The Waterfront District Mural

TL; DR

• Build weekend was amazing
• Next build date – Spring 2025 (exact date TBD)
• Tell your story behind the mural on this website

The Stories Behind the Art

At its most fundamental level, art is about communications. Sometimes it presents a window to the past. Sometimes, it is a message to the future. Sometimes it simply is the present.

Whatever form – pictures, words, human movement, or sound – that art takes, there is a story. Hence, why art history is such a valuable college course.

Starting with cave drawings, art evolved to include elements of architecture. In a sense, the old buildings seen in the ancient world were the billboards of their time.

The written word became a valuable tool, particularly with the explosion of the first wave of mass media, thanks to the Gutenberg Press. Writing not only became an artform through literature and poetry, but it also became a meta-tool for documenting another artform, music.

One common denominator with these different media throughout the ages is that art is a manifestation of an artists’ time and effort. In other words, a piece of the artist lives on in their artwork.

Only Who is the Artist? *

As we continue our mural project, we are guided by an amazing artist, Reham Aarti. Reham has installations throughout the United States, and we are blessed to have her as a Waterfront District neighbor. She is donating her time and talent to a project that would probably cost tens of thousands in a traditional public setting.

For this project, she is the conductor of an orchestra of volunteers that have already turned a drab wall into something that reflects the beauty of the surrounding scenery and vibrancy of the greenbelt. With that said, the fun that was seen on the greenbelt masked days and days of Reham’s site preparation and post-event grouting of the mosaic.

Sad you missed build weekend? Don’t despair, we will have another build day (exact date to be determined) in the spring. At that event we will complete the background. Beyond putting on the pieces, there are multiple ways you can participate, contribute, and shape the mosaic and beyond.

We Need You – Stories Beyond the Animals, River, and Mountains

Back to the ponderings on art and its form as a communications tool. Clearly, the Internet and artificial intelligence presents a potentially disruptive and accessible form of art. In our case, we can use the web to tell the stories behind the mural. In a sense, this website will allow us to enrich and continue to tell the stories embedded in the mosaic mural.

Although the mural reflects the beauty of the river, the flora, fauna, animals, and mountains, it doesn’t say much about the people and their impact on the area. This website will include those stories and enhance the meaning of the mural. Examples of these stories could include:

• Stories of the first people who inhabited this area
• The Chinese Gardens
• The commercialization of the area, including the meatpacking plant
• The development of the current Waterfront District and its evolution
• Personal stories associated with the tiles. We already have several stories from build day.

Writing, editing and even creating videos telling these stories are another way you can contribute to this project. We also need help creating and managing the website. Thus, this is really a multimedia project with the mosaic at its core.

We already have several stories and easter eggs from build day that will be published in the future, including

• Toto flying off by himself
• A honeymoon remembrance
• A Garden City – Santa Cruz connection

Beyond improving the looks of our portion of the greenbelt, we can communicate to future generations the uniqueness and history of our special community.

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*This is paraphrased from the great philosopher, songwriter, and Moody Blues’ bassist, John Lodge, and his 1972 song, I am just a singer in a Rock and Roll band. His question becomes an even more important one to ponder with the explosion of machine learning/artificial intelligence and the potential blurring of human and machine.