The walk from the Fruitvale BART station to the Institute of Mosaic Arts in Jingletown takes only about 10 minutes, but when you arrive at the 5,000- square foot purple building covered with glitzy glass, it’s like a whole different colorful world. It’s not only the school that’s smothered in mosaics-- as though the creativity inside can’t be contained, the buildings around the school, founded in 2005, shimmer with mosaics as well.  

Rachel Rodi, a teacher at the institute, thinks the school has helped bring together the community.  

“Even when we were working on the first one, people want to stop and talk about it,” she says. “They’d ride by on their bikes and ask us what we were doing. I think it makes people feel safer and more connected with the community.  

Mosaics have definitely had an impact on Rodi’s life. In 2004, she felt she’d come to an impasse in her work with ceramics and didn’t know what to do next. At the time, Rodi had a live/work studio on the same street in Jingletown as Laurel True, a muralist and the founder of the Institute of Mosaic Arts. True was working on a mural mosaic outside of Rodi’s kitchen window and when Rodi saw it, she knew she wanted to make mosaics, too.  

“The light would reflect on it and there was this sense of magic and movement,” Rodi said. “There’s something about a mural and how it’s created with brokenness and mixed media and it’s just sort of beyond.” 

Rodi began studying mosaics intensely. Now she has her own business doing installations. Teaching at the institute, she sees her students become as enamored with mosaics and murals as she is.  

“They just light up,” she says. “It’s so easy to integrate people with an art background or without an art background. Mosaics are so forgiving. In the glass mosaics class, for example, we use mostly stained glass, and there’s so much variation and beauty, you don’t need to be an expert to create something beautiful.” 

True, like Rodi, was an artist working in other media when she visited a friend in Philadelphia 20 years ago and saw Isaiah Zagar’s work.

“It was what we would call now folk art or outsider art, and his creative process totally drew me in,” True says. “I’d seen mosaics before but it wasn’t until I saw this totally renegade all over the place stuff permanently set into walls that I knew I wanted to do that. I was a fabric artist, and so it was sort of a natural progression.” 

True finds, like Rodi, that most people feel they can enter in to mosaic making easily—or more easily than they can with, say, painting or drawing.  

“I don’t what it is that scares people off with being creative,” she says. “People have these ideas about being good or not good at art or math, it seems like. You don’t hear people say, ‘I’m not good at history.’”  

But there’s something about mosaics that makes people who don’t think of themselves as artistic feel they could do one, True says. Besides the accessibility, she believes mosaics satisfy a need to create order. True, who teaches part time in New Orleans, says class attendance skyrocketed there after Katrina, and the same thing happened with her classes in Oakland after Sept. 11.  

“There’s something about the piecemeal approach and the metaphor of smashing things and then bringing order to chaos,” she said. “There are so many ways to approach mosaics. Some people approach it as a right brain activity and some as a left brain activity. There’s something for everyone.” 

Along with being a form of expression, True says mosaics offer a practical way for people to make money being creative. True teaches classes in the business of mosaics and all around town she sees installations by people who have gone to her institute.  

True, who has studied in Italy, Turkey and Senegal, loves to travel. When she was 19, she went to Ghana in West Africa to work on a volunteer project. She has been going back to the same town for more than 20 years, teaching mosaic arts and now facilitating a community mosaic project there.

One of True's most recent projects is working with kids in West Oakland and Kenya on something called Woven Stories, where the groups will collaborate to design community projects, such as benches in West Oakland and a mosaic mural in at a Rudolph Steiner school in Kenya.  

Glynnis Kaye, a resident artist at the institute, says True’s energy is inspirational.  

“She’s got a magnetic type of personality,” she says. “She looks at things in ways I wouldn’t look at them. She’s not a talker, she’s a doer. She makes things happen.” 

Classes at the Institute for Mosaic Arts in January include Introduction to Glass Mosaics, Architectural Applications and Exterior and Garden Applications. The schedule is here. 

About Emily Wilson

Emily is a radio, print and web reporter. She has written stories for KALW, NPR, KQED, The East Bay Express, Alternet, Diverse and Edutopia, among others. She teaches at City College of San Francisco, works at KCBS and writes about arts for the Examiner.com.