When is a pencil not just a pencil?

When it’s on John and Amy Higgins’ lawn across from Lake of the Isles, is 20ft (6m) tall and gets an annual public sharpening that draws crowds of more than 1,000 people.

The giant pencil, known as Loti Pencil, got its fourth annual sharpening on June 7. The event kicked off another Minneapolis summer in the United States, filled with outdoor art festivals and not a single day below 65°F (18°C).

This year’s pencil sharpening fell on Prince’s birthday.

“Because of leap year, by coincidence, it’s going to be another 12 years before Prince’s birthday is on a Saturday,” John said before the event. “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 4ft-tall (1.2m) 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 radio station and the founder of First Ave’s dance party Transmission, spun tunes at the sharpening. He also threw in some Prince tracks.

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 played 12- to 15ft-long (3.6m-4.6m) 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 performed as part of the opening ceremony.

Kids also joined in on the fun. They got close and asked 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 and Ingvoldstad three months ago and came to town early June to shoot the documentary.

Straub 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 LA.

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

“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 John and his wife by surprise and it really moved them, he said.

The couple has 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 aluminium 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 John 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.” – By ALICIA ELER/The Minnesota Star Tribune/Tribune News Service