People driving along Grand Avenue in Phoenix may have noticed artists working on planters, putting their own personal touch on the pots. The Adopt-a-Planter project is working to attract visitors to the art galleries on 12th Avenue and Grand. We’ll take a look at one artist’s vision for decorating her planter.
Ted Simons: If you've driven along Grand Avenue in Phoenix lately you may have seen artists decorating streetside planters. The adopt-a-planter project is working to attract visitors to art galleries on 12th Avenue and Grand. Producer Darcy Machado and videographer Juan Magana took a look at one artist's vision and inspiration.
Tammi Lynch-Forrest: I just love mosaic, I really do. I love painting with glass. That is a planter project that the city did for this grand avenue. They have installed 55 planters along the bike lane, and then invited artists to come and do each planter in their own style. This is an Arizona themed planter. You'll find different Arizona images in here. You're going to see a Phoenix, a Thunderbird, the state bird, the state flower, the state snake. So as you look throughout you're going find little images that represent Arizona. This one is very unusual because it's done almost entirely in stained glass. Most mosaic is done in broken pottery, broken dishes and broken tiles if it's on this scale. I've taken stained glass and used it as more of a fine art mosaic for this. Each sheet is $10 to $25. So there's literally a few hundred dollars in glass in here. Lots to learn in the sense of movement in mosaic. You're taking something that's cold and stiff and hard and trying to give it some kind of fluidity. There's a reason that will look this way, this comes around and should be visually pleasing to your eye. You take an image I have drawn on with chalk in my instance. Then I cut the glass to fit. And because of curved surfaces we do a lot of scoring which we normally wouldn't do on a flat surface. It prevents a whole different set of problems the way it's shaped, as opposed to doing the side of a building. They are going see almost like an outdoor gallery. If you don't have the time to go indoors, and a lot of times people don't, you can come through here and see the art on display. I love it when people get inspired by the mosaics especially. I really like bringing that to people. I've had people come by here every day or so just to watch the progress. It feels really great. A lot of the community feels like it's their planter and it really feels good to me.
Ted Simons: And many of the planters decorated along 12th Avenue and Grand have been finished and can be seen from the street. Tomorrow on "Arizona Horizon" award winning scholars are looking to use their honors to continue careers in science and engineering. And also we'll learn about a new product dealing with artificial pollination. That's tomorrow on "Arizona Horizon." I'm Ted Simons, thank you so much for joining us, you have a great evening.
