He’s made a living out of building sculptures from Lego and his work has been shown in 100 cities and 24 countries, attracting millions of visitors. But you won’t find any Lego in Nathan Sawaya’s home. Call it work-life balance: “I love what I do, but it is a job … not a hobby,” the 50-year-old American artist says.

It is a job, but it’s also something like a dream. Sawaya was a Wall Street lawyer who was unhappy with his career, playing with his favourite childhood toys after hours to unwind. Creating elaborate sculptures from scratch wasn’t unfamiliar to him – as a child, when his parents wouldn’t buy him a dog, he fashioned a lifesize pet from Lego bricks. “It was very rudimentary, but it was what I could do as a kid,” he recalls.

Sawaya began posting photos of his sculptures online. When his website crashed from all the clicks, he took it as a sign to quit law and pursue Lego. The first iteration of Sawaya’s travelling exhibition, the Art of the Brick, was held at a small art museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2007, featuring about two dozen sculptures. “I treated it like a wedding and invited all my friends and family from all over,” he says. “I expected that to be my last solo show, but fortunately it has kept going ever since.”

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Initially, Sawaya was met with resistance from Lego – the company’s first ever contact was a cease and desist. But he eventually went to work for Lego as a master model builder (the people who build the models for Legoland and other official operations). The audition process sounds simple enough, but it requires skill. “They say: here’s a pile of bricks, build a sphere out of it. You build the sphere and they roll it across the table or the floor to see how you did.”

After a short stint with Lego, Sawaya branched out on his own. He’s now a Lego certified professional, a title reserved for those who have made their own businesses from the bricks. “It’s a very good business relationship,” Sawaya says of his dealings with Lego these days. He has to buy the bricks, like anyone else. “I understand that they’re a toy company, and they understand that I’m an artist.”

Is there any tension in making art from a branded product? “Of course,” he says. “I’m subject to the decisions of a third party.” For example, he’s limited to the colours that Lego produces – he gets around this by having an extensive inventory of about 10m bricks between his two studios in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

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Sawaya doesn’t see his exhibition as promotional for Lego – “I don’t call the show the art of Lego,” he points out – but he acknowledges that the accessibility that makes him love the medium so much also equates to something of a monopoly. “It is still a brand, and that is a part of it,” he says. “When you get up very close to every sculpture of mine, you can see the word Lego on every individual piece.”

The Art of the Brick, which has just opened in Melbourne, has been a worldwide hit – there are three or four exhibitions running simultaneously at any given time. “They’re all different, but there are favourites that I’ve replicated because there’s some expectation that certain pieces are going to be there,” he says.

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Sawaya’s most well-known piece is 2007’s Yellow, a sculpture of a man opening his own chest to reveal Lego pieces spilling out – Lady Gaga superimposed her head on to it in the video for her 2014 single G.U.Y. At the Melbourne show it looms large, surrounded by seven smaller-scale versions in different colours.

But there are plenty more. Sawaya doesn’t keep count of how many sculptures he’s created over the past two decades, but estimates that it might be close to a thousand. He’s made a six-metre-long Batmobile and a lifesize replica of Central Perk, the cafe from Friends, with fellow Lego artist Brandon Griffith, which required 1m bricks.

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So what goes into planning a Lego sculpture on this level? “It depends on the piece, of course, but it all starts with the idea,” he says. “There’s some mapping that goes into it – sometimes it’s just drawing it out. Sometimes it’s digital.

“There’s also a lot of research that goes into it: am I doing a piece that people are familiar with? If it’s a replica – let’s say an art history piece – that’s going to require going and looking at the original, gathering photographs and whatnot. If it’s just pouring out of my brain, then it’s more trial and error.”

In Melbourne, Sawaya’s works are animated with kinetics for the first time – 250 glowing skulls move in mesmerising waves against a mirrored wall, with lights and music adding a new dimension. In another room, there’s a lit-up recreation of Formula One driver Lando Norris’s helmet at an 18:1 ratio; in yet another, realistic animals, including a giraffe and a polar bear mother and cub, are projected against their natural habitats in a collaboration with the Australian photographer Dean West.

These creations are undeniably impressive, but peer into some corners of the internet and you’ll find some people asking: is it art? In Sawaya’s mind, at least, it doesn’t matter. “I leave it up to the art critics and students to decide what the art world thinks,” he says. “I’m not striving for it – I’m just doing my own thing.”

