Since 2005, the artist HOTTEA has been placing his public yarn-and-stencil installations in cities all over the world.

For letting go, HOTTEA’s most ambitious project to date, the artist worked within the complex architectural details of the MIA’s Target Wing rotunda. The result is a physically light but beautiful, space-filling volume of color. Visitors are encouraged to sit or lie on the “grass” and look up into the sun-colored, cascading lengths of yarn. Visitors can also stand in the middle, surrounded by the gradient colors filling the space. Looking at letting go from the second floor, one sees thousands of individual strands, a streaky volume that creates a gently disorienting vibration of color that fills the rotunda’s void.

During four weeks of construction and installation leading up to the MIA’s 2012 Northern Spark event, HOTTEA, MIA staff and volunteers measured, cut, and knotted an estimated 14,000 pieces of colored yarn (almost 400 skeins) to a plastic fence. If laid end-to-end, the yarn would stretch for 82 miles, or put another way, the distance from the MIA to Mankato, Minnesota. If it went straight up into the sky, the yarn would reach past the K&aacure;rmán Line, the border between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.