It’s 15 feet tall, 250 pounds, red all over and therefore always looks a little out of place no matter where you put it.

Red Ball is coming to Northwest Arkansas in September, and over the course of five days will be squished, suspended and stuffed somewhere in each of our biggest towns — Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville, as well as Siloam Springs.

“This project, referred to as the ‘world’s longest street art work,’ has been all over the world, from Paris to Abu Dhabi to Tokyo and has stopped in many U.S. cities,” said Brittany Johnson, director of communications for CACHE. “We’re excited to be bringing it (and the artist) to Northwest Arkansas.”

CACHE, the Creative Arkansas Community Hub and Exchange, will host a talk with Red Ball artist Kurt Perschke at 21C Museum Hotel and an artist event with MIXD in Rogers. All dates and details for the events and the Red Ball appearances are still being worked out, but will be announced soon.

Artist Kurt Perschke has already made his site visit to the region to scope out the potential wedging places for his incredibly popular work.

When the idea for Red Ball originally popped into his mind, Kurt laughed. It was the answer to an opportunity he had in St. Louis to choose among three sites in the city to place a large temporary work. At the time, Perschke was primarily interested in sculpture, but he had recently realized an interest in doing public art and working outside.

Deciding on an artwork to develop “is often a process from (considering) the most complicated to the simplest” idea, Perschke said by phone. “I finally landed on the simplest idea because it was just so funny and also seemed outrageous.”

Then when he told the curator, a representative of that art committee, what he wanted to do with the site, she laughed out loud too. That made it clear to him that Red Ball could actually work. Of the three sites he considered for its first installment, two of them were pretty spaces in downtown St. Louis. But one of them was forgotten-looking, an on-ramp area, an underside that people simply drive through. Perschke was drawn to it, and the curator green-lighted it. She thought the work could really reach people.

“I didn’t realize how long it would run,” Perschke said. It started in 2001. In the 23 years since, he’s come up as an artist with this work that was meant to include an audience of everyone. “Humor is tricky to do in art … it’s like a tool that’s equivalent of other tools of scale and color and TACTivity (tactile activity), to allow the project to do things and go in communities in ways that it might not be able to” otherwise.

ROLLING IT AROUND

What was immediately clear to Kurt Perschke was that Red Ball would work better if it was repeatedly shown. Taking it to a huge variety of locations would show off its shining characteristic — that sense of play.

At 250 pounds, Red Ball is inflatable and built like a beach ball. It has to be floated in installation, otherwise people would destroy it, but overall it’s very durable having been made with the same technology as a river raft or an outdoor sun shade. The vinyl is by Ferrari. Perschke made it tough knowing it would be placed in cities and alleyways and incessantly touched and bounced against.

“Red Ball is about as high as a semi-tractor trailer and that’s not accidental,” he said. The work plays with architecture since it’s scaled off the height of bodies, being more than twice the height of the average person and “sort of the right size to not quite fit a lot of places. That’s the goal.”

Bringing it to Barcelona as an illegal street art was a sort of test to see if it could be as successful somewhere else as it had been in its first place.

On the first day, Red Ball was positioned not far from military police. Perschke’s friend who was helping him run things felt like it would be a given that they’d get arrested and made plans for getting the art back in that event. Meanwhile Kurt was more interested in keeping out of jail himself. But not a single person questioned them or told them Red Ball couldn’t be there.

At first that astounded them, but finally “I realized it just seemed too ridiculous,” Perschke said. “It’s not graffiti, it’s not recognizable, there was no context for it. I realized it looked like something someone must have said ‘yes’ to.”

These days the Red Ball team secures all their permissions in advance of its showing, usually with the help of teams like CACHE who bring artists to their city or region.

But Barcelona was also the only place of another irresistible experiment: rolling it. They tried it while they were on the beach, but it didn’t go well.

“It’s impossible to control it,” he said. “What happens is that it’s so big you can’t see where it’s going and who’s getting run over.”

No small children were hurt in the rolling of Red Ball, but a bunch of 12 year old boys, a soccer team nearby, immediately tried to co-opt it so they could run each other over. Never again, Perschke vowed. Not with the public.

Watching people interact with Red Ball has been quite the experience and Kurt has learned a lot from seeing the audience.

“Because I was moving it everyday, I could see how it works in different locations and how the location influences” the interaction, Perschke said. Some places in town are more natural for hanging out, while others make you want to keep walking.

And while each site is a completely different experience, there are some patterns in audience engagement. They just might be expressed in different ways based on where they live.

Australians were more physical with it, such as an instance in Sydney when folks jumped on it for more than an hour. That was reflective of their “very humorous culture,” Perschke said. In France, where Red Ball has visited many times, they almost never touched it, but will sit and chat around it. In Tokyo and Taiwan, it was clear everyone wanted a picture with it.

Now that it’s been running so long, “there’s a sense of intensity, super fans who would come every single day (even when) it’s a long project, two or three weeks,” he said. One of those guys brought a different red object, such as hot sauce, a red yoga ball, etc., each of the 21 days that Red Ball was there, so he would have a collection of photos of his red pairings.

Many people offer up suggestions for where it should go in their towns. Perschke listens and takes a team to the area. They look for sites that will have the right audience. It’s got to be somewhere people might ordinarily go that is a large enough space. Not just to navigate the size and scale of the artwork as they squish it into a location or pin it to a site, but for a crowd to gather.

But if you show up and ask questions, don’t expect to get too many answers from staff on site. Perschke wants you to come to your own conclusions about it.

“People want to put it in a box and move on,” he said. “When someone asks, (we think about) how to give information without answering. It’s here today, tomorrow … it lets people absorb” the work.