Project Description

This artist team worked with project architects to form seating areas, planter walls and fountains which together form an inviting corner park. Surfaces are covered in colorful ceramic tile, most of it hand-painted and/or sculptural. While the artists worked together on the trio of fountains as a concept and in the common use of ceramic tile as a material, each fountain also reflects the individual artist’s style.

Artist Statement

“We thought of the fountain as a metaphor for life.”

About the Artist

ELSA FLORES was born in Las Vegas, educated at Art Center College of Design and Cal State LA, and has exhibited extensively throughout the region.

ROBERTO GIL DE MONTES was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts from Otis Art Institute, and is currently a professor of art at UCLA. Among many other solo and group exhibitions, Gil de Montes was included in the prestigious Hispanic Art in the US: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors which toured the country in the late 1980s. Many themes are found in Gil de Montes’ work—his Mexican origins, his life in Echo Park, Mexican popular art, the tradition of retablos and ex-voto paintings, and the unexpected.

PETER SHIRE is a Los Angeles native who was educated at Chouinard Art Institute and was a member of the internationally renowned Memphis Group during the 1980s. His work is in many museum collections throughout this country and abroad. Shire has taught art and design courses at a number of Los Angeles’s art and architecture schools. He has maintained a home and studio in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles for many years. Shire’s public sculptures can be found in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and in Los Angeles at Elysian Park, and the Academy Village Housing Project in North Hollywood, CA.