Take an early winter walk along the downtown stretch of the Lansing River Trail and you will find that the year 2022 left Lansing with a quietly spectacular gift.
A swirling, 650-square-foot mosaic, newly installed on the south side of the Shiawassee Street Bridge over the Grand River, is unlike any piece of public art in the city.
Thousands of tiles, made by artists and non-artists alike from all over greater Lansing in the past two years, were shaped by one woman’s vision into a teeming, gleaming city on a wall.
It took more than two years for Lansing artist Alexandra Leonard and her loyal assistant, artist Bob Rose, to see this ambitious project to the end. Taking advantage of late October sunshine, the pair grouted the last of about 2,600 tiles just before the snow began to swirl.
As winter sets in, both artists are reflecting on the project of a lifetime.
“It feels like post-partum tile depression,” Leonard joked.
The experience has changed their lives.
Rose talks about the project like Moses returning from the mountain.
“You’d get to see someone’s story on every tile,” Rose said. “After a while, you started to feel like the keeper and holder of their moment in time. It’s the most emotionally deep, profound project you could imagine.”
In the 2020s, public art is everywhere, tugging at your attention with uninvited imagery, intrusive messages and rah-rah agendas. Love Lansing. Choose hope. Be yourself. We can unite. Think different. Shop local. There’s an almost Orwellian feeling in many public spaces, a sense that you can’t be left alone with your thoughts.
The Shiawassee Bridge mosaic is different. In microcosm or macrocosm, it holds a mirror to the community. Its grand, dynamic design and granular detail suck you in.
The more you look, the more you see — spaceships, cacti, bicycles, turtles, disembodied lips, a mysterious doorway, a man in a canoe, a pair of jellyfish.
Every tile has a story. The jellyfish are labeled “Sir” and “M’Lady,” carved into the clay by a recently married couple. On their honeymoon, one of them was stung by a jellyfish.
There are broken dishes from local restaurants, fragments of the Eckert Power Station and shards of beloved Christmas ornaments that will shine on for another century, thanks to the wall.
Many of the tiles convey messages, at all levels of literacy.
“This wall is permanently etched with people’s feelings,” Rose said “Whether they are silly or quite deep, they’re all there.”
There are verses from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and a tile with “I love mommy” scrawled in one corner. There are messages of hope and inspiration, memorials to loved ones and a tile that simply reads “2020 SUCKS.”
“This is our time capsule for the pandemic,” Rose said. “They’re still finding mosaics in Pompeii. Someday, somebody’s going to look at this and say, ‘Oh yeah, there was a pandemic 50 years ago.’”
Leonard has always been a sharply self-critical artist, but surrendering her urge for total control to the chaos of a community has changed her mind about many things.
“I honestly don’t have anything negative to say about how this has turned out,” she said, shaking her head as if she never thought she would say those words. “I just love all these tiles people made.”
In 2019, Bob Rose saw a YouTube video about a dazzling mosaic on a staircase in Rio de Janeiro with 2,000 tiles from 60 countries — and the setting for the sun-kissed, sexy video of Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful.” The creator of Escaderia Selarón was Chilean artist Jorge Selarón.
Rose, 64, was born in Essexville, near Bay City, Michigan. He worked for the state for about 30 years as an engineering technician until he got the bug to “color outside the lines” late in life and started drawing and painting in his 40s.
It struck him that a Lansing version of Escaderia Selarón might be an ideal project to pitch for an Arts Impact Grant from the city of Lansing. The $75,000 grants go to “a permanent creative structure” that “enhances a neighborhood’s appearance and kindles community engagement” in the city.
Although Rose has had several shows around the state, and has done sculpture as well, he had never worked with tiles.
But he knew just the person to call. A few years earlier, Rose met Leonard, a ceramic artist and professional tile installer, at a local arts event. He already admired her artistry and passion for ceramic work, but after working closely with her for months on the bridge mosaic, under often trying circumstances, he misses no chance to rhapsodize about an artist nearly 30 years his junior.
“It’s astonishing to see the power and maturity and strength in this human that I know, Alexandra Leonard,” he said. “The size of the project, the brainpower required to keep the concept going, with all these people involved — I love this person. She’s taught me so much it’s beyond belief.”
Leonard, 35, grew up in Mason and has lived in Lansing since 2012. Her mother still has tiny tea sets and other objects young Alexandra made of out of sculpting clay and fired in the kitchen oven.
