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Nathan Sawaya makes a living playing with Legos.
Sawaya, 42, began his career as a lawyer on Wall Street. But he was constantly dogged by a yearning to do more creative work. Eventually, he happened upon his childhood Lego collection and used it to build massive sculptures, displaying the resulting works on a website.
One day, that website crashed because it got too many hits. That was the turning point. Sawaya walked away from law, turned to Lego, and never looked back.
Since then, Sawaya's work has traveled the globe in the acclaimed exhibition The Art of the Brick. One of his sculptures was featured in a Lady Gaga music video. His Lego Oscar statue stole the show at the 2015 Academy Awards. He's penned two best-selling art books and launched a nonprofit. And he's still creating new works, brick by colorful brick.
"I never in my wildest dreams thought I could keep doing this when I started," Sawaya told INSIDER. "It was a great experiment that has worked out rather well."
Here's a look at some of his most famous works — and his journey to art world stardom.
Sawaya couldn't get museums to take him seriously when he started as a Lego artist.
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"I'd been reaching out to art galleries who were not really getting what I did," Sawaya said. "At the time, when I brought up the idea of Lego art, people pictured cars and trucks and little castles — things they saw at the toy store. People didn't see it as an art medium."
But one museum did get it. In 2007, the executive director at Pennsylvania's Lancaster Museum of Art reached out to ask Sawaya he was interested in showing a solo exhibition. "When I had that first exhibition, I treated it a lot like my last," he said. "I figured, well, this is my one shot."
But that first solo show was a massive success.
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The Lancaster Museum of Art normally gets around 35,000 visitors a year, Sawaya said. His exhibition drew 25,000 people in just six weeks. "It was mind-boggling," he said.
That's when The Art of the Brick began to take off.
Since then, The Art of the Brick has traveled to 26 states and 14 countries.
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The exhibition has also broken attendance records worldwide, and CNN named the show one of the top ten "must-see global exhibitions."
And there's still plenty to come: The exhibition is scheduled to keep traveling through January 2017 (with more potential shows TBD). By then, Sawaya's art will have been exhibited for 10 straight years.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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