “Just really personal stories that sort of indicated a real connection and a real sort of sense of community, despite the fact that people may not be here all the time.”

The sculpture, called “The Dreams We Carry,” will feature see-through wire mesh luggage shapes, each with a different object inside, inspired by the interviews. The shapes will hang together in a cloud above travelers passing through the rotunda.

Kobayashi is based in Los Angeles, and his career has focused on public art. Usually, he starts an installation by getting to know the local community. He said his thought process for this project was a little different because the airport isn’t just for locals; he wanted to reflect the spirit of travel, too.

“The intent of the artwork is to create a fantastical vision of imaginary bags and suitcases ascending upwards,” Kobayashi said. “They’ll hover above travelers while refracting the constantly changing light that splashes through the rotunda.”

Kobayashi will work on building the sculpture in 2024. It will be installed early next year.

The piece will join 80 permanent works that the airport has in its collection through its arts program.

Ben Owen is the director of Arts@MSP. He’s looking forward to seeing the installation come to life.

“Our foundational concept of the program is … creating a destination within the airport that people recognize and can come back to and visit again, but also that has a nod to the culture and the environment of the upper Midwest,” Owen said.

The sculpture is the finishing touch on the airport’s recent redesign of the G concourse, which added space to waiting areas and expanded food and retail venues. More airport renovations are underway, too, with changes coming to six out of the terminal’s seven concourses.