Daryl examines the cut clay tiles for the faces of the figures.
David stains the kids house tiles with iron oxide. These will be clear glazed, and used around the borders.
Virginia cuts mirror. Her othe key job right now is transferring the design to the Wedi board.
Willy breaks tile. Usually Marie and David are helping!
Here I am a couple of weeks ago at Killarney Elementary. The kids are working on designs for the mosaic.
Today, Carlo from Crealde is heading to Tampa to get the infamous Wedi board, a kind of light weight cement board that the artists on the mosaic Yahoo groups recommend. Because there is a concern that the Community Center may one day be renovated, we wanted to make the mosaic on removable panels. This addded a level of complications, but also has some benefits: we can bring the panels to the schools rather than always bringing the artists and students to the site. Wedi board has a foam core, which makes it much lighter than traditional backer board. Since I have to carry these panels to the far reacher of the Killarney campus, I thought it would be woirth the effort and expense (3 times more expensive) to get the Wedi Board. I hope it turns out to be good stuff.
Today I am heading to Crealde, then later to the community center.
Here is my wonderful team of volunteer artists at Crealde School of Art: Marie, Virginia, Darryl, Heather, Me, and Willy.
These generous, talented,and fun artists all worked together to take drawings done by the fifth-grade students from Killarney Elementary, reduced and enlarged them, and created a master layout. Here we are rolling out a large sheet of photo backdrop paper, kindly given by Rick Lang and the photo department. We (Virginia mostly!) used a grid to transfer the drawings onto this life-sized (10ft. by 18 ft.) version of the design.
the kids arrive at the site
Peyer Schreyer, director of Crealde, and a long-time Hannibal Square supporter, shows the students the current mural and talks about the chance to build a new, permanent tribute to the history of this community.
Killarney kids were engaged and come up with some great ideas.
Killarney kids spent some time looking at the images and reading the stories in Crealde's Heritage collection for inspiration.
Several project team members with the ideas the kids generated.
Here is the current mural on the wall of the community center in Hannibal Square, the historically African-American neighborhood in Winter Park, Florida. You can see that whne they remodeled the building and added a door and ramp, it went right smack in the middle of the mural, which had been centered on the wall. This basically ruined the current mural, which has also faded and peeled in the Florida sunshine.
After thinking of tiling over the current image, and keeping its design intact, we decided for serveral reasons to start pretty much from scratch, using this mural as inspiration. First, since we are going to a lot of time and effort to make it a permanent tile mosaic, and there is a chance of further renovations or remodelling, we plan to build the mosaic on panels that could be removed if necessary.
Second, because of the door placement, we've decided to move the whole design over to the left, between the two doors, instead.
This close-up of the current mural shows the problems with the paint peeling and the rough stucco texture that made a painted mural difficult. We do want to keep the child-designed quality and simplicity that this mural captured.
This is the sign posted by the old mural. Our new mosaic will portray the same historical moment as this mural did.
