Artist Shawn Kolodny can pinpoint the exact moment things, well, blew up.
There he is on November 22, 2022, wearing a gray T-shirt and gym shorts in the hallway of his Normandy Isles home, affixing a pump to giant silver orbs and inflating them until he’s engulfed in a sea of shiny spheres. The 20-second video—showing preparations for his debut large-scale artwork—proved to be just the right combination of silly and mesmerizing. When the dust settled, more than 1.67 million Instagram viewers had registered their approval.
“The next six months turned out to be the craziest ride of my life,” says Kolodny, who adds that his status as an artist went from “struggling” to “sought-after” at head-spinning speed after that video and the final product—a 30-by-40-foot walk-through installation—was unveiled at the 2022 Art With Me festival. “All sorts of magic started to happen,” he recalls.
But the magic almost didn’t happen at all. In early 2020, after 25 years managing nightclubs and restaurants in New York City, Kolodny made a full-time move to Miami, intent on turning his hobby of oil painting and silk-screen printing into his vocation.
It was a gamble, but Kolodny’s entrepreneurial streak made the risk tolerable. “I was used to living without a steady paycheck,” he says. His work ethic gave him the necessary discipline. “There’s a saying that you have to make 50 or 60 pieces before you get to piece No. 1,” he explains, noting that his practical side kept him grounded: “I gave myself a timeline.”
A year and a half later, he was considering returning to hospitality, says Kolodny, now 53 and living in Miami Beach. And then, a chance art project led him to the oversize orbs that now define his career. Kolodny was painting (and contemplating the end of his artistic life) when he found himself revisiting a familiar theme. “All my life, I’d made little circle doodles up and down the sides of paper,” he says. What if he created a 3D version of that motif?
On August 15, 2022, he sprayed fuchsia paint onto marble-sized wooden balls, artfully arranged them in a small shadowbox, and captured the process on video. His normally sluggish social media feed perked up. “I got a little bit of Instagram love,” he says. “I thought, ‘I have something here.’” Then he expanded the idea, literally. “I’ve always been attracted to scale,” he continues. “People remember big art.”
Kolodny’s successful 2022 Art With Me debut was quickly followed by installations at the Scope Art Show and The Sagamore Hotel South Beach. Within two years, Kolodny’s buoyant mega-bubbles (Vogue described one installation as “a visual delight”) would be showcased everywhere from the Four Seasons Hotel in Mexico City to the Missoni runway during Milan Fashion Week.
Of the enduring appeal of the orb, Kolodny says, “we have an organic connection to the shape.” That, plus his joyful treatment of the form would see his whimsical works displayed at Art Basel, Pharrell’s Something in the Water festival, and the St. Regis Aspen, and as part of the global campaign for House of Creed. He even launched a podcast called Ballsy: It Takes Balls to Sell Art. And, after getting numerous inquiries about where he acquired his inflatable spheres, he started selling them himself through his business, Big Shiny Balls.
Kolodny credits the playful and vibrant vibe of the Magic City with inspiring his fun and fanciful artworks. “It’s the greatest city on Earth,” he says. “It’s magical. It’s joy. You can’t help but feel that, and it’s reflected in my work.”
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