El Jardín de los Sueños

When you stand in the main foyer at Sonia Sotomayor Elementary, you are about to enter a very special place — one that teaches you how to enter another world deeply, to symbolize and communicate with your Spanish-speaking neighbors, some who live here and some who live half a world away. Looking through the two sets of glass entry doors is much like looking through the cobalt blue geometry that frames the mosaic

— they both suggest perceived windows.

The artwork is made from approximately 10,000 pieces of hand-cut and fired ceramic tile, created by Mosaika, and offers an additional invitation to reflect on this idea of looking inside and out — to travel the distance between time, landscape, and cultures through language, color, symbol, and texture. Organized around an Andean cross, the Chakana, the mosaic celebrates Latin America today by including numerous pre-Columbian antecedents. Two Mayan glyphs aligned along the center vertical axis —

juun

and

winik

— translate as “book” and “person”: two important ideas about what a school is and does. Some symbols included here appear more than 5,000 years ago in the archaeological record. Images of stars and constellations celebrate our ancient connections to those who have gone before us. Throughout the mosaic are images of prairie flowers — Columbines — which offer a metaphor for education that blossoms and unfolds into the very fabric of our lives.

Background

I have lived and traveled for many years in Latin America. From refugee camps, to war zones and orphanages, to watching Halley’s Comet from a high Andean plaza, canoeing in the Amazon rainforest, paragliding in the Atacama desert, and climbing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán — I have tried here to express my love for the amazing complexities and interwoven realities of the Latin American people and landscape.

A word of deep gratitude and thanks to United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for contributing her words of wisdom to our children in this artwork.