Tile by tile: Milwaukee in mosaic
The owner of Tieton Mosiac Ed Marquand knew he wanted the mosaic-tile piece his team was creating for Baird Center to help tell the story of the community. But that proved to be a difficult task for someone who has only ever visited Milwaukee a handful of times. So, he reached out to friends and acquaintances from Wisconsin, listened to their stories and what he discovered was something pretty special.
“Milwaukeeans are very proud of their community and that was really easy to pick up on when talking to people from the area. As I was doing my research, I kept learning all sorts of little factoids about the city, and that really inspired me in the design of the mosaic.”
The end result was the glass, wood and Wedi board mosaic titled Elements, Milwaukee that now welcomes visitors to Baird Center’s administrative offices.
Engrossing himself in Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s lore wasn’t the first time he learned about a community through its stories. He first discovered his admiration for the mosaic art by becoming a student of New York City. As a younger Southern California kid turned graphic designer, he would regularly visit the Big Apple in search of its art scene. In a mecca of art and cultural institutions, Marquand found his inspiration in the most unusual of places, deep underground in the city’s subway stations. It was there, built into the subway’s dirty walls that he found his artistic muse.
“I was always intrigued with the subway platform mosaics from 100 years ago,” Marquand said I was spending a lot of time in New York and standing on those platforms and would just stand there admiring the mosaics. We had started an initiative in Tieton, Washington to create an incubator for artisan businesses and through all sorts of odd circumstances we ended up starting Tieton Mosaic as a typographic mosaic studio. We expanded into other imagery and design directions pretty quickly.”
Tieton Mosaic, which Marquand now owns and serves as the creative director, had their first 15 pieces commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts as the organization got up and running. With artists in-house and also collaborations with others, Tieton has designed and produced murals and art for transit station, hospital, park, museum, municipal, resort sites and for private collectors.
While the group’s roots are in the typographic style, they have always developed imagery mosaics as well. That is how Marquand and four of his colleagues found themselves studying Milwaukee’s history and culture and ultimately settling on the design for the piece commissioned for Baird Center.
Elements, Milwaukee is split into five sections highlighting different aspects of the city and region.
Parts of the area that Tieton Mosaic incorporated into the work were fireworks representing the City of Festivals, beer for Milwaukee’s brewing heritage, an abstract of water reflection and fractured ice representing Lake Michigan, machine gears representing manufacturing, the word QWERTY as a nod to the keyboard invented in Milwaukee and Royal Catch-flies, which are flowers native to Wisconsin.
The different elements within the piece were created using a variety of methods and materials. The abstract of a Lake Michigan reflection is made with transparent colored glass and opaque colored glass to give it a shimmering quality that imitates what you would see if you were in a small watercraft and looked down to the water. The gear was created by firing cobalt blue metallic glass that turned into a gunmetal shade. The fireworks were created using a Byzantine material.
One of the most captivating parts of Elements, Milwaukee is the ice section, which was created using a water jet to form triangles and then buffing them with a Dremel tool for hours and hours. The end result is a dramatic texture that instantly grabs peoples’ attention.
“That’s actually the part of the piece that people come up and pet the most,” Marquand said. “It’s something about human nature that they want to touch that thing.”
After diving deep into Milwaukee and Wisconsin and pouring their souls into the creation of the piece, the team at Tieton Mosaic grew quite attached to it.
“It was fun collaborating with you guys on the selection, but also the scale, oh of course the beer and the fireworks, we can’t forget them,” Marquand shared. “It was really a fun project to work on. I am very proud of it and the staff was very sad to see it leave the studio.”
Elements, Milwaukee is part of the We Energies Foundation Art Collection located at Baird Center. Ed Marquand is one of the thirty-three artists, most from Milwaukee, Wisconsin or with special ties to the area who have works featured in the collection. You can discover more about the artists and their works at https://bairdcenter.com/art-collection/.