It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood!

Lis Healey and Jen Maufrais approached me back in 2018, asking if I'd be willing to help them with a massive project. They had successfully written a grant to the Neighborhood Partnering Program to create a 150' long mosaic on a reviled retaining wall in their neighborhood. They already had a preliminary design and a community of excited people but needed someone to create a game plan and oversee the project.

I was super excited to join their team. I had just finished the "Community Quilt" and wanted to try my community mosaic methods on a larger scale. 

I think the drawing session is a very important first step in the community mosaic process. It's quick, easy, and gets the creative juices flowing. I drew out their wall, with its bare bones design of trees and houses on a rolling landscape, on brown paper. Then, we gathered at the local library and "filled in" many of the large blank spaces with interesting elements – plants, flowers, animals, bicyclists, ufos, you. name it – and reserved real estate for those events on the larger drawing. Note: If you try anything like this at home, it helps to "grid" the entire mural and label each square foot, like section 1A, 1B, etc. It's the only way to organize it later when the whole thing is in pieces!

Next came the tile making. We rolled slabs and used our drawings to sketch out and cut our tiles. We also made a lot of bark and leaves for our big trees, as well as a good amount of random shapes to add interest and texture. I taught the first workshop, and Lis taught the remainder. She rolled A LOT of clay!

Then Glazing! And a Pandemic! After the first glaze workshop we could no longer gather due to COVID. Lis made glazing kits and personally delivered tiles all over her neighborhood so that people could finish putting color on their pieces. Blackshear Elementary, where Lis teaches art, closed its doors and we lost access to its kiln. This was the year that we started wondering if this project would ever be done...But eventually all the pieces were fired (primarily by Lis) and delivered back to me for assembly. 

The mural assembly is may favorite part. Discovering all the tiles, lovingly packed by Lis and Jen, and sorting them into a composition, was delightful work. My mind loves the process of creating order out of the randomness – of making all the tiles exist in the same imaginary world. I sorted, cut and mounted all of the ceramic pieces on fiberglass mesh, cut the mesh into the aforementioned "grid" and labeled each section before returning the entire mural, meshed and boxed, to Lis and Jen.

Then we started the glass workshops. All of the unfilled space on the mesh was slotted for glass background. I had labeled what color glass went where, so during a workshop a  person received a square with some ceramic glued to it already and random empty spots labeled "blue," "green" etc. Then they would cut and glue the appropriate glass to that spot. After all of the mesh was filled in with glass, the entire mural came back to me again!

Transferring the mural back and forth was a new, sometimes nerve wracking experience. The Southern Oaks mural budget only allotted so much for an artist fee (me), so Lis and Jen were on their own through many of the workshops. Fortunately these women are powerful creators and organizers. I was amazed by their dedication and endurance throughout this project.

Installation took a couple months. It was bad timing that it coincided with the heat of summer which makes the thinset and grout misbehave! Here are my kids and their friend, totally beat after a day of grouting with me!

Tired, hot, dirty kids!

Mostly I installed the mural by myself, though Lis and Jen were able to come out and help some, as well as artist and neighbor Nancy Barnes. And towards the end I had an army of neighborhood volunteers help with the sealing and fussy cleaning!

Lis grouting the “4th of July Parade” section

The neighborhood was helpful and present in many ways during installation. I will never forget, when a sudden squall came in from the South one afternoon, Sally Jo came running out of her house with a tarp crying, "The Mural!" and helped me cover the still wet thinset. Becky brought me gallons of iced tea. Another kind person brought donuts and still others brought lunch sometimes. During one stressfull week, during which a mentally ill man became aggressively obsessed with me and the mural, the neighbors organized an hour by hour mural watch. I literally had someone keep me company, all the time, for the entire week! Never have I felt so appreciated and cared for while making an art project.

Finally Southern Oaks has a beautiful, beloved mural that over 200 people from the neighborhood had their hands in making. I was honored to be the director of this project. Southern Oaks is a truly a delightful community of wonderful people, and this art reflects that.

“Lis and Jen’s Houses” (detail).

The mural is WAY too long to photograph properly. Check back soon for a video link. Also, for more information about this project, check out the cool website Lis created, detailing the journey! http://somosaic.org

The Community Quilt

In November, 2019, my colleague, Melissa Knight, and I were excited to dedicate a new piece of public art at the Rosewood Zaragosa Neighborhood Center in Austin, TX. "The Community Quilt” was a mosaic that we designed and fabricated with over 100 members of the Rosewood Community, funded in part by a City of Austin Cultural Initiative grant, local businesses, friends, and other private donors.

This piece exemplified the community building power of art. Through a series of workshops, free and open to the public, we designed the mosaic and made hundreds of tiles (which I then assembled into the final piece). People of many cultures, languages, and ages created art together, talked about their lives and changing communities, shared visual and philosophical ideas, and most importantly, had a lot of fun! I can’t tell you how many people accidentally discovered the workshops while visiting the neighborhood center for one of its many services, decided to sit down “for five minutes to see what it was all about,” then exclaimed, four hours later, “I am having the best time of my life! I never knew I was an artist!”

