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Making Waves academy
Making Waves Academy is a 5th-12th grade public charter school in Richmond, California that serves underrepresented and socio-economically disadvantaged students and helps prepare them for higher education. MWA recently expanded their campus which gained them an additional 14 acres and 250,000 square feet of teaching space. This includes open learning areas, a parent resource center, space for restorative justice, middle and upper school gymnasiums, and a performance art space. The expanded campus will grow the student population from approximately 800 students up to ~1,400 students by the 2025-26 school year, with incremental growth over time.
As part of the school’s expansion, El Dorado brought in 4 artists to design artworks for the site including artist Leslie Shows who is well known and recognized for expanding the boundaries of landscape painting. Leslie was tasked on creating an art piece for the school’s amphitheater. El Dorado then approached us to help achieve their goal of incorporating Leslie’s artwork into the concrete at the amphitheater. We suggested Lithomosaics as the perfect system to achieve her design intent.
According to Leslie “The design is for 3 sections within MWA's amphitheater, located between the art and music buildings. It has playful, flowing lines and doodles underfoot that suggest images like plants, cells, water drops, and sea life, so the students can continually find new things in the open-ended, abstract imagery. It is meant to show off the colors of the Smalti tiles against the concrete, and I included scattered confetti-like pieces to emphasize the tiles themselves in a painterly way. Lithomosaic was the perfect technique for this design and it may be the first really abstract Lithomosaic.”
Leslie Shows’ website: www.leslieshows.com