20-foot-tall pencil on Lake of the Isles lawn gets its annual sharpening

The giant No. 2 pencil also is the subject of a documentary film.

By Alicia Eler Star Tribune

June 3, 2025 — 6:15am

When is a pencil not just a pencil?

When it's on John and Amy Higgins' lawn across from Lake of the Isles, is 20 feet tall and gets an annual public sharpening that draws crowds of more than 1,000 people.

The giant pencil, known as LOTI Pencil, will get its fourth annual sharpening on Saturday afternoon. The event kicks off another Minneapolis summer filled with outdoor art festivals and (hopefully) not a single day below 65 degrees.

This year's pencil sharpening falls on Prince's birthday ― and the pencil is ready.

"Because of leap year, by coincidence, it's going to be another 12 years before Prince's birthday is on a Saturday," John Higgins said. "Maybe one of the pencil crew dances [five people dressed in pencil costumes dance] will be to a Prince song. We've got special commemorative purple Prince pencils. We typically hand out yellow pencils."

To sharpen the giant public artwork, LOTI Pencil creator and wood sculptor Curtis Ingvoldstad made a 4-foot-tall wooden pencil sharpener that he hoists onto the tip with help from his friend John Daugherty, and the pencil gets pointy again. Then, they throw the shavings to the crowd below.

This is a community ritual that's also predicated on losing a bit of the pencil every year.

"The sacrifice of its monumentality is something that marks a year. ... And so this is the sacrifice ― the pencil has to be sharpened otherwise it wouldn't have been used," Ingvoldstad said.

DJ Jake Rudh, a regular on the Current and the founder of First Ave's dance party Transmission, will be spinning tunes at the sharpening. He'll also throw in some Prince tracks.

It's not a pencil sharpening party without the requisite sweet treats from La La Ice Cream and the T-shirt slingshot, where lucky folks can snag one of 60 special commemorative purple T-shirts launched from a giant slingshot.

This year there's also an alphorn duo. And no, that's not a reference to Minnesota's Afton Alps. We are talking the Swiss Alps.

The musical duo of Edina-based Mary and Ralph Brindle will play 12- to 15-foot-long horns, usually used to call sheep, but also to create music in the Swiss Alps. The duo has been playing alphorns together for 35 years and will perform as part of the opening ceremony.

Kids also can join in on the fun. They can get close and ask the pencil questions using a special telephone to translate it all to the pencil.

LOTI Pencil is getting so famous that soon there will be a short documentary about it.

Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker Daniel Straub started doing interviews with John and Amy Higgins and Ingvoldstad three months ago and will be coming to town this week to shoot the documentary.

Straub hasn't yet seen the pencil in person.

He first saw the pencil on someone's Instagram account, just before its ritual sharpening.

"There's something about turning an object to the scale of its source material, like making a pencil the size of a tree, that seemed really funny to me," Straub said by phone from L.A.

He grew more interested in the pencil's philosophical message after learning more from Ingvoldstad and Higgins.

"There was a quote from John where he described sharpening the pencil as 'a promise to do something,' and this yearly ceremony became this renewal of a promise," Straub said. "This isn't just a yearly gathering, it's also a celebration and renewal, but also an acknowledgment of the passage of time."

Someone wanting to make a documentary film about the pencil caught Higgins and his wife by surprise and it really moved them, he said.

The couple have been in their home for more than 17 years, and they'd love to keep up this tradition, but it might be ephemeral in nature, as was the felled tree that created it.

The pencil is different from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's "Spoonbridge and Cherry," which regularly gets its spoon and cherry repainted, is made of aluminum and steel, and could last forever.

The pencil first appeared in June 2022, some five years after the upper canopy of a 180-year-old oak tree fell onto the Higgins' front lawn during a storm.

Rather than just get rid of the wood, the couple decided to preserve it in their own way — by making it into a public work of art in the shape of a No. 2 pencil. They hired Ingvoldstad to craft it, and the rest is history.

For a stationary pencil on a lawn, it's pretty busy.

Last Halloween, the pencil wore a costume for the first time, dressing up as Superman and jamming out to R.E.M.'s song "Superman" on the weekends.

As Higgins told the Star Tribune at the time, "the pencil has a personality, and likes to do stuff regular people do — enjoy sunsets, pose for pictures with people."

And although the pencil is becoming quite well known, for creator Ingvoldstad that's less important than what it means to the community.

"It's super heartwarming and overwhelming when people come up and thank me from their hearts for this because, it's very unexpected in some ways," he said. "But it doesn't change why I do art and it doesn't change me, and it doesn't change anything in my pursuit. It just makes me feel good that other people get to walk away with the inspiration."