Wednesday Journal, June 23, 2021
OAKPARK.COM | RIVERFOREST.COM
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Community mosaics find home after 21 years Will be displayed outside planned recreation center By STACEY SHERIDAN Staff Reporter
Whatever happened to the five mosaic columns that were supposed to go outside Longfellow Elementary School? For about two decades, nothing – until now. The ceramic creations will at long last be displayed openly and permanently, enhancing the façade of the Park District of Oak Park’s planned community recreation center. “After 20-plus years, these mosaics are going to take a place in the community,” said Camille Wilson White, executive director of the Oak Park Area Arts Council (OPAAC). An act of community collaboration by OPAAC, the park district and the school’s parent teacher organization led to the ceramic creations being unearthed from storage and repurposed for the recreation center, for which funds are still being raised. “We all had an epiphany one night,” said Jan Arnold, Park District of Oak Park executive director. The mosaics were created for Longfellow by artist Mirtes Zwierzynski back in 2000, with the help of students, the PTO and Chris Worley, the school’s art teacher at the time. Using shards of broken ceramic tiles, the five columns represent Oak Park’s history, from the prehistoric epoch up until the year of their creation, depicting its everevolving social and geographic landscape. The columns extended as wide as 5-feet in width and stood as high as 12-feet. The Illinois Arts Council awarded Longfellow a grant to fund the outdoor art installation, which was titled, “Stories Of Our Neighborhood.” The school intended to
ALEX ROGALS/Staff Photographer
PIECE BY PIECE: Master artist Carolyn Elaine (right) and first-year apprentice Lauren Edwards handle the tesserae for the “Off the Wall” mosaic. mount the five pillars outside of the school, but that never came to fruition due to size and structural complications, according to Amanda Siegfried, spokesperson for Oak Park’s Elementary School District 97. Last year, the park district requested OPAAC’s partnership in incorporating public art into the plans for the community recreation center. Meanwhile, the mosaics languished in the basement of a former Longfellow parent. Just as it takes time to arrange individual tile shards to create a final mural, the idea to display the mosaics outside the recreation center took a year to materialize. Things developed quickly from there, with the PTO donating the mosaics to the park district. OPAAC began repurposing
the mosaics columns into a flat mural this summer as part of the council’s “Off the Wall” summer arts program under Carolyn Elaine, who has served as master artist every summer since the program’s 2005 formation. The reformatting will take about two summers. While she played no role in the original Longfellow project, Elaine has her own special connection to the mosaics through Zwierzynski, under whom she apprenticed. “It’s her design; it’s her energy; it’s her interaction with the community,” Elaine said of her former mentor and the five mosaic columns created at the turn of the new millennium. The two artists have worked together over many years. Elaine asked Zwierzynski
in reimagining the Longfellow mosaics as a mural to suit the community recreation center, which she agreed to under one condition. “Mirtes, being the type of artist that she is, said, ‘I just have one request… that in some way all the students who worked on this are acknowledged,’” said Elaine. Elaine gladly agreed. The original assembly of the five mosaic columns was documented through photography. Zwierzynski has suggested using the pictures taken of the students working be transformed into an exhibition to be shown alongside the unveiling of the mosaics and the community recreation center, which has accrued about 75 percent of its fundraising goal of $22 million. The students will be invited to the eventual unveiling. Depending on the recreation center’s construction schedule, the mosaics will be installed in the fall of 2022 or spring of 2023, according to Arnold. The columnsturned-mural will adorn the east side of the building. The benefits of repurposing the mosaics include cost savings. The park district had budgeted about $150,000 toward purchasing an original piece for the center. Beyond that, several materials used in the Longfellow project were saved and the mosaics themselves are also in wonderful condition. “It’s easily saved the project about $100,000,” said Arnold. The value of the opportunity extends beyond the monetary. The mosaics were created to tell Oak Park’s history but have become a part of that history themselves. The brokenness of the journey from their creation, to reformation and their future installation is not unlike breaking whole tiles then assembling a new picture from the debris. “There’s beauty in the brokenness,” said Elaine.
In Austin, discussing Baldwin’s ongoing influence
Festival Theatre hosted discussion with Eddie Glaude on June 15 By MICHAEL ROMAIN Equity Editor
James Baldwin was center stage on June 15 at Kehrein Center for the Arts in Austin during an event hosted by Oak Park Festival Theatre, along with several other organizations from Oak Park and the West Side. Eddie Glaude, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, channeled the late Black essayist and novelist during a panel discussion on Baldwin’s life and work. Glaude, author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, said while in the process of writing the book, which was published last year, he
had to really grapple with the thrust of Baldwin’s words. Those words, he said, forced him to confront some hard truths about himself. “Jimmy is demanding that we encounter honestly who we are,” Glaude said. “What’s so distinctive about the American project is that we’re comfortable in our myths and illusions because we don’t want to look the evidence of who we are squarely in the face. So there’s a kind of adolescence that defines this place.” Glaude spoke virtually to a panel of three people seated onstage: Saudia Davis, director of the Center for Creative Entrepreneurship; director and actor Ron O.J. Parson; and actress Emma Sipora Tyler, who moderated the discussion. “While I was writing this book, I drank too much Irish whiskey and the reason is because I wasn’t exactly prepared,” Glaude said. “[Baldwin’s] telling me over and over again, ‘If you’re going to write about this place, old boy, you’re going to have to deal with you now, because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness
of our interior lives. “I had to deal with the fact that I’m a wounded little boy who still has daddy issues,” Glaude added. “I had to deal with what was in me.” Parson said he remembers watching Baldwin on the The Dick Cavett Show in the 1960s and the things he said still resonate, adding that he acted in Blues for Mister Charlie, a play Baldwin wrote in 1964. “You can literally put him on a talk show today and he can say the same thing and it would be as relevant,” Parson said. “I think it’s all theater — the novels, the films, all of that. What we go through in society, a writer can make that happen on stage and say something.” And what Baldwin would say, Glaude explained, is that we have an ethical imperative to bear witness, to be honest, to tell the truth — even though “we’re living in a time where lies abound.” You can watch the conversation online at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=PxdLa0ey3-Q&t=121s.