Fueled by nature and tinged by oddity, Brandon Nastanski’s installation art and sculptures provide a glimpse into the mind of this 2000 grad.

Nastanski created his best-known installation art while exploring Boston’s 527-acre Franklin Park. Walking his dog took him to the park several times a day, where he started collecting discarded items. As a refuge for his collection, Nastanski built a lean-to against a rock outcropping, using sticks and twine he found in the park. He hung a picture of nature’s original ombudsman, Henry David Thoreau, at the entrance and dubbed his creation the “Unofficial Franklin Park Research Outpost.”

“Unofficial” because there was no map to find your way — at first, visitors just happened upon it accidentally — and he didn’t seek permission from the Boston Parks and Recreation Department to build the structure. Spurning the officials landed Nastanski and his outpost on the pages of The Boston Globe and local alt weekly The Boston Phoenix. In an editorial, The Globe celebrated the project, while wagging a finger at Nastanski’s bypass of the permits process.

Permit squabbles aside, Nastanski used the structure to house the growing collection of artifacts he’d found wandering Franklin Park: a rusted shopping cart, old bottles, tea tins, candles, a raccoon skull, religious statues and a keyboard, among other items. Nastanski has almost created an altar to the park itself — a form he’s familiar with — as he admits to a history of “almost obsessively” collecting things.

“I’ve always displayed these things around my home, toeing a fine line between a natural-history-type display slash altar-type display,” he said.

As part of his MFA work from the prestigious Parsons Fine Arts in New York City, Nastanski created a miniature speakeasy that was featured in the 2008 Pulse Contemporary Art Fair in New York City. Visitors entered the tiny wood cabin through a trick bookshelf. Inside, Nastanski served drinks amid found furniture and other curiosities.

“Brandon Nastanski’s speakeasy … reminds us of the at-first cozy, then-frankly-spooky cabin in which Jeffery Euginides’s hermaphrodite protagonist realized she was more than just a little girl in Middlesex,” New York Magazine remarked in its write-up of the work, before celebrating the artist’s eccentric sense of humor by adding, “Or is that just us?”

“Getting the public in is a big part of my installations, [especially in] a public piece like that,” Nastanski said.

An assignment from a Parsons professor to create an art piece involving a shelf, liquid and a jar helped him realize the connection between his collecting past and his artistic future.

“A friend pointed out that this should be the easiest project for me,” he said. “I had these things all over my house. Duh.” From there, Natanski began to marry his personal life with his art life, embracing things he’d previously considered outside the realm of his artistic practice.

During his stay in Boston, Nastanski also helped form Esprit de Corps, an art collective dedicated to providing open access to the art world. The group has exhibited many shows in its own basement residence in Jamaica Plains, along with hosting or curating shows at other galleries.

Now living in Richmond, Va., Nastanski has returned to some of the pieces he began at Flagler, working with plaster to create body casts, which he’s now melding with his love of natural history by attempting to create sculptures of “sort of animal-human hybrids.” Whatever work is yet to come, you can be assured it will be equals parts nature, spook and art.

Natanski says his art in and of the Boston woods is still standing more than two years later. The “Unofficial Franklin Park Research Outpost” has withstood the brunt of two northeast winters in its attempt to reach out to the public and bring them more into the world of art.

“I didn’t have permission to do this, but the area was very underused,” Nastanski said. “I like to think that I bettered the space — I cleaned up tons of trash and made a safer place and a destination in the park.”

He recently visited it and said community has helped to maintain the piece.)

In Richmond, e is also working on a project similar to Franklin Park called, “The Unofficial Chimborazo Museum of Curiosities.” You can view his work at: www.brandonnastanski.com.

Shared interests and a chance contact with award-winning author John Bowe have led Diana Briggs, ‘07, down a promising editorial career path with a job working on his upcoming book.

“If someone had told me two months ago that I’d be in Hayes, Kan., I would not have believed them,” she said.

