TINA L. SCOTT
EDITOR
LEGO’s have changed a LOT over the years! No longer just the square and rectangular blocks and tiny little people figures, the ideas for what can be created with LEGO pieces is endless these days, and the LEGO interlocking pieces themselves now come in a huge array of colors, shapes, and sizes, enabling designers to create works of art from those LEGO pieces. The world of LEGO is limited only by one’s imagination.
To create many of the new and innovative creations using LEGO pieces, many LEGO fans start with kits. Beyond that, they can disassemble the original creation and then use the pieces to create something entirely new if they so choose.
Locally, Tim and Dawn Dunbar are huge LEGO fans with a huge [and growing] collection. They participate in a worldwide LEGO collection tracking database and currently have the 10,859th largest collection of LEGO’s in the world. But even more notable is their collection of 576 different LEGO kits they have purchased, assembled, and have on display in their home, utilizing nearly 400,000 individual LEGO pieces.
The T.B. Scott Library’s Beyond Books Community ArtShare Program will feature a diverse and colorful exhibit of some of the completed kits in the Dunbars’ collection during the months of July and August.
The couple began purchasing LEGO sets as gifts for their daughters in the late 1980’s, and it turned out they liked assembling them. A new hobby was born and a collection begun. Soon their hobby turned into purchasing and assembling dozens of new sets each year. Tim said they really enjoy spending time together assembling the kits, so he considers it more of a hobby than a collection, but there is no denying the number of completed sets now puts it firmly into the category of a collection.
The Dunbars will display a wide assortment from their LEGO collection … from flowers and typewriters, to Batmobiles and globes.
Viewers are invited to vote for their favorite for a chance to win their very own LEGO Architecture San Francisco kit. And as they examine the collection on display, they will also likely find themselves saying, “Wait, that’s LEGO?”