Beautex Playground
A World of Welcome
TEEN MOSAIC CAMP
The Beautex Playground mosaic is over 360 square feet and was accomplished through a collaboration between Lebanon Valley Council on the Arts, PA Council on the Arts through Millersville South Central PaARTners, Make a Difference Lebanon, and the Lebanon School District Art Faculty.
Prior to our 2-week summer Mosaic Camp, I attended a block party near the playground and conducted over 50 surveys of neighbors asking about potential themes for the mosaic. Those neighboring the playground had a desire to reclaim the space which had gained a negative reputation related to previous illegal activity and past violence occuring there. We settled on a theme of “A World of Welcome.” I collaborated with art teachers at Lebanon High School to have students create over 40 custom made tiles for the mosaic addressing the theme.
With 16 teen participants, our mosaic camp spent the first week learning how to make mosaics and creating personal pieces. We discussed the theme and the teens drafted out a design for the wall. I challenged each of them to choose a “word of welcome” to tile on the wall. We installed and grouted the mosaic in the second week of camp. After learning how to tile the wall, the teens invited friends, family, and neighbors out to help tile. The wall truly became a place of welcome as over 70 volunteers from a range of ages and races worked together to create this beautiful installation.
“All around now are barriers and gates and fences that draw lines around gifts and possibilities and resources and access… Here is the news. Out beyond the world of exclusion and rejection and hostility, there is on offer a world of welcome that sees the other not as threat or competitor but as cohort on the pilgrimage of humanity. That alternative world of welcome is signed by bread and by wine; but it is known by lives that reach out and touch in order to heal and transform.” — Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own
