Over this past weekend, we were able to officially install the Emmaus Mosaic Project! Although we have a few steps left, we really wanted to share some of the images captured from this weekend. Thanks to Katie Gustafson, Jeff Shreck, Ross Kirk and Jill Schrader for these pictures!
Welcome to another progress update on the Emmaus Mosaic Project! We have a lot of exciting news to share regarding successful and upcoming fundraisers, the preparation of the library wall, and the installation dates! FUNDRAISERSOn December 5th we held our second Drink and Draw fundraiser at the Lower Macungie Community Center. The event was another success with about forty participants creating a winter landscape! A huge thank you to Blick Art Supplies in the South Mall for donating paint, and to all volunteers and participants that made this a successful event! Us art teachers worked together on a group painting that will be up for auction at our next fundraiser... ORIGINAL ARTWORK RAFFLE! This will be taking place during the Emmaus High School Spring Musical, Mary Poppins! At each showing from March 18th to March 22nd, you will have the opportunity to purchase raffle tickets to win original artwork created by EPSD art teachers. There will be a variety of artworks up to win, from paintings to ceramics and more! The great aspect about this fundraiser is that you will be supporting multiple artistic ventures at once: the EHS Drama Club and the Emmaus Mosaic Project! Here are the dates and times of the show: Wednesday, March 18th @ 7 p.m. Thursday, March 19th @ 7 p.m. Friday, March 20th @ 7 p.m. Saturday, March 21st @ 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, March 22nd @ 2 p.m. We will be set up outside of the auditorium before, during and after each performance! Tickets for the play are on sale in the main office of Emmaus High School. If you cannot make the show, you can still come to buy raffle tickets! PARGING IS COMPLETE! Our biggest obstacle in this process has been preparing the library wall for a mosaic of this size. The library has a brick surface, which is rather uneven. A process Zagar employs, called "parging", includes applying a concrete layer on top of brick to even out the surface, making the mosaic process easier and safer. Not long ago, the parging of the library wall was completed! The surface is now prepped and ready for our drawing to go up, and ultimately, the mosaic itself! Here are some photos of the parging: INSTALLATION Dates! With the parging complete, we have two more major steps: the drawing and the installation of the mosaic! Students from Drawing and Painting 2 at Emmaus High School will be aiding in the drawing process on March 12th and 13th. Isaiah Zagar will be arriving to help us install the mosaic on April 11th, 12th, 18th, and 19th!
Please stay tuned for a date/time of the mosaic's opening. This has been a labor of love throughout the past two years and we are all very excited to share this project with the community of Emmaus! Lower Macungie Middle School was host to Clay Night, a tile-making fundraiser, on April 24th. Art teachers Kathy Thomas and Ken Glenville led the fundraiser, which was a fun and productive night that generated even more interest and material for the project! Over forty students, adults and LMMS faculty members participated, creating tiles both for the mosaic and to take home. Additional Clay Days were held for those who could not attend Clay Night. We can't wait to see these tiles put to use in our upcoming installation!
On March 7th, we had a second opportunity to continue our collaboration with artist Isaiah Zagar! We completed sketches of some possible designs for the piece at our last meeting. From there, we determined that there are a few elements of Emmaus we want largely represented on the mosaic: the Triangle, a train, the movie theater doors, the Moravian Church, and the Library. Students at EHS, guided by Regina Oster, Tracy Maley, Lisa Caruso, Ginger Coleman and Katie Gustafson, worked on creating to-scale drawings of these five elements and re-developing them further in both clay and glass. The results are beautiful vignettes representative of the collaboration between us and Zagar, and the style of the final piece. After Isaiah departed, we were left with a clear direction: to combine the five main elements into one cohesive composition. Working together, we created what will be the final, overarching visual of the piece! Moving forward, the high school teachers and students will continue to work on those vignettes. At the Elementary schools, teachers will be working with students to create painted tiles of a theme. For example, Shoemaker Elementary will be creating tiles all representing faces. Finally, we were able to set the dates for the installation of our piece! Beginning June 7th and 8th, we will work with Isaiah to begin the mosaic. Isaiah is then departing for a trip to Mexico, so we will have to wait until June 30th and July 1st to finish the grouting and paint in the lines. We will have the whole wall complete by noon on July 1st! fundraising We had a VERY successful fundraiser at the Lower Macungie Community Center the night of March 7th. Almost fifty people attended our Ladies' Drink and Draw Night that was organized by Anne Kukitz and Dave Willett. Each attendee left with a finished painting of poppies in a field, and all proceeds raised are going straight to this project. Our next fundraiser begins tonight at the Emmaus High School: an Art Raffle! Throughout each showing of the EHS Drama Club's Beauty and the Beast, you will have the opportunity to purchase raffle tickets (6 for $5) that could win you original artwork by us, the East Penn art teachers! This fundraiser will run from today, Tuesday March 18th until Sunday, March 23rd. We will draw and notify winners by phone on Sunday, March 23rd! Another ongoing fundraiser are the beautiful Commemorative Tiles. Ceramics teacher Lisa Caruso created only 100 tiles from a single mold commemorating the project, and you can purchase one for $25. The mold will then be broken, so these are limited editions. Check them out below! Expect more updates soon with work that the elementary schools are putting together, the preparation of the wall with concrete board, and for more fundraising opportunities. If you have tile or other materials to donate, contact us and we'll let you know where you can drop it off!
Welcome to the Emmaus Mosaic and Mural's first blog update! Last month, Isaiah Zagar visited Emmaus to look at the site of our community piece and to sketch ideas with us. Our town has such a rich history, it was easy to come up with sources of inspiration for the subject matter of the piece! Isaiah spoke to us a lot about his process, which is very spontaneous and opportunistically driven. Despite him having a specific system for how to mosaic a wall, he rarely goes into a project with an exact plan about what the piece will end up looking like. Due to this, our sketching session was more to generate an overall feel of what we think the visual should be. We all focused on a phrase that Isaiah had said, which really stuck out to us: "an abstraction of a map of our community". Here are some of our designs! Can you spot our inspirations within our sketches? We left the day with a very clear sense of where to go from here!
Stay tuned for information regarding fundraisers and more ways for you to get involved! Spread the word! |
AuthorSEast Penn School District Art Teachers Archives
April 2015
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