New Hampshire domino artist Lily Hevesh builds a domino formation while posing for a portrait for her Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024. After 25 hours over eight days, the time had come for Lily Hevesh to topple 15,000 dominoes. With a soft flick of her finger, Hevesh stood bac.
.. She’s spent 10 days painstakingly constructing her art installation - and now she’s about to destroy it with the flick of a finger.
On Saturday, D.C.’s National Building Museum will see 100,000 dominoes topple in a colorful feat of engineering.
The installation - made with sleek, straight-edged neon tiles built for knocking down rather than the traditional dotted kind - features elaborate field constructions and rarer domino “tricks,” such as giant collapsing walls and fragile domino towers, all connected by a fluid chain of evenly spaced slabs. The chain reaction of metronomic tck-tck-tcks is expected to last eight full minutes and promises to be supremely satisfying. The mastermind behind it is Lily Hevesh, a 25-year-old domino artist and artist-in-residence at the museum, who has garnered fame in the international domino community and beyond for her massive, inventive creations.
She and her team of nine international builders have crafted the 50-by-50-foot trail with the ultimate goal of having it crash down in carefully calibrated chaos for the exhibit’s grand finale. “When you see the effects that the dominoes are creating by having that motion and kinetic energy, that’s where I think the real beauty of domino art comes out,” Hevesh told The Post. Hevesh is building all this inside the museum’s Great Hall, where anyone can stop by and see the team in action as they construct the domino field.
While they’re separated from the public by a short, white picket fence to protect the domino art from any unintentional toppling, members of the public can get up close and personal to the different sections and their builders. Domino artists build out the Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024. A detail of a domino formation at the Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024.
One of the goals of the exhibition is to create the world’s tallest domino tower. There is a sense of precarity inherent to the scene: “More people, more manpower, more dominoes,” per Hevesh, also mean more risk. Pieces that are even a millimeter off can wreck an otherwise mesmerizing topple.
Yet the workers add pieces at a rate much faster than one would expect for a job requiring such precision. Each tile is perfectly spaced and angled so that it collapses onto the next - and the next, and the ..
. - as intended. Aileen Fuchs, president and executive director of the National Building Museum, said it’s been stressful for her to watch the build in progress.
She and the museum’s security guards constantly wonder if the dominoes are too close to the barriers shielding them, or if someone might knock them accidentally. But she also finds peace in watching Hevesh and her domino builders at work. “I find it contemplative.
There’s something incredibly peaceful and mesmerizing about the specificity of where you have to place each one,” she said. Fuchs first found Hevesh through a friend, who recommended she check out the YouTube sensation’s Hevesh5 videos. Conway Myers 5, puts dominoes in a formation during a class at the Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024.
“My kids were mesmerized. I was mesmerized,” Fuchs said. From that point last summer, it had been a goal to get the artist to the museum, where Fuchs hoped she would build something spectacular.
The residency is Hevesh’s biggest self-led project to date, and the culmination of years of practice and innovation. Hevesh first found her calling in dominoes as a child. When she was 9, her grandparents gifted her a 28-piece set of traditional dominoes.
The New Hampshire native loved watching them collapse and soon found a robust (and growing) community of domino content creators on YouTube. These people, many of them in Europe, would collaborate with one another to build bigger and bigger projects. Their channels would grow in popularity as more people tuned in to their satisfying topples - a harbinger of the ASMR fads that would follow in the late 2010s, when viewers turned to sensorially satisfying videos to trigger a “tingling” feeling.
Hevesh decided she wanted to be a part of that online community. She found herself a good set of toppling dominoes - which are still relatively rare in the United States - and began to teach herself the basics. Almost immediately, she got to work posting videos of her own creations at age 10, in 2009.
Though her account, Hevesh5, was anonymous for the first six years of its existence - leading many to believe that Hevesh was a middle-aged man, as many in the domino community tended to be - she has since made a name for herself as a young, record-breaking domino artist. Fifteen years and 505 videos later, her channel has amassed 4.1 million followers and 1.
8 billion views. Hevesh’s work has also been featured on “Saturday Night Live,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Today” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden.” In 2016, she had her first brush with the silver screen when Will Smith toppled her domino installation for the film “Collateral Beauty.
” Hevesh has also traveled the world for her dominoes, taking part in collaborative projects and international events like the World Domino Collective in the Netherlands. She attended college at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute near Albany, N.Y.
, where she studied design, innovation and society, but dropped out after a year to pursue dominoes full time. She was receiving paid commissions for her work at that point, and it was through practicing the art that she picked up the physics, geometry and design skills she needed to be successful in her craft. Dominoes stand lined up at the Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024.
This week, Hevesh broke the world record for the tallest domino structure with a tower more than 33 feet tall, inspired by the Building Museum’s 75-foot classical columns. Guinness World Records witnesses and surveyors were on hand for the topple to prove it was a free-standing structure. In a public art project like “Destination Domino,” where museum visitors are encouraged to watch Hevesh and her team operate in real time, the stress of getting it just right is multiplied.
“It’s a little more pressure, because now we’re like, ‘Oh, we need it to work. Because there’s people watching and it’s a live event,’” she said. Like many in the domino world, though, Hevesh has found comfort in surrendering to the risk and knowledge that mistakes “happen all the time,” knowing that things can be built again, and better.
“It definitely goes from super meditative - like, I’m in my own zone - and really relaxed, to the other end of the scale where I’m like, ‘I’m so nervous right now, I really hope I don’t drop a domino,’” she said. Hevesh doesn’t have a unified theory for why so many millions of people are drawn to her work, though she cites the novelty and ASMR-like experience as potential reasons. Fuchs, as a fan herself, thinks it may have something to do with the sense of amazement that comes with watching such carefully planned chain reactions unfold, as if by magic.
Perhaps, too, the appeal resides in watching something fall apart, but in a planned, desired and even beautiful way. The toppling tiles provide the illusion of control over gravity. They hint at the possibility of impending collapse being a little less scary.
After all, it is only when the last domino falls in a display of “beautiful destruction” that Hevesh finds her pieces have truly reached completion. “When you topple a domino project,” said Hevesh, “that’s the pure or true domino art.” New Hampshire domino artists Lily Hevesh, right, and Stephen Burton stand in a cherry picker up to the top of a domino formation at the Destination Domino special exhibition at the National Building Museum on July 13, 2024.
One of the goals of the exhibition is to create the world’s tallest domino tower..
