Tieton Mosaic created Elements, Milwaukee as a tribute to the many diverse ideas that make Milwaukee and the region as a whole unique and special.

“Milwaukeeans are very proud of their community and that was really easy to pick up on when talking to people from the area. As I was doing my research, I kept learning all sorts of little factoids about the city, and that really inspired me in the design of the mosaic.”

Found within Elements, Milwaukee are nods to those factoids.

Byzantine style smalti is used in the first section to create the image of fireworks, representing Milwaukee’s nickname as the City of Festivals. Beer glasses are created with mortised flat glass as a hat-tip to the city’s brewing history.

The middle section captures the remarkable graphic quality of the local Woodland Duck and the lakes and waterways that are so important to the area.

“The first nod to the water is an abstract image underneath the duck. We used transparent colored glass and opaque colored glass to create a kind of shimmering quality that you would see like when taking a rowboat over the water. Next to that is what looks like ice shards on a frozen lake. We used stacked shards of translucent white glass.

The next section shows gears representing Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s long history of industrial innovation and manufacturing. The word QWERTY is present to reflect the fact that the typewriter and the keyboard layout was first patented in 1868.

The final panel shows Royal Catch-flies flowers, that are native to Wisconsin with the background tiles made from variegated green glass.

“It was a very fun project to work on and I am very proud of it. The staff at Tieton Mosaic was sad to see it leave the studio because the enjoyed working on it so much.”