Michael McGinnis is a sculptor, SRJC instructor, pastel artist, home builder, woodworker, furniture designer, husband, father and the inventor of one of the coolest toys in the world, the Superplexus.

The Superplexus is a handmade, three-dimensional spherical labyrinth, built to challenge the limits of your manual dexterity and spatial understanding. You have to maneuver a wooden marble through its multi-planar hairpin turns, spirals and staircases, and successful completion requires a minimum of 425 turns of the sphere. It’s set inside a 36-inch diameter acrylic sphere that allows you to tilt it in any direction to guide the marble. The entire track laid out on a straight line is 31 feet longer than a football field. Each Superplexus’ difficulty level can be customized.

As a high school junior, McGinnis had to design a board game for an art class he was taking. McGinnis never won any of the board games he and his 11 siblings played, so he decided to instead come up with a 3D maze game.

His creation, dubbed the Perplexus, is a 3D labyrinth with dozens of features to intrigue, infuriate and entertain you as it sits coyly on your coffee table, inviting just one more attempt. Three versions offer different levels of difficulty, with a fourth to be unveiled at a toy fair this fall.

After 30 years of honing his original idea, his doggedness has paid off big time. McGinnis has sold almost 1.5 million toys worldwide, won eight major awards in the toy world and the royalties have enabled him to work “normal” hours for the first time in his adult life. The large-format sculptures are an offshoot of his toy, Perplexus, and have become his primary form of fine art.

McGinnis, 49, is most comfortable in his workshop, behind his snug home in Santa Rosa’s historic west end. The shop contains multiple large-format versions of his 3D sculptures in various stages of construction, five of which have been commissioned by collectors and museums from around the world.

“From my standpoint, the Superplexus work and the Perplexus work have been a part of my life since I was a teenager,” McGinnis said. “And this may sound odd; I felt guilty or somehow not right because of the way that people in the art world might judge whether this should be considered art, and for me it’s always been my greatest passion and in a sculptural sense. And so it took me a long time to get to the point where I realized, you know what, I don’t need to worry about what people think about what I’m doing–I’m just going to do it.”

As a young college student, McGinnis attended SRJC where sculptor John Watrous saw his potential and took him under his wing. McGinnis was a reluctant student and wary of Watrous’ expectations. “I didn’t know just how playful you could be as an artist…I didn’t have an idea that an artist was someone experimenting all of the time and playing around with a unique idea. John and I became immediate friends and I ended up working there as his student assistant.”

Being born into a family of artists has helped shape McGinnis’ worldview of what’s important in life: relationships and family. When asked about the role his wife Becky played in his decision to shepherd the toy’s development over a sometimes exhausting and impoverished 30-year period, McGinnis quickly answered, “Becky has been a firm believer from day one, in that there was a value in what I’m doing, and it being a value for us as a family–it’s not a waste of time to do these things.”

Since being invited to teach at SRJC by Watrous and Max Hein, the art department chair of the time, McGinnis has taught at SRJC for 23 years. He studied art in the very rooms where he teaches today. After settling into teaching, Watrous told him that he should consider getting into computers. McGinnis had never used a computer before working at SRJC.

The digital graphics program at SRJC was in its formative stages. “I took John’s summer program, used a Mac for the first time, and from there I made my first art piece…with light projected onto objects. Since then I’ve done many different installation pieces with three dimensional forms that change color and form with light,” McGinnis said.

Whatever the latest technology is, McGinnis into it. “It’s just so much better to stay up to the minute with it than to fall behind. As soon as any system upgrade happens, I get the newest one.”

The computer has also become an indispensable part of the development of the Superplexus. During the many years it has taken to bring the toy to the marketplace, each new prototype took hundreds of hours, with all of the loops, turns and interlocking planes shaped by hand from fine layers of wood. It also meant going back to the drawing board with Computer Aided Design (CAD) designers hired to help create the eventual mold designs for the production factory.

After receiving orders for the large-format sculptures, McGinnis realized he would be the best person to design the track layouts using CAD. Biting the bullet, McGinnis learned CAD and is now designing all of the elements for the newest iterations of Superplexus.

“Sculpture has always taken advantage of technology–whatever the technology is. At one time it was metal tools to be able to carve into stone or into wood.” With the advent of industrial materials came sculptors eager to use them. Sheets of plywood, a brand new substance, allowed sculpture to be made with planar forms.

“Art is usually at the forefront of new ways to communicate and new ways to look at things,” McGinnis said. “It’s a critical element in our beings as humans and yet, it’s ignored. It’s something which isn’t considered valuable.”

McGinnis said that although knowing math and English is important, everybody should have good visual acuity, to be able to judge what they’re seeing and if they’re being exploited with visual communication. “If you really want to be a creative thinker and a critical thinker, you also have to have critical, visual skills. Ultimately, art provides a better world for people.”

McGinnis described a dream he’d had about a gigantic Japanese Superplexus. In the dream, an organization had built a gigantic structure, a human-sized Superplexus to play in, climbing in and sliding through.

“I had nothing to do with it, but there it was,” McGinnis said. “I’ve always had this idea I would build gigantic ones, say 25 feet tall. Building a huge piece would be great.” McGinnis described a vision of a potential gallery show: “I want to build a lot of scales and designs; there could be some that are 12-inch diameter, some that are 24 inch, some that are three feet and everything in between and really have a world of Superplexus designs.”