Saguaro Kids - A Mural Series

11 April 2019

When I was researching who the artist was for the saguaro cactus murals, I noticed that he (Steve Farley) had also created a series of murals that were at the mall practically next door to the previous mall.  Yeah, it's a mall neighborhood.  But the murals are wonderful!!!

This series is called "Saguaro Kids: Oro Valley Gold."  Yes, this part of Tucson is called Oro Valley.  I'm guessing the children of any community are the gold - definitely children are seen as the wealth of the community in many cultures.

The murals are set up in the same way as the mosaics I talked about previously - the tiles are on some sort of board that is mounted in a steel structure, and there are two murals back to back in the structure.  But these are special murals.  In the words of the artist, "Each structure has a saguaro cactus on one side, and a local kid posing like that saguaro on the other side."

Really, these are absolutely whimsical and funny and art with a sense of humor!

Did you ever pretend to be a plant as a child?  Pose like a tree, or dance like a growing flower?  Play a vegetable in a school performance?  Or even the yoga pose, Tree.  This is exactly like that, but the children are being saguaros!!!

I loved it, walking from mural to mural, laughing at these four kids having so much fun being immortalized as giant cacti!!!  

So, big photos so you can see how wonderful these are.  And I'm posting the photos saguaro and then saguaro kid.

Oh, interesting fact - the artist, Steve Farley, is a well known photographer, artist, and State Senator from Arizona!!!  And yes, he uses a photo collage compiled of his photographs to then transfer the image onto unglazed tiles, which are then glazed and fired to create these mosaics.  

Links: www.tilography.com/privateart.htm 

www.tilography.com/

www.wescover.com/creator/steve-farley