George Woodman's ceramic tile installation, 1984, Delavan-Canisius College Station, NFTA-Metro, Buffalo, NY: From the Archives...
In 1984, George Woodman’s first public commission in ceramic tile was installed in the Delavan-Canisius NFTA-Metro station in Buffalo, New York. Three walls in the station’s mezzanine—measuring 11 feet high by 72 feet long in total—are still today covered in pattern made from 8 inch square tiles, greeting riders as they pass from the trains to the street. “The mural is based upon a modular system,” Woodman wrote, using "six basic elements and their six reversed, or mirror, images. These can be combined in a great many ways. The modules have been executed in twelve colors of line on a white ground and in white lines on three tones of gray. In all then, there are 180 different units used.” His intention was to “make a wall that could be viewed as a series of loosely related episodes which could be enjoyed by the casual passerby. The mural is rich in greatly varied detail which derives from the nearly infinite possibilities of combination among the several modules. An effort has been made to avoid any big, static, over-all composition which would need to be seen or ‘taken in' from a single view.”
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