In December, the Town of Richford learned they will receive a 2016 Community Arts award from the Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes which will fund a mosaic for the south wall of the pavilion at Rawley Park. The grant for approximately $4,800 was one of the only large applications to be fully funded.
The grant will allow for free workshops for the Rawley Park Mosaic in Richford, N.Y. On Sunday, April 3 from noon to 4 p.m., there will be a tile-making workshop at the Richford Town Hall at 7 Bowery Lane. Please bring donations of glazed tile, mirror, broken stained glass, broken china, etc.
On Sunday, April 17, there will be a glazing workshop at the Richford Town Hall from noon to 3 p.m.
Mosaic installations dates will be announced.
Rawley Park is in the center of Richford, just north of the intersection of Routes 38 and 79. The park is bordered by a managed trout stream. There is a pavilion that people can rent inexpensively, a playground, a basketball half-court, a baseball field, and there will be a soccer field at which the Newark Valley Soccer Club will hold some practices and games starting this year. The park is used not just by residents of Richford, but also by kids and families from the adjoining communities that lack a playground.
During the last year, a core of dedicated townspeople formed the Friends of Rawley Park committee and held numerous work parties to clear brush, engaged the Weekend Warriors from the Tioga County Jail to help clear brush, held a dish-to-pass community dinner with a bonfire and movie, held a trunk-or-treat Halloween event, surveyed the public about what they’d see added to the park, performed some playground maintenance, installed a new park sign, applied for and received a grant from the Floyd Hooker Foundation for a topographical survey of the park, applied for a grant to fund security cameras, contacted the New York State DOT who then cleaned out sluiceways to make the park drier, and worked on a master plan for improvements to the park in the coming years.
The creation and installation of the mosaic at the park are part of the community involvement and sense of community ownership that the Town and committee are trying to build. Ideas for the park were solicited from townspeople, and drawings were solicited from town children. Based on that input, the mosaic will depict the natural world of Richford. In April, there will be a free tile-making workshop followed two weeks later by a glazing workshop. Among other tiles, they are hoping to get handprints from as many town residents as possible. These handprint tiles will be the leaves of a large maple tree in the mosaic. They are also asking residents to donate glazed tile, mirror, broken stained glass, broken pieces of china, etc. to the project. In May, they are going to install the mosaic over a weekend to be announced.
The artist they are working with is a muralist and mosaic artist living in Tioga County named Annemarie Zwack. Zwack is a visual artist specializing in working with communities to create public art. Zwack believes in the power of community-made public art and stated, “Projects like this have a big and lasting impact on the culture of a rural community, by facilitating the bond that forms through engagement in the arts, and is sustained by the sense of place that a piece of permanent, community- generated, public art creates.”
Zwack is currently co-leading an 80’ x 8’ mosaic installation on the wall of a DPW facility in Ithaca (in the parking lot of the Sciencenter) called the 1st Street Mosaic Project. Examples of her work can be seen at www.ZwackArt.com.