• The Art of the Brick is on now at Melbourne Showgrounds.

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Faith Ringgold, who died Saturday at 93, was an artist of protean inventiveness. Painter, sculptor, weaver, performer, writer and social justice activist, she made work in which the personal and political were tightly bonded. And much of that work gained popularity among audiences that didn’t necessarily frequent galleries and museums. This was particularly true of her series of semi-autobiographical painted narrative quilts depicting scenes of African American urban childhood, subject matter that translated readily into illustrated children’s books, of which, over the years, Ringgold published many.

Altogether, hers added up to a landmark-status career. But the art establishment, as defined by major museums, big-bucks auction houses and a few talent-hogging galleries, never knew quite what to do with it, or with her. So they didn’t do anything. No mega-surveys, no million-dollar corporate commissions, no Venice Biennale-type canonizations.

Recently, though, very late in the day, came a serious uptick in attention. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art finally brought Ringgold into its collection with the acquisition of several pieces from early in her career. One of them was a monumental 1967 painting titled “American People Series #20: Die.” It shows a crowd of panicked men, women and children, white and Black, screaming and bleeding, and stampeding in all directions as if under lethal attack from some unseen force.

It’s useful to remember where Ringgold stood in her life at the time she painted the picture. Harlem-born, she’d had a classical art education, was teaching art in public school, and was painting what she herself described as Impressionist-style landscapes. She was also reading James Baldwin, listening to the news, and seeing American racial politics shift from civil rights-era passive resistance to a newly assertive Black power. The country was on red alert, just as it is today, and her art responded to the emergency by turning topical.

In the paintings she called the “American People Series,” of which “Die” was one, white people and Black people appear together, but with skewed power balances made clear. In an early picture, “The Civil Rights Triangle” from 1963, five men in business suits, four Black, one white, form a pyramid, with the white man on top, indicating that to the extent the civil rights movement was white-approved, it was also white-controlled.

In “Die,” the culminating picture in the series, a full-on war has erupted, though one that goes beyond being a clear-cut race war. All the figures in the picture look equally stunned and traumatized by the blood bath they find themselves in.

And for Ringgold at this time, art itself went beyond being the seismic recorder of a culture. It also became a vehicle for path-clearing and ethical advocacy. She organized protests against the exclusion of Black artists from leading museums, and designed posters in support of the Attica inmates and the activist Angela Davis. In a painting series called “Black Light,” she eliminated white pigment from her palette and mixed black into all her colors. By the 1970s she had become convinced that Black liberation and women’s liberation were inseparable causes. In 1971 she painted a mural for what was then the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island.

She knew that the country she lived in was actively, murderously crazy. For an artist to find a voice for that craziness, to get the pitch of the madness right, was unusual and daring. For that artist to be Black and female was more than unusual, and met with pushback from many sources, most of them within the art world itself.

The kind of painting she favored — figurative, storytelling, polemical — was out of fashion with the establishment, which well into the ’60s touted abstraction as the only “serious” aesthetic mode. (Even within Black art circles a debate over whether modern art, Black or otherwise, should admit political content was very much alive.) And her work continued to run against the grain throughout the Minimalist and Conceptualist years. It’s only recently, with figurative painting hugely in vogue, that her work has gained something like market currency.

And over the decades she continued to develop in new directions. Her formal means grew ever more craft-intensive, incorporating weaving, sewing and carving. Her political content drew less from the news and more from art history and her own life. Her determination to share this content, often determinedly Black-positive in tone, with young audiences through 20 published children’s books is all but unique in contemporary art annals.

The full range of these developments was on display in an overdue retrospective, “Faith Ringgold: American People,” organized by the New Museum in 2022. But back to Ringgold at MoMA in 2019.

For the opening of its newly expanded premises, the museum was rehanging, top to bottom, its permanent collection galleries, and “Die,” a relatively recent arrival, was chosen for inclusion. More than that, it was awarded a starring role. It shared an otherwise sparsely installed gallery with a major MoMA attraction, Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a confrontational image of five nude Catalan prostitutes with sliced-up bodies and faces like African masks.

