If Broom Collection with Boom doesn’t sweep you off your feet, nothing will. (I’m sorry, the pun was unavoidable.)

David Ireland was known for not giving a hoot about the mediums he used in his pieces hence this work of art made of old brooms in various states of disrepair that he found in the corners of his house. The brooms were actually inherited when he bought his legendary house on 500 Capp Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. The previous owner was an accordion maker and apparently a bit of a pack-rat based purely on how many brooms he had in the house. It was Ireland’s original intention to just gut the house and start from scratch, but the brooms made him see things a little bit differently. Once he collected about 12 or 13 of them, he decided that he would “configure them in some kind of clock formation because it would show you buy a broom, you sweep with it, you wear it out and you discard it and buy another one and do that same thing, so there’s kind of a repetition of assemblage here.” Not that there was much discarding of brooms in this process but that’s beside the point. Ireland was the medium magician and in buying this house, he had everything he needed to make art for the rest of his career. From this point forward, Ireland’s artistic genius would not be swept under the rug (I really can't help it).