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Tile Quilt

A Public Art Venture in Buffalo, New York

by Gail McCarthy

As seen in Ceramics Monthly October 2002

When I proposed a tile mural for the lobby of the Apollo Theater, a once-grand inner-city movie house reborn as the City of Buffalo Telecommunications Center, I knew the design and execution needed to satisfy both the community and city hall. The architect, Robert Traynham Coles, had allocated $25 ,000 from his $400,000 budget for an artwork that would be integral to the structure and would have citizen participation in its making. Our city's Common Council approved this appropriation as a test-run of Buffalo's fledgling percent-for-arts program.

Built in 1941, the theater had deteriorated badly since its closing some 20 years ago. The beauty of its interior space was barely discernible when, on a gray winter's day, I visited the site with the architect. The areas designated for art were: the entrance vestibule, the circular lobby and a contiguous back corridor leading to what would be high-tech recording studios in all, l200 square feet.

At that time, the structural skeleton was forbidding. All of the walls had been demolished, the roof was open, and ragged floor seams merely suggested the shape of the lobby. It was a great advantage to be brought in so early in the design process, though, because the architect and I had many a productive talk about "what should be." As a result, I was given complete freedom to manage this year-long project.

My willing collaborators included the faculty of an art school, suppliers of ceramic materials, a project engineer, a multitude of construction workers, a skilled tile setter and hundreds of community artists. I brought to this design process my hybrid background as a ceramics artist, an environmental sculptor and a professor of art at Niagara County Community College, as well as my experience as a former grad student in the University of Buffalo's School of Architecture.

My first decision was to select ceramic tile as the most appropriate medium for this area of high public impact. A 6x6-inch commercial bisque tile was just small enough to fit the curve in the lobby wall and just big enough to offer a "picture surface" for the community's artists.

My next decision was to employ the faculty of Locust Street Neighborhood Art Classes, Inc., to solicit artists and to fire the tiles. When the school's part was completed, it would be up to me to organize the diverse images into a unified and coherent composition. No one could even guess what the finished project would look like because so much would depend upon both the quality and the number of painted tiles produced by the as-yet-unknown artists. Salk about high-risk odds!

When Molly Bethel, the director of Locust Street, agreed to take on the project, I budgeted funds to purchase new kiln elements, a safe exhaust system and tile setters. The funding also provided for photo documentation and a dignified salary for the staff As coordinator, I had to pay attention to bids for every tool and all materials. All purchase orders—written in triplicate— required approval by project engineer Paula Weeks. I worried about excess delivery charges, late-return policies and slow delivery time lines. By begging suppliers for discounts, I stretched the money as far as it would go.

The selection of glazes involved considerable testing and reevaluation. I knew that we should stay with simple, nontoxic recipes, so I chose a family of commercial majolicas that is child friendly and tinted to correspond to finished colors. The majolicas did require a base coating on each tile, but this eliminated a time-consuming protective overglazing at the end of the decorating process.

On evaluation of our first test group, the painted tiles appeared too subdued, and certain colors lacked the sparkle of the primary spectrum. As a solution, I eliminated some colors and substituted commercial gloss glazes for the red, yellow and black. The two types of glazes proved compatible; on the next tests, the colors had brightened and the contrasts and dimensionality came to life.

As summer moved along, the project attracted television and print coverage. Locust Street set tables out at street festivals. The faculty agreed not to restrict the choice of subjects, other than prohibiting ads for commercial enterprises. Volunteers were provided with coated tiles, huge squirt bottles of majolica and gloss glazes that were fed into individual glaze pans, plus lots of good brushes. People of all races and ages—from senior citizens to tiny children in the laps of their parents—wanted to make a painting for the Apollo Theater. The school soon had so many artists waiting at its doorstep that it dedicated an entire painting studio exclusively to the project.

Reaching the end of summer (and the last dollar in my budget), I had to call a halt to the painting sessions. The tiles came home to the school, were stacked into setters and slowly fired to Cone 05. Some artists had been too restrained with the glazes and, after careful inspection, their tiles were carefully touched up and refired. The finished tiles were stored in the basement, packed away, unsorted, in dozens of green plastic bread trays begged from a local supermarket.

Both the number and variety of decorated tiles had grown far beyond my original estimate. I was confounded by the prospect of combining 1500 completely unrelated glaze paintings into one coherent design. First, I spread out the tiles to let them "speak" to me. As leaves started dropping that fall, I came back, day after day, to the narrow basement of the art school to decide which group each tile wished to join. After four hours my mind would close down, telling me it was time to quit for the day. I reviewed the tiles so often I recall virtually every painting and where that tile eventually was placed.

I found that the paintings fell into recurring themes, such as hearts and love, words and names, house and family, faces and figures, plaids and stripes, flowers and landscape, spiritual messages, comic characters, memorials to a lost loved one, solid color groups, and preschoolers' abstractions. The Colored Musician's Club was the only easily themed group, since the players drew instruments or clefs. I labeled each category as I sorted tiles back into the green plastic trays.

Those hundreds of lovingly produced images began to take on a life of their own and would appear in my dreams as vibrant statements about the human condition. It took weeks to categorize each tile, then to organize topics into long, dual-tile strips to be set into a unified design. I decided to employ floor-to-ceiling rows of red, yellow and black commercial tile to frame and offset the various themes. After measuring and remeasuring the lobby’s walls, I made use of my rusty architectural skills to produce scale drawings that would accurately communicate the placement of every tile to both the architect and the installer.

The installation began in the dead of winter. I was warned about the Port-A-John, but not about the lack of reliable heat, so, the second day, I donned boots, multiple layered shirts and long johns to work alongside a swarm of finishing carpenters and electricians. Every hour, a portable heater would scald the atmosphere with a few moments of blistering heat that was immediately defeated by the subzero climate.

The construction crew was wary of an artist intruding into their space, but soon were won over by the profoundly human nature of the images. They began to make their own drawings on the drywall, and brought their wives and children to preview the installation's progress. Such is the power of art.

My tile contractor, Tiede-Zoeller, Inc., requisitioned Jim Haak, their best tile setter, who looked over my drawings, grabbed his level and started in. The tiles went, one by one, from my hand to his. For the wall beyond the lobby, we installed tiles that incorporated the first name of every artist. We also added autograph tiles for the politicians, contractors and civic groups that had supported the project.

Looking back on the intensity of this period, I recall the collision of a succession of emotions. I was impatient to proceed from the fragments of individual tile to the whole work. I had boundless optimism, which was soon followed by the fear of performance in public, since the installation was a piece of theater being viewed by a host of spectators and commentators. I was subject to internal panic about how well the idea would actually work. As those tiles were walked, two by two, up the ramp, I could hear the hundreds of voices singing, now in chorus, about their lives.

When the renovation of the Apollo Theater was finished and the doors thrown open to the public, our mayor, Anthony Masiello, celebrated its interior as "the Sistine Chapel of Jefferson Avenue." It was no longer my project. By then, it had become the composite possession of each artist who had contributed his or her vision to the greater whole.