Small-town Kansas is exactly where Diana Briggs found herself this past spring. She spent most of February and March passing through towns in the American West, stopping in each long enough to gather love stories. That’s right, she’s talking to people about love.

Briggs was recruited by Bowe to interview people for his upcoming book, “Mine: Americans Talk About Love.” The book is due out in time for Valentine’s Day 2010.

Bowe is the co-editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs” and author of “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.” It might seem like a leap from slave labor to love, but it was Bowe’s book on that subject that brought him and Briggs together.

After seeing his appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Briggs Googled Bowe and found an interview with him. She e-mailed the interviewer, and a few days later, received an e-mail from Bowe himself. He became a mentor for Briggs, who at the time was working with the Ritz Carlton in an effort to get fair-trade products into the hotel.

“I got a hold of him to see what he was into,” Briggs recalled. “He wanted me to help him with this book he was starting.”

She flew to New York to meet up with Bowe, who promised to make it worth her time if she stuck with him. Next thing she knew, Briggs was on a plane to Colorado, set to return a month or so later. After the Rocky Mountain state, she followed roads to Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

In each town she’d hit up coffee shops, post fliers about the book with her phone number, and wait.

“For the most part it’s a feeling,” Briggs said. “I’d strike up a conversation with someone, tell them what I’m doing, and it turns into the best interview — conversation, really.”

When she ran into trouble in Kansas, where no one seemed to be biting on the love-story line, she just walked into a thrift store and shouted, “Does anyone have any love stories?”

“When you’re yourself with someone, they’ll do anything for you,” Briggs said. “I still talk to a lot of people that I’ve interviewed. I can’t tear myself away to find out what’s happening next in their love lives.”

After a few short weeks at home in Venice, Fla., she was back out on the road again to New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee in a search for more love stories.

Leaving St. Augustine after his time at Flagler College was hard for Scott Nickerson.

“After all the places I lived in my life, St. Augustine was one of the only places where I felt completely at home,” the 1982 communication graduate said. Nickerson missed St. Augustine so much that, after moving he found solace in a Jimmy Buffett song, “Wonder Why We Ever Go Home.” The song took on a special meaning to him, and he went on to found the first official Jimmy Buffett Parrot Head club in 1989.

As the club grew, it morphed into Parrot Heads in Paradise Inc. The organization allowed for the start-up of other clubs under its charter. PHiP gathers Buffett fans for fun and charitable purposes.

“I was bored with my social life, and I wanted to create opportunities to get involved in various charities,” Nickerson said. The first club formed around him in Atlanta and attracted well over 100 initial members. Chapters of the non-profit corporation operate in most states, Canada and Australia. Although not officially affiliated with Jimmy Buffett, the clubs got the go-ahead from his lawyers.

Nickerson, as founder, has been able to meet Buffett a few times. “I got roasted by the Pleasure Island Parrot Head Club a few years ago. A big screen came down and a video of Buffett with a personal message to me was shown. It’s the nicest thing he’s ever done for me personally,” Nickerson recalled.

But this Buffett fan does more than just listen to the music. He used his own musical talents to jam in a tribute band, A1A. After receiving a call from fellow Parrot Head Jeff Pike, they formed a duo in 1992.

“I started playing drums when I was five or so,” Nickerson said. “[Now] I make most of my living playing music.” His music career started in St. Augustine with some Flagler friends, playing with The Bridge Street Kings from 1980-82. Nickerson added, “That’s another story in itself.”

A1A became successful enough to bill itself as The Original Jimmy Buffett Tribute Show. “A1A was the only Jimmy Buffett tribute band at that time, so we ended up having such good luck, business-wise, that we were able to do it full time for a living,” he said. He continued to play with A1A full time until October 2006 and he still plays on request.

For more on his organization, visit http://www.phip.com
Scott Nickerson’s personal site: www.ScottNickerson.com