Special Events
Special Events
Celebrate Marina Park’s renewal July 8 at 10 am
with neighborhood gathering to unveil new glass mosaic
Meet your neighbors and the Ventura Police Department’s K9s and enjoy refreshments and music as the City of Ventura celebrates new improvements to Marina Park, located at Pierpont Boulevard and Greenock Lane, with an unveiling of a new glass mosaic at the park entrance on Saturday, July 8, at 10 AM.
Mayor Carl Morehouse will be on hand to unveil the beautiful artwork designed by City’s Senior Civil Engineering Tech Bernie Heckenlively and created in glass mosaic by artist Larissa Strauss. This amenity was funded as part of the greater capital improvements to Marina Park’s infrastructure, which also included new landscaping, refurbishing the children’s play ship San Salvador, beach stabilization and an upgraded Pierpont Lift Station for wastewater.
The designer has named the 26-foot-long concrete signage wall that, varies in height from four
to six feet, “The Wave.” It is “textured to indicate the sand that greets the surf” and invites the viewer to “ride the swells.” A marine scene in glass mosaic depicts two pelicans, inspired by Dixon Merrith’s “Pelican Poem,” which the designer fondly recalls “Dad recited to me as a child, just as my grandfather used to recite it to him”. The artwork celebrates “the pelicans’ presence on this planet for 40 million years, their magnificent wingspans that can reach 6 feet, and that our pelicans, Pelicanus Occidentalis, came back from the brink of extinction after the clean up of poisons in our environment.”
“I love to watch their aerial formations and maneuvers,” continues Heckenlively. On “a calm warm spring day, have you ever noticed that you can see the green grass growing on the Channel Islands from the mainland? In the mural, created by artist Larissa Strauss, you can. The pieces of glass she was able to find were incredibly close to the pastel colors [of the design] that it made this project even more exciting.”
“ Each piece of the glass mosaic is individually cut into the shape I want,” said Larissa Strauss about her first public artwork “and comprises thousands and thousands of pieces” over the artwork’s 100 square-foot dimensions. “The largest piece is perhaps 2 x 2 inches and the smallest are mere shreds or slivers of color.” The artist, largely self-taught, has been working in the stained glass medium for over six years and has her studio at the Bell Arts Factory. Her work, exhibited in a sold out show at Fox Fine Jewelry in January, is popularly collected throughout Ventura County.
For more information contact: Denise Sindelar, Public and Visual Art Supervisor, at 805.658.4793 or dsindelar@ci.ventura.ca.us. Reporters can contact designer Bernie Heckenlively at bheckenlively@ci.ventura.ca.us and artist Larissa Strauss at lgstrauss@yahoo.com or 907.1473. This release is available under the pressroom link at www.cityofventura.net.