San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Tapestrylike tile work adorns Broadway building.
Tapestry-like tile work on Broadway office building features native plants, animals
Ceramist Diana Kersey and a team of five worked on her new mural “The Riparian Edge” for about eight months, but they never saw it in its entirety until right before installation began on the Oxbow office tower under construction near The Pearl.
“It was impossible to build it all at one time,” Kersey said. “The only time we ever saw it put together was when we put it together at the very end. My studio is not quite large enough to lay it out.”
Instead, the two-section mural — one segment around 508 square feet, the other around 150 square feet — comprises a lot of individual tiles, which were assembled like an enormous jigsaw puzzle. How many individual pieces are there? Don’t ask her.
“We never count that,” she said. “If anybody wants to take the time to count them, they can let us know. We would appreciate it.”
The tapestrylike eyecatcher features native plants and animals including water lilies, Indian blanket wildflowers, bees, red-eared slider turtles, Mexican freetail bats, herons and redtail hawks. The title reflects a guiding idea for architects Don B. McDonald and Ronny Eckels, who wanted the entire building to be connected to the bustling commercial enterprises in the area as well as to the river that flows nearby.
The name of the building references the shape of the river years ago, said McDonald, whose namesake architectural firm is working on the Silver Ventures-owned building. An oxbow is a lake that forms when a section of a river is cut off, leaving a separate body of water.
“It’s a commercial space, and they really wanted to connect the commercial aspects of the Broadway corridor to the river and to the development there,” Kersey said. “When they were talking about that, it made me start thinking about ecology and the idea of the riparian edge, when two ecosystems overlap and there is this extra vibrancy of life.
“I used the plants and animals as an allegory for what they were trying to do with human infrastructure.”
The mural can be seen over the main entrance facing Broadway and over a secondary entrance on the north side of the building close to the intersection of Avenue B and Grayson Street.
“We were looking for something to animate the entrance,” McDonald said. “We liked the idea of having a prominent entrance on Broadway and engaging the street.”
McDonald’s firm also strives to work with local artists and craftspeople on its projects. They had commissioned some small plates from Kersey for an interior project, and thought she would be a good fit for the Oxbow building.
“We like to draw from local talent just because it makes the buildings feel like they’re of San Antonio, especially in this area here, that has such a rich natural history,” Eckels said. “And we just kind of had a zany idea that we could do something a little bit more like a public art project on the side of the building, and ownership, gratefully, bought into it.”
Kersey has done a fair amount of public art, starting with “Life Cycle of the Gulf Coast Toad,” a work on the Mulberry Street Bridge that was installed in 2011. The new mural includes a rendering of the toad as well: “I’ve always had a warm feeling for that toad since he was my first public art project,” she said.
Her other contributions to the cityscape include “The Guardians of Five Points,” an installation of ceramic columns at VIA Metropolitan Transit’s Five Points Transfer Area; and “Bridges of Understanding,” a series of pieces exploring the origins of such street names as Travis and Santa Rosa that is part of the first segment of the San Pedro Creek Culture Park.
“The Riparian Edge” is the largest project Kersey has ever tackled. In fact, it was too big for the 650square-foot studio she had built five years ago in her backyard. So she sought and eventually found a larger space to accommodate this and future large-scale work.
It took some time to get the new studio completely up to snuff. Until kilns were installed, whenever a section was ready to be fired, it had to be schlepped to her home studio about a mile away,
“It was not fun,” she said. When it was finished, she said, “we packed it in boxes like file folders, with cardboard between each tile, and put those in pallets. We delivered 12 pallets of work to the site, and then at the site, we unpacked it and laid it out and assembled it.
“I’ve always installed my work by myself, and I have an understanding of how it goes. This time, it was too dangerous for us to install that high up.”
Instead, masons installed it, using a thin-set mortar to adhere it to the building, she said.
Installation of the mural is complete, and McDonald advises those who want to check it out to head over there in the morning: “It’s really beautiful any time before noon.”
A crew now is stenciling an alternating pattern of quatrefoils and stars on the building’ exterior, a reference to the frescoes that once adorned Mission San José.
“I think this is all about tapping into San Antonio’s architectural roots,” McDonald said. “It is a pretty unique thing to paint on a new building, but it’s been done here in our community for hundreds of years, and we thought that was a fun thing to tap into.”
Quatrefoils are part of Kersey’s mural, helping to create a relationship between it and the stenciling.
“That way, it doesn’t look like two distinct art pieces on one building, but, rather, a cohesive composition,” Eckels said.
The building is part of an office development that will include the Credit Human headquarters. It is slated to open this fall.
When it does, visitors also will be able to get an up-close look at Kersey’s handiwork, thanks to a series of ceramic medallions mirroring the mural’s imagery, which will be placed in corridors throughout the space.
“The murals are really impressive and nice, but they’re so far away,” she said. “I’m excited that people will be able to get up close and touch what we’re going to install inside. They’ll get a different experience.”
Those pieces are distinctive for another reason: Because of stay-at-home orders put in place to stem the spread of COVID-19, she crafted all of them herself.
“I didn’t have any studio assistants during that time, so they were 100 percent made by me. That hasn’t happened in a long time,” she said. “I’m a lot slower working alone. When you have four people going, you go pretty fast.”
McDonald and Eckels expect the mural to draw the attention of neighbors, pedestrians, cyclists and drivers passing by, making them engage with the building.
And they expect it to have that effect for a very long time.
“We think this terra cotta will be here in 500 years,” McDonald said.
They have evidence of its durability, Eckels said: “Funny enough, they dropped a piece from the very top. The last piece that they were supposed to place dropped when they were installing it and nothing happened.”