Felix Rivera (1957-2008)

We regret the passing of our dear friend and community member Felix Rivera.
Felix was a wonderful helping hand in the making of Seed of Growth,
his enthusiasm, kindness, resourcefulness, cooperation and great sense of humor will always be remembered. Thank you Felix for all your love and great energy. You we'll be tremendously missed at the park and Seed of Growth stands with a part of you in it.

Finishing in Mosaic started this Fall!!!

This past fall of 2007 I was able to start on the finishing of "SOG" thanks to the generous donations from AnnSacks and Laticrete Int. and to the endless support of Hope and the commununity of el Barrio.

Due to the arrival of the cold winter the work has been postponed to the Spring of next year.

Stage II: Finishing in Mosaic

This is the Rendering for the proposed finishing of "SOG" in glass mosaic.

Poem
by Tanya Torres
which will be included at the base of the Sculpture:

Seed of growth,
Sprout from the womb of Mother Earth,
Nourishing and essential,
Mother, feed us,
With your water,
Live fluid of strength
Growing space within the eggs of time
With pinks and violets and reds
Let the fountain of strength flow.

It looks like this!

Photo by Rodney Zagury

Some Photos

Click To Play

Some new stuff

The moment has come to go back to work on the sculpture. This is what I came up with after some work with tesserae. Of course, I'm not working on this on my own, but I enjoyed discovering that the little gray cubes are great for writing!

Un poquito de trabajo

El viernes pasado nos reunimos a pensar un poco en el mosaico que irá sobre la escultura. La parte de adentro de la "piscina" se rellenará un poco con cemento. El mosaico en esta parte será sencillo. Vamos a hacer un experimento con distintos tipos de mosaicos para ver si podemos lograr un diseño que nos guste.

New Design

This is the design that was finally approved by HOPE Community.

The Umbrella

One instrumental part of the process of getting the grant and creating the sculpture was the umbrella organization HOPE Community, Inc. Carmen Vazquez agreed to help us by arranging for HOPE to be the umbrella and providing the necessary paperwork to complete the application.

There was only one problem: When Carmen presented the proposal to HOPE's board... they did not want to have a naked woman right in the middle of their beloved garden.

Since we were still trying to integrate Lina's style into the design, we agreed to change it.

How this all started

Lina and I were coming back home to East Harlem from work and she had given me a lift in her car. We started talking about public art since she had recently completed an installation at a park in Queens. Somehow we started talking about doing a mural on a large wall here in East Harlem, but that was not going to work out since the owner was not going to allow it. Nonetheless, the idea took its own life and when it came time to fill out the grant applications for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Lina got us to design the work and fill the application.

The process of designing the sculpture, which was and is going to be a fountain, took a couple of meetings in which I drew some preliminary designs. Originally, the sculpture was supposed to be a voluptous woman whithin the style I have been working with in the past years. We did one, but then decided to change it to incorporate more of Lina's style. We reworked it after the application had been sent and Lina called the LMCC to tall them that we had put in the wrong drawing! They said we could send it in and she did.

The day we worked on that drawing was wa Friday. I remember because I arrived at her apartment exhausted and depressed after a long week of work. I really did not know how to start working, but as we began to work with drawing and clay, I felt much better. The feeling, however, was an indication of what was to come throughout this entire adventure. As artists struggling to both make a living a create art in this city, creating any kind of serious artwork is a great, immense, challenge.

But we struggled and one day got a phone call announcing that we had gotten the grant.