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November 02, 2001
New Community Mosaic for Otis Street Sidewalk
Three local artists, about 200 homeless youth, and groups of Mission District community people have composed thousands of tiles into a mosaic and painted-tile art work, newly installed into the Municipal Railway’s new sidewalk extension for the bus stop in front of 150 Otis Street between McCoppin and Duboce streets. Titled "The Flower Inside Us Grows," the 65-foot-long work was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission at the request of the Municipal Railway. The image is a tree with flowering shoots, which are joined to the roots at the other end by a long, undulating trunk section containing 34 hand-painted tile images against a mosaic background in different shades of green. Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center director Susan Kelk Cervantes designed the colorful work and made a full-scale painting as a guideline for the mosaic. She and associates Peter Carpou and Carolyna Marks then held two years of mosaic workshops that drew people of all ages. The homeless youth, aged 14 to 20, went to the Larkin Street Youth Services Drop-In Center, where they cut, shaped and fit all the tiles for the flowering shoots in the work’s top section. It is the kind of detailed work that can be monotonous and labor-intensive, says Carpou, the center’s artist in residence. "But many found the experience both meditative and rewarding." Some of the Larkin Street youth were also the ones who painted the central section’s larger, one-foot-square tiles with flowers, animals, sunsets, rain, an eagle, people and other images. Other people, both youth and adults, helped the artists assemble the trunk and root sections of the tree at the Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center’s Mission District studio, where both regular volunteers and drop-ins congregated at biweekly sessions.