The South Austin Neighborhood Center (2508 Durwood, next to Gillis Park) wants to create an art installation at the front of the Center similar to the one recently created for the Rosewood-Zaragosa neighborhood center

The South Austin Neighborhood Center has reached out to the Dawson Neighborhood Association to help prepare a proposal for the City of Austin Neighborhood Partner Program (NPP) and to then help organize workshops to produce the artwork using volunteers from South Austin community.

The DNA is working with local artist Ryah Christensen, who produced the Rosewood-Zaragosa mosaic, to put together the NPP proposal submission. While we can’t guarantee artist selection, our intent is for Ryah to be the artist for the project.

The NPP funds up to 70% of the cost of approved art projects and allows the remaining costs to be covered through community-provided volunteer hours, both time spent on the art project itself and time spent in other volunteer activities that directly serve the community, such as park cleanup, through in-kind donations of materials and services, or through cash donations.

For the Rosewood-Zaragosa Neightborhood Center, artist Ryah created a 7’x7′ tile mosaic mounted in a free-standing frame (see image below right).

For the size of project we envision, about $15,000.00, the city would cover about 70% of the cost. Between participation in the tile-making workshops and other community-directed volunteer work (including community-focused activities like park cleanup and It’s My Park Day) there should be no problem meeting the remaining 30% contribution.

Our plan is to submit a proposal to the Neighborhood Partnering Program in October (proposals can be submitted twice a year in June and October).

The proposal requires a reasonably complete design for the piece.

This presents a challenge as the mosaic we envision will emerge dynamically from the contributions of community tile makers as guided by the artist.

To meet this challenge we are soliciting tile submissions now to start building up a body of potential tiles from which we can start developing a general design and theme for the mosaic to then guide the final design.

See the second page of this newsletter for detailed submission instructions and example tiles.