Handmade Art Under Foot

After witnessing the five-year-long creative process from start to finish that set in stone the artists’ original designs, it was clear to members of Phoenix Arts & Culture Commission that the story was a “rare opportunity.” They saw it as a tale well worth telling to the public who would walk on the floors, said Ed Lebow, Public Art Program Director of the City of Phoenix Office of Arts & Culture.

The resulting exhibit, “Art Under Foot: Handmade Floors at the PHX Sky Train” is open to the public at The Gallery @ City Hall through Feb. 27, 2015. The exhibit documents the process from hand-drawn art to digital images and through each stage of the construction process.

“It’s a very different exhibit in the gallery than we’ve done before,” Susan Shaffer Nahmias, Ph.D., co-curator of the exhibit with Lebow and a member of the Arts & Culture Commission. Instead of the usual framed art, this exhibit is “much more storytelling and a very bright and colorful story,” she said.

The exhibit takes visitors behind-the-scenes to the construction site, from the planning and design stages to the method used to transfer the design to the floor, to pouring the aggregates, to the final fine polish. Several different media recount the process, from photos, design drawings, and computerized models, to written and audio narratives of those involved, and an eight-minute documentary video.

A 10-foot-long, hands-on model showing the step-by-step installation of terrazzo lets visitors experience each stage, from rough stone to the gleaming finished product.

“Visitors find it fascinating. It piques their interest to see the floors themselves,” said Nahmias. “It’s exciting to see people respond to the story and to see them connect with something that before was just a floor, something they didn’t notice.”

An official VIP opening of the exhibit was held on Feb 28, 2014, with over 200 in attendance, including city officials, members of the Arts & Culture Commission, gallery supporters, and many of those involved in the project: the artists who designed the floors and the terrazzo fabrication team led by Advance Terrazzo of Phoenix, and their families.

At the opening, a presentation by NTMA executive director Richard Bruns to Tamie Fisher, the City of Phoenix Acting Aviation Director, commemorated the project’s achievement of Job of the Year, the terrazzo industry’s highest honor. The project was selected from among 52 terrazzo projects nationwide based on design, scope, and craftsmanship.

The terrazzo floors are designed for vast spaces with strong natural light, “so every step is full of detail and beauty,” Lebow said. Each floor was designed by a different artist, selected through a competitive process.

“Topo Magic” is a whimsical 11-color depiction of topological maps of the Arizona landscape in the outdoor East Economy Lot Sky Train station platform. The 450-foot-long terrazzo design ranges from 12 to 36 feet in width, totaling approximately10,000 square feet. The floor’s designer, Anne Coe, is a 4th generation Arizonan and one of the state’s most recognized painters. Her work has been included in over 100 exhibitions.

“Journey Through Nature,” the 44th Street enclosed pedestrian bridge at the train system’s first stop depicts the themes of nature and metamorphosis.

Aggregates of abalone shell, native desert stone and locally recycled glass bring dimension to its intricate geometric floral patterns in vibrant colors. The 9,828-square-foot floor was designed by Daniel Martin Diaz of Tucson. Diaz has designed several prominent public installations, including a terrazzo floor in Tucson.

Inside the 44th Street Sky train station, the floor design, “Tailplane Patterns,” is a patterned composition based on the shape of the horizontal stabilizer, or tailplane, of an aircraft. A weaving thread of black provides variation within the symmetry, and a light-reflecting blend of recycled glass and mirror aggregates unifies the 10-color design. Los Angeles painter and mixed media collage artist Fausto Fernandez designed the floor, which is 440 feet long and ranges from 17 to 40 feet wide.

Then, in the terminal station, expected to handle about 2,000 passengers per hour during peak travel periods, is “Variable Order.” Nearly 200 yards long, the design integrates over 1,000 randomly placed water-jet-cut aluminum letterforms superimposed with an elegant handwritten script. The design elements are embedded in five repeating fields of blue, transitioning from dark to light, and back to dark, with an aggregate mix of recycled crushed mirror, blue and clear glass, and abalone shell. Daniel Mayer, an art book and print maker at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, designed the floor as well as glass murals installed in Sky Train bridges.