Artists create mosaic ‘love letter’ to natural St. Pete

What’s 175 feet long, four feet wide and consists of more than 15,000 individual pieces?

That would be St. Petersburg’s newest public art installation, currently in progress at the intersection of Park Street and Central. The Sunshine City Mosaic was commissioned by the City to add a splash of color and je ne sais quoi to St. Pete’s western edge, which had heretofore been art-free.

Artists Alex Kaufman, George Retkes and Laura Spencer have designed what’s essentially a tall, thin mural laid on its side – in this case, it’s on a freshly installed sidewalk that intersects the 4.9-acre greenspace Sunset Park, next to Boca Ciega Bay – but it’s not a mural. There’s no paint involved. The ambling pictorial tour of Florida fauna and flora is made up entirely of porcelain tile and glass. “They wanted a piece that would draw people into the park,” explained Kaufman.

“For me as a muralist, I got so jazzed by the idea of a mosaic,” said Spencer, who’s painted for the SHINE Mural Festival and at other venues. “Because in the city of St. Pete, murals don’t qualify as public art – capital P, capital A. That’s because they don’t last more than 25 years.

“Well, mosaics are illustrative, right? And if we cut it out of tile and glue it on the ground, it’s for sure going to last a really long time.”

Photo by Bill DeYoung.

Once the installation is completed, by the first week in August (weather permitting), city workers will lay six-inch concrete curbing along each side of the mosaic, providing a total width of five feet. This will result in a raised sidewalk unlike any other in St. Pete.

On the eastern side, it starts with the sunrise over Tampa Bay, dives underwater and and moves westward to end with a beach sunset. Through mosaic depictions of various habitats, Spencer said, “We tell the story through the native wildlife in those areas.”

Travelers will discover mullet and other native fish, a manatee, aquatic plants, a seahorse, dolphins, a Great Blue Heron, then mangroves, leaves, trees and flowers, butterflies, orange blossoms, palm leaves, an anole lizard, an osprey and more until things return to the water. There’s a flowing sun at the halfway point.

Kaufman and Retkes are co-workers at Mark Aeling’s MGA Sculpture Studios, and both were key in the design, construction and installation of many of Aeling’s stainless steel public art pieces, including Gladiolus at the St. Petersburg Police Station, and the “flying” Tony Jannus biplane mounted at the St. Pete Pier.

In 2019, Aeling bought an advanced piece of high-pressure machinery to cut and shape steel. The waterjet, as it’s commonly known, is capable of directing more than 60,000 psi (pounds per square inch).

“One interesting thing about the waterjet is that is cuts any material,” Kaufman explained. “Including porcelain and glass. So I started looking into ‘What are artists doing with porcelain, glass and waterjets?’ And I found lots of mosaics were being made, across the country.

“Modern takes on it. Not like the old way, little pieces broken by hand and glued together, but really contemporary stuff. The other thing is that this is porcelain that’s thick for flooring, not like the thin pieces they break by hand. And that’s where the idea came from. The machine could cut porcelain, and I thought, I would love one day to do a mosaic.”

That opportunity came in the form of the city’s Call to Artists and RFQ (Request For Quote) for the Sunset Park project. It turned out the three friends had similar ideas about such things. “It all just coalesced together,” recalled Kaufman. “I said ‘What do you guys think about a mosaic sidewalk?’”

This would be a first for the three musketeers. Said Retkes: “We knew the machine could cut it, and we had confidence we could figure out the rest.”

Spencer, aka Miss Crit, is known for her murals, paintings and drawings that bring animals, plants (and otherwise) to life. So she drew everything first. “When we talked about this,” she said, “we realized that the three of us have so much love for St. Pete that we really wanted to create a love letter, celebrating our favorite things about our natural and native environment.” The City approved the concept and design, and agreed to pay the collective $50,000.

Next, explained Retkes, “Alex took Laura’s design and broke it down into smaller mosaic pieces.”

Pre-installation jigsaw assembly. Image provided.

This was done through a computer. Everything, of course, had to be designed exactly to the sidewalk’s scale, and every one of the 150,000 pieces cut by the waterjet (“I have touched every single one, physically, multiple times,” Retkes said with a laugh) came from a sourced segment of hard ceramic; nothing was dyed, shaded or re-colored.

Once the pieces had been fabricated, the sidewalk was done in large segments, assembled at MGA with grout, glue … and a lot of patience. Adjustments have to be made.

Every segment is now completed; the artists are working at least five hours every day to transfer and permanently attach them, piece by piece, to the new sidewalk.

The process has taken longer than they expected. There have been delays caused by the 2024 hurricanes (the entire park, Kaufman said, was under water at one point), day-to-day weather, and by the waterjet itself, which they are only permitted to use after MGA’s regular operating hours. The equipment was briefly out of commission, too.

“We’re all working 40 to 60 hours a week at our normal jobs, and still finding 20, 30 hours to commit to this, too,” said Retkes. “To give the City credit, to give an opportunity for a project this big to artists that have not made a mosaic, that’s very huge for us. This project would not exist anywhere else.”

An idea of what the final installation will look like. Rendering provided.