The two paintings were placed cater-corner in the gallery, so you could take them in together at a glance. Both are violent. (The colonialist implications of “Demoiselles” have been much noted, and art historians have read the picture as, among other things, an expression of male sex panic.) Both register as scorchingly political, while leaving their precise politics unclear. Paired at MoMA, they seemed to be visually and conceptually duking it out.

For me, Ringgold — an avowed Picasso fan — won the match. But what really mattered was simply that she was there, smack in the center of Western Modernism’s ground zero institution, and with her most radical image. I admire Ringgold’s later art, much of it materially innovative and expressively buoyant. But it’s the early work, from the pivotal period that produced “Die,” that I keep coming back to.

What she managed to do, in those early paintings, was put aside all the conventional art tools she’d been schooled with, beauty among them (she would later reclaim it), in order to face down the world as it really was, including an art world that had no use for her — a Black woman — and was, in fact, fortressed to keep her and everyone like her out.

Certain artists manage to leap over walls. Picasso was one. And some tunnel under those walls, hit resistance, tunnel some more and, once inside, open a door to let others in. That’s what Faith Ringgold, artist-activist to the end, did.

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One of the questions that arises in my mind is how we can make generative AI art an actual meaningful creative tool that does our bidding, instead of doing its own thing. The ‘slot machine’ effect is very widespread in generative AI tools, and very rarely do you get anything out that resembles the image you had in your mind as you were going in.

I believe generative AI art tools can be an ally for artists, helping us improve workflows, find new ideas and speed up creativity. The generic nature of AI art can work in our favour, as text prompts alone really can’t replace the imagination of artists. This gets to the very heart of what AI means for creativity, and how we manage its use.

Considering the way these systems are trained, it’s no wonder the results of text prompts alone are artistically poor. All of the data is basically condensed into a thick soup of visual data, linked to metadata that explains what the data depicted. Trying to give that data an interesting form through a text prompt alone, is inferior to what you can do with a brushstroke, a few coloured splotches of paint or a detailed sketch or digital painting. Even a quick 3D model says more than a hundred prompts.

I believe that we, as creatives, can steer this generative power in a much more interesting direction by utilising all our existing skills and applying a layer of generative AI where it makes sense for us. By taking a 3D scene 90% of the way, for instance, we can focus much more on storytelling, image composition, aesthetics, and design instead of spending ages in the time-sink that is the last 10% of an art piece or production. 

Do you let the generative process define the folds in the clothing of a character based on a brushstroke or two with your tablet? Or do you let a few 3D gestures define the hairstyle of a sidekick in your game with a swing of your 6 DoF VR controller while the AI takes care of the individual strands of hair?

I would much rather see passionate creatives help shape the creative tools of the future, with generative AI art in the picture, than leave it to prompt-jockeys (sorry about the pun) or corporate money people. I hope my work in this field can help inspire others to help with that.

Of course, my belief that AI art tools can help and not hinder creativity is set against the heated debate around generative AI’s impact on artists, particularly about the aspect of the training data and the issues around how many systems were trained on data from the internet without regard for copyright and without consent.

Systems like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and Sora were all trained on data that was read into the datasets from all available sources. Some argue that it’s direct theft, while others argue that the systems are learning by watching the content, just like we are when we get inspired, read a book, watch a movie, read a news article, or listen to a podcast and form opinions about the world through doing so.

Everyone from acclaimed artist Sacha Jafri to D&D illustrator Greg Rutkowski, whose name has become a style in many AI art systems, have spoken out about the issues with AI. There are also ongoing legal struggles around this very topic, lead by artists like Kelly McKernan whose name has become a prompt, losing her work. The outcome of these is yet to be seen.

Regardless of the outcome of that struggle, generative AI is here to stay. Systems like Adobe’s Firefly are trained on legally sound data (for the most part, outside of the occasional Midjourney or Stable DiffusionAI-generated image that snuck its way into the Adobe Stock library). While in the future AI art tools could be better legislated against and controlled, to protect copyrights, the actual technology is’t leaving us. The challenge, to myself and others, is to find better ways to make AI work for us, not against us.

Martin Nebelong has been experimenting with AI art to enhance his workflow, not replace it. Read his tutorial on how to use AI with Photoshop to paint live adjustments and his seven secret Photoshop AI tricks you need to know; tips for using Firefly and AI in Photoshop creatively.

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