At Mason High School, she plunged into a welter of activities, from marching band to musical theater to running, leaving her little time to pursue art.
By the time she graduated in 2005 and went to Kalamazoo College, she added psychology and anthropology to her interests. Struggling to settle on a major, she took a pottery class on a whim.
“I almost had this moment of Zen,” she said. “As you’re centering clay on a wheel, you have to be very focused. Look away and you lose it.”
She picked art as a major.
“I thought, here is something it would be pretty hard for me to get sick of,” she said. “Anything else I wanted to tackle — world problems or whatever it might be — I could fit into art in some way.”
Her life was heading toward a grand fusion of solitary art and community-based projects, but she didn’t know that yet.
Eight months of studying abroad in Nairobi, Kenya, working with Sudanese refugee children, taught her the value, and the fragility, of a community. The 2007 presidential election in Nigeria was marred by widespread fraud, voter intimidation and street violence that left over 1,500 people dead. Leonard saw some of the chaos outside the window of her host family’s home.
It was the best and worst time of her life.
“I felt so sad for this place I had fallen in love with, watching it fall apart, feeling for the people I got to know there,” she said.
While in lockdown in Kenya, watching deadly chaos unfold on the street, she got a call from home, informing her that a close childhood friend had died.
In the aftermath of multiple sorrows, art became therapy.
Her senior year exhibition was a set of ceramic sculptures of human bodies and heads she named “Things Fall Apart,” after the classic 1958 novel by Chinua Achebe chronicling Nigerian tribal life before and after colonialism.
Ceramic art schooled her in the delicate dance of control and surrender. “You create this art, but you subject it to fire in the kiln,” she said. “Things can break. Things can explode. It goes through the process of heating and it comes out changed. I think that process, the discovery, is beautiful.”
After graduating, Leonard moved back to Lansing and took a rest from art. She worked at the now-defunct Travelers’ Club Restaurant and Tuba Museum. She resolved to build a sustainable, long-range artistic career, and became a financial adviser for about five years.
In 2013, she visited the Philadelphia Magic Gardens, by prolific Philadelphia mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar. There are over 200 Zagar mosaics in Philadelphia.
“He’d make huge-scale installations using garbage — broken tiles, broken bottles, bicycle tires, figurines,” Leonard said. “It was the coolest art I had ever seen.” It also showed Leonard that mosaics could work in colder climes than Brazil’s.
She researched methods and materials and participated in workshops with Zagar.
“He’s in his 80s, up on a ladder, hauling buckets of cement, with a smile permanently etched on his face,” Leonard recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, maybe this is what you look like when you get to do the thing you love your whole life.’”
In 2016, a new mentor, Paul Torok of Heritage Flooring, taught her how to tile bathrooms and kitchens.
As her experience grew, she saw a path to a sustainable art career, designing custom tile installations.
Soon, she would create the mother of all custom installations.
As soon as Leonard won the Arts Impact Grant in February 2020, she set to work on a final design.
She is amazed that the final product resembles the early drawings and notes she scribbled out on graph paper that spring.
Leonard is reluctant to discuss her vision for the work. While she and Rose were working on the wall, people often stepped back, surveyed the panorama and asked them a deceptively simple question — “What is it?”
Usually, she threw the ball back at them, asking “What do you see?”
“I want to keep the mosaic as open to community participation and enjoyment as possible,” she said.
“It means so many different things to people, and that’s great,” Rose said. “There are no wrong answers. It’s art.”
When pressed, Leonard admits that a love of nature, and fascination with natural processes, played an important role in her design. Roughly patterned by color, the tiles ride undulating waves and hint at geological processes. Each tile is a future fossil of Lansing life, circa 2020, so it makes visual and conceptual sense to embed them in colorful strata, marked off by the darker or lighter in-between layers.
“I tried to create swaths of color and larger, abstract motion and activity so it wouldn’t come out like a big, colorful soup,” Leonard said.
The panorama intensifies as you look from left to right, from muted tans and grays to brighter reds and blues, quickening into a mesmerizing vortex sparkling with reflective shards.
Leonard’s original sketch for the mosaic is scrawled with the words “remember Jupiter, the big awesome swirl.”
“My original inspiration for the inner swirl area was the Great Red Spot on the planet Jupiter,” she said.
“I imagined gravity pulling, turning it into this really intense thing.”