I am thrilled with both the process and the final aesthetic of this piece and cannot wait to do more projects like this one. Check out the photos (courtesy of David Comeau) below that illustrate how we made the “Community Quilt.” And, hear my interview with Bob Dailey on KOOP radio!

At the first workshop, we all drew quilt patterns, often inspired by our culture, or our family memories. We also perused a lot of quilting and weaving books to think about patterns and how they are organized.

Many people alternated between working on separate images that reflected their own world, and interacting with the rest of the groups’ patterns.

Our second and third workshops were all about tile making!

We had many templates and designs people could choose from to make their tiles, though people were also free to create their own shapes and designs.

After the tiles dried for a couple weeks we could hold the glazing workshops.

After the glazing workshops I fired everyone’s tiles.

Then, I started to assemble the tiles into the larger mosaic, using our original design as a map.

Since this had to be a free standing artwork, we had to dig and pour concrete footings.

The mosaic was porcelain tile, mounted to cementitious board with cement thinset, and framed with decking. These frames were then screwed into the larger steel frame.

First, we advertised the workshops all over town.

We were challenged to try and borrow from, respond to, and connect our patterns with our neighbors’ patterns.

After the drawing session I took everyone’s patterns and collective drawings and created a final “working” design for the quilt… I say “working” because I knew this design would serve only as a map that would guide, not dictate, future tile making.

Both the tile making workshops were fun filled, busy days. We made A LOT OF TILE!

So many hands made this mosaic!

We built a steel frame to hold the mosaic and welded it to the footings.

Installation Day!

Finally the mosaic is installed!

Eiler's Park Public Art Sculpture

My husband, Sun McColgin, and I are in the process of creating a public art sculpture to mark the entrance of soon to be renovated Eiler's Park, a sweet little pocket park next to Deep Eddy Pool, Austin, Texas.

This renovation has been long desired by community members who remember Eiler's Park's rich history as a riotous, beautiful place, once part of a larger recreational area which included Deep Eddy Pool. The Pool and the Park date back to the turn of the century, when Mr Eilers purchased the property, and turned a fun, but dangerous current (the original "Eddy") into the city's first concrete pool, eventually adding zip lines that careened playful folks into the river, a fifty foot diving board, and giant slides. Travelers camped at the recreational area while visiting Austin, and many locals made the long trek to the pool (then considered in the "country") on hot days. During the roaring twenties, Eilers transferred management of Deep Eddy Recreational area to a former circus producer, and the park's atmosphere became even wilder. Stories abound about a famous diving horse who would leap from the diving platform. Apparently people could find their whiskey, swim and have a wonderful time at this park. A torrential flood in the 1930s destroyed most of the park and filled the pool with debris, but eventually the pool and park reopened, though with a more subdued character.

Though no one is alive today who remembers the wild twenties at Deep Eddy Pool, many do remember another giant slide at the playground at Eiler's Park, one which would even set an adult's heart leaping. Over the years, this and other amenities disappeared, and the eventual separation of Pool and Park carved up the once expansive recreational area into small, cloistered tiers that unfortunately rendered the park both less useable and less visible. Today everyone knows about Deep Eddy Pool, but few even are aware of the Park's existence. Neighbors, local business owners, community members, Austin Parks and Recreation, and Art In Public Places have now joined forces to renovate the park and bring back some of that former magic. Sun and I are fortunate to have this opportunity to make art for this project!

Most of the visual components of our design are featured under the "Abundance" section of this website, but here are most of our design materials, recently approved, for you to peruse.

We will be fabricating "Abundance" this year!

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ADS MOSAICS

Finally! An updated website, blog included, so I can share newer work, and offer a more in depth look at some of my recent projects.

AUSTIN DISCOVERY SCHOOL MOSAICS

As chronicled in the "Community Building Through Art" section of this website, one of my recent projects has been creating mosaics with the entire student body and general community of Austin Discovery School to adorn the buildings on their new campus.

I thank the ADS art teachers Juliet and Hannah, for accommodating and spearheading the first component of this project: making ceramic tiles. Every ADS student made at least one tile, sometimes a leaf or bird or insect that would easily integrate into a tree mosaic, but often a random, whimsical expression of themselves.... I fired everything from slices of pizza to eyeballs to "Find me on Pinterest" tiles.

I thank fellow artists Aly Winningham and Courtney Arte for helping direct many many community volunteer sessions, where kids and adults alike came and assembled the plant mosaics, collage style, with this random assortment of tiles. Sometimes it seemed like an impossible organizational feat to make sense of the chaotic display of expressions, but in the end I think we created a riotous celebration of diversity and independence.

So far four of the eight mosaics have been installed. At the end of this month the art teachers at ADS are hosting a "mosaic blitz" during which the entire student body will work on and hopefully finish the remaining four mosaics over three days. Stay tuned for the video!