Mosaic Travelogue, Part 2

Miracle Mile

I’m including this in the mosaic travelogue even though it’s not technically a mosaic.

Shortly after I arrived in Tucson in 1989 I was commissioned to be the artist for a project renovating the I-10 and Miracle Mile overpass. I was extremely honored but a bit overwhelmed to be asked to do this as I had never before taken on a project of this magnitude. There was a budget allocated with the Arizona Department of Transportation (Percent For Art) allowing for the art/design. When I was hired (by a local landscape architecture firm called Wheat-Gallaher Associates) the process for choosing artists for these type of projects had not been yet allocated to what was then called TPAC (Tucson Pima Arts Council), which was changed to The Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona in 2016. Confused yet? Suffice it say I may have been the last artist to be hired outright before TPAC took over.

The process from design to completion lasted from 1990-1995. I worked with the landscape firm along with engineering firms, tile contractors, and steel fabricators. There were six large murals made up of 18,000 tiles in the finished work. I was tasked to draw each mural with a Sharpie on 6x6 Mexican tiles, and color code the spaces with the designated glaze (color) to be fired. Each tile was painstakingly marked on the back with placement location. Once an entire mural was fired I put the pieces together in the parking lot of the fabricator to see that each one worked visually.

Another task during this project was to create a design that would be incorporated along the entire I-10 corridor that fit the theme we called Pueblo Deco. I had made a study of the many buildings in both Tucson and Phoenix that were built during the time when Art Deco was an architectural element used in the southwest. With that in mind, my friend Bill Mueller (RIP, best known as the operations manager for the restoration of the Temple and Music and Art) helped me to replicate a life-size form out of wood which we then had made into a mold. We then poured concrete to make the positive (and painted it) which you can see here. You can’t drive the frontage roads of the I-10 corridor in Tucson without seeing thousands of these topping the retaining walls.

I was also tasked to design the pedestrian fence which was contracted out to a steel fabricator (A company from Denver won the bid for construction of the design).

One of the best parts of the job was wearing a hard hat on site.

The completed work somewhat looks like a mosaic. Some of the tiles have fallen in recent years but I have not been contacted to help in any restoration, nor have I had any luck contacting anyone about it.

As the tail end of this project was wrapping up I got extremely busy touring with a band called The Mollys which kept me on the road up until 2000. I didn’t have much time to think about visual art through that period thus the wait until later on in the 2000s when the mosaic bug hit.

Next up, part 3: Mosaic Sculpture and Wall Work

And now for your moment of philosophy.