An artist-owned mosaic supply shop, community classroom & artist studio

Snelling Avenue Mosaic Planter Project

In the summer of 2006, the Hamline Midway Coalition received a STAR grant through the City of Saint Paul to beautify Snelling Avenue in collaboration with Mosaic on a Stick. The plan was for members of the community to create 170 mosaic medallions (10" in diameter) to cover 10 concrete planters on the Avenue. Our good friends at the Coalition recruited and organized a team of neighborhood volunteers that went through a basic mosaic training program at the Stick, empowering this group of volunteers to staff community open studio sessions for making medallions. And guess what? It's working! Even better than we could've hoped! New people show up at each open studio session. People come back with their friends (and neighbors and kids and co-workers and students) to take part in the fun. Anyone can participate (and it doesn't cost anything either!) & people have been happily surprised at the results thus far. And you wanna know what the best part is? Ok, so there are lots of best parts, but we'll just give you the highlights. At least 75 people (and those are just the ones that we can see and are easy to count) have contributed to the Planter Project in some way since it began in August. The time commitment is small and the payoff is big. So many people have said things like, "I've always wanted to learn how to do this" and "wow " I didn't know I could do this " I'm not artistic at all, donchya know" and other things that make us smile really big. Because this is community art in action. People coming together to create art. And in this case, the art that's being created is permanently installed in this neighborhood of living, breathing, working, coffee-drinking-at-Gingko's people. Who knows what this neighborhood will come up with next?