She planned to work full bore on the project through spring and summer 2020 and finish it that fall, but when the COVID lockdowns hit that spring, that schedule went into the wastebasket.
She began to slowly amass a stockpile of tiles by holding a series of outdoor tile workshops around Lansing, often keyed to bigger events.
Her first workshop in July 2020 was a “socially distancing dance party” in the parking lot of the former Replay Records in Old Town. There were about 20 more outdoor workshops in the summer at various spots on all four sides of town.
Leonard came to the workshops with buckets of clay, a portable slab roller and various inscribing tools to create the designs.
She took some control over color and size of the tiles, but she never knew what the results would be. A 7-year-old boy breathlessly collared Leonard at one workshop to tell her about his tile, which depicted a dolphin jumping out of the water, with a meteorite hitting the Earth in the background.
“I don’t remember how it all connected, but he was really proud of his tile,” Leonard said.
She tied many of the workshops to events such as Arts Night Out and the Lansing Alive festival in July 2022.
One tile is extra special to Leonard. In summer 2022, an MSU grad student from Ghana moved next door to Leonard with her 3-year-old son. Leonard invited them to see the wall and come to a workshop.
The boy “wasn’t into the tools,” so Leonard put a big blue tile on the ground and the boy danced on it.
“Just to see his little footprints — all that energy and DNA, all of our fingerprints have touched these and infused them with our energy,” Leonard said.
By summer 2022, she was cutting the slabs smaller and smaller to accommodate everyone who wanted to participate, as word spread about the project and people saw it start to take shape on the wall.
Working for months in a public space, Leonard and Rose kibitzed with lunching insurance workers, joggers, bikers, students and anyone else passing by on the trail. They got familiar with a predictable crew of “regulars,” both humans and dogs, who orbited the area nearly every day.
Residents from the apartment building next to the bridge came by to check in, bring donuts or ask if they needed a bathroom break.
“I’m astonished at how overwhelmingly positive every comment was,” Leonard said. “It was always, ‘Wow, looking good.’”
They shared baked goods and snacks, many of them donated by well-wishers, with the homeless people who frequently set up camp under the bridge.
“We’d sometimes be there at 10, 11 o’clock at night,” Rose said. “We met people from Germany, Malaysia, all over the world.”
In September, as work was winding down, a woman and her young son approached the wall. Rose asked the boy if he wanted to put a tile up and was astonished by the mother’s reaction.
“She started to cry,” Rose said. “So many people have put their hands on this project. It started out with the concept of ‘art within art,’ but it’s so much more than that now. It’s a community within a piece of art.”
Mayor Andy Schor was thrilled to find his tile, which says “Lansing” and has a rendering of the three Eckert Station smokestacks.
To Leonard’s surprise, working in a semi-controlled, collaborative way was a joy.
“It’s was real eye-opening for me,” she said. “I have never made work like this, where the public could see the whole process. It took the ego out of it.”
As the weeks went by, Rose hauled flats of tiles, lugged buckets of grout, inched his way across the wall alongside his new role model and took everything in with saucer eyes. He offered advice to Leonard now and then but mostly savored what he calls “the greatest collaboration of my life.”
“A lot of girls and young women saw Alexandra putting art up there, being the leader of this project,” Rose said. “So many of our idols are athletic, musical or otherwise, but I’m sure so many kids came away from this with a different view of where they can go with their life.”
In late fall, a woman sent a message to Leonard on the project’s Facebook page. She and her husband had just visited the wall, looking for tiles they made at a workshop more than two years earlier, in June 2020, but only found hers. Did her husband’s tile make it into the mosaic? Or had it broken, exploded in the kiln or suffered some other catastrophe?
Leonard found it in a few seconds.
“Not very many of them didn’t make it,” she explained. “Even if they cracked or broke, I still tried to put them back together and use everything.”
Rose shook his head.
“How does she know? It’s like going to Vet’s Hardware and asking for their most obscure bolt: ‘Oh, here it is.’”
Although every tile is in place and fully grouted on the bridge wall, Rose and Leonard will be back on site in the spring, to extend the mosaic up the stairs from river level to the street.
In the meantime, Rose pictures all kinds of people stopping by and scanning the wall, looking for their place in the grand mosaic.
“It’s like finding an ornament on the Christmas tree,” Rose said. “This is going to go on for years.”
Support City Pulse - Donate Today!
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here