BGuthrie Photos: TN -- Nashville -- Fannie Mae Dees Park

TN -- Nashville -- Fannie Mae Dees Park:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.149.233.72 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] FMDEES_100925_05.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] FMDEES_100925_06.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] FMDEES_100925_08.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[4] FMDEES_100925_09.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] FMDEES_100925_12.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] FMDEES_100925_14.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[7] FMDEES_100925_16.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] FMDEES_100925_17.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] FMDEES_100925_20.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[10] FMDEES_100925_22.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[11] FMDEES_100925_23.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[12] FMDEES_100925_26.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[13] FMDEES_100925_27.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[14] FMDEES_100925_30.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Description of Subject Matter: Fannie Mae Dees Park (aka "Dragon Park"): Pedro Silva's mosaic sea serpent is is the centerpiece of this accessible park for all children.

Pedro P. Silva Extended Biography:
Pedro P. Silva developed a technique that allowed hundreds of untrained people to participate directly in a mosaic art project that achieved unity of design and pleasing aesthetics. The process had the added benefit of overcoming class and economic barriers to instill a strong sense of community and shared values among participants. Mr. Silva began working in public art that involved communities in the 1960’s and continued through the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s to refine techniques that were adopted by artists all over the world. Throughout his career, he has worked with and studied many art forms: sculpture, painting, mosaics, ceramics and electronic music. Mr. Silva now focuses mostly on his personal work, combining traditional and contemporary artistic media.
Born in Chile, Mr. Silva studied law and diplomacy at the Universidad de Chile. However, he turned to the formal study of painting and sculpture, and in 1959, he earned a scholarship to come to the United States and study at the Arts Students League and Columbia University. In 1960, he earned anther scholarship to Mexico, where he studied mural and fresco techniques with a disciple of Diego Rivera, as well as sculpture, painting and photography at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. Returning to New York, Mr. Silva became involved with HARYOU ART in Harlem, teaching sculpture to a group of very talented young adults, who were high school drop-outs. When he started working with the Henry Street Settlement, his career in public art began. Mr. Silva built playground sculptures for many sites in Harlem and the Lower East Side of Manhattan with the hands-on participation of members of the community.
In 1972-74, Mr. Silva conceived, designed and constructed a serpentine, free-form bench surrounding the Ulysses S. Grant National Memorial (Grant’s Tomb) on Riverside Drive and 122nd St. in New York City. This project, which took three summers to complete, involved six professional artists and over 3,000 members of the local community who ranged from Columbia University professors to street gang members and from small children to the elderly. Iron bars formed a core structure that was covered with mesh wire and cement and then completely decorated with mosaic tiles. In order for the maximum number of people to participate but still achieve a unified aesthetic, Mr. Silva devised a method for people to create their designs on brown paper, arrange the tiles over it, and then cover the design with clear contact paper. These individual mosaic art works could then be stored by theme (sea creatures, dinosaurs, mythological beings, flowers, etc.) until a suitable place on the bench was determined by the artist. The resulting public artwork remains, protected and appreciated by the community that helped create it.
Throughout the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, Mr. Silva employed the techniques he refined at Grant’s Tomb to create other works with community participation. Primarily, he worked in New York City schools and parks. In 1979, the Craigmillar Festival Society invited him to create a giant play sculpture in Edinburgh, Scotland. This project took three months and resulted in a 65 foot long by 20 foot high “Mermaid Fountain” covered with tile mosaics and included a “paddling pool.” This working class neighborhood had very little experience with formal art, and the project was a significant part of local efforts toward community building and revitalization of the neighborhood. In this project he worked, as usual, with a team of 4 local artists, that after they did their own mosaic projects, spreading this knowledge and technique all over Scotland.
In 1980, the Metro Parks and Recreation of Nashville, Tennessee, invited Mr. Silva to design and construct a play sculpture in the Fannie Mae Dees Park. He created a 200-foot-long “Sea Serpent” that undulates in and out of the ground, which serves as its “water.” The arches of the serpent’s body have tire swings hanging from them. The tail curves around a playground area and forms a bench and climbing sculpture. Tile mosaic designs cover most of the structure, and more than 1,000 people helped create and execute these designs. The following year the Nashville community invited Mr. Silva back to create three more art works: the “Baby Serpent,” the Cardiovascular Center Mural, and another mosaic mural for the Eakin School. Again he worked with local artists, who did their own projects afterwards, the “Sea Serpent’s wake” inspired many other artists to do their own creations using his technique.
In the summer of 1984, Mr. Silva traveled to Chicago to design, direct, and execute a tile mosaic mural, “Chicago’s Dream” in the Fullerton and Central Park Symons YMCA Building, under the sponsorship of the Youth Service Project and the Chicago Mural Group. Once more this was the inspiration for many local artists to work with mosaics in their own projects.
In the fall of 1993, Mr. Silva was invited to Barcelona, Spain, to design and execute a mosaic mural in the new 45-story high hotel Le Arts (the tallest building in Spain). It is on the background wall of the Bar and the Snack Bar on the first terrace.
In 1994 he conceived, designed and constructed a tile mosaic mural in Intermediate School 246 in Brooklyn, New York, with the participation of students, teachers, parents, and staff. It is 25 feet wide by 30 feet tall and depicts life in the Caribbean basin. The centerpiece is a carnival mask surrounded by the sun and marine life, including fish, plants, sand, rocks, and coral. The wide border contains several islands, representing diverse Caribbean nations, where many of the community participants were born.
Since 1986, Mr. Silva has expanded his artistic media expertise to include advanced technology. He took an intensive course in audio engineering to learn the latest techniques in digital recording and synchronization of sound to image (both video and film). He has done extensive work creating electronic music with computers and synthesizers. He also is involved in computer art, developing 2-D and 3-D ideas (painting/sculpture), as well as animation.
In 2003, he was commissioned to restore a playground (“Animal Park”) that he created and built in 1965-66 with the participation of children and community volunteers, under the auspices of the Henry Street Settlement in 40 Montgomery Street in the Lower East Side, New York City.

The above was from http://www.psilvastudios.com/ps_biography.html
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
2010 photos: My office at the main Commerce Department building closed in October and I was shifted out to the Bureau of the Census in Suitland Maryland. It's good to have a job of course but that killed being able to see basically any cultural events during the day. There's basically nothing of interest that you can see around the Census building. Overnight trips this year: Civil War Trust conferences (Lexington, KY and Nashville, TN), and my 5th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles). Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs until the third one broke and I started sending them back for repairs. Then I used either the Fuji S200EHX or the Nikon D90 until I got the S100fs ones repaired. At the end of the year I bought a Nikon D5000 but I returned it pretty quickly. Number of photos taken this year: about 395,000..
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].