‘A wonderful way to welcome people’: Shelburne Falls mosaic sign project inches closer to completion

SHELBURNE FALLS — The aged sign welcoming drivers to Shelburne Falls is one step closer to a mosaic makeover.

Volunteers gathered at the Shelburne Falls Senior Center on Friday to grout the five panels of mosaics that will mark the entrance to the village. These are the finishing touches for the mosaic after Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School students helped artist Cynthia Fisher piece it together about a month ago.

“The beauty of this project is that it’s a community project — the community has built these panels,” Ashfield resident Amy Shapiro said on Friday as she and around 15 other locals got their hands dirty with grout. “It’s such a wonderful way to welcome people.”

Fisher hopes to see the sign installed before the fall, but she said the timeline depends on the fundraising campaign. Although the Shelburne and Buckland cultural councils have funded $850 of the project, Fisher stressed that the fundraising effort has a long way to go. Those who are interested in helping push the project past the finish line can donate to the GoFundMe at tinyurl.com/3s55eeu9.

Before mosaics were her medium of choice, Fisher, a Buckland resident, was an illustrator for children’s books. About 26 years ago, she tried out mosaics and never looked back.

“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t stop doing this,” Fisher recalled. “It’s a medium that totally resonates with who I am as an artist.”

Instead of blending together paint to create the perfect hue, mosaics require the artist to make the best of the materials at hand, Fisher said.

“Say you don’t even have the right color for something. You have to make do and figure out another way to do it, and in the end, it ends up being more creative because of those limitations,” she said. “You don’t need to know where you’re going with something — you can just do it and let it evolve. As an artist, that is huge. … You can let them lead you and you get out of the way.”

Until 2008, Fisher crafted mosaics for customers’ homes, filling in features like kitchen backsplashes. Then, the recession hit.

“That work dried up immediately, so it was like, ‘OK, what are you going to do?'” Fisher recalled.

Her friend Shapiro recommended she switch gears to grant-funded community projects. Since then, Fisher has crafted several mosaics that color the streets of Shelburne and Buckland. She called the mosaic for the village entrance her “last hurrah.”

“It’s a way of giving thanks to this beautiful area that’s now my home,” Fisher said. 

When asked why she wanted to include the community in the artistic process, Fisher gestured to the locals crafting and chatting around her.

“Because of the energy you feel in this room, because people respond so much to it,” Fisher said. “It’s truly a labor of love for me, but I also feel like this is something the community is going to really appreciate and take pleasure in.”

“My family can drive by it and say, ‘Hey, Grandma did that!'” Lynda Leitner of Shelburne Falls said as she grouted the first panel. “This just announces us, in my opinion, as an artistic community.”

Below the letters, “The Village of Shelburne Falls,” in the first panel, pastel pink and blue tiles fill a sunset above a recreation of the Bridge of Flowers in the second panel. The third panels extends the illustration with a reflection of the bridge in the Deerfield River. The fourth panel reads “5 miles ahead” above the fifth panel, which marks the year of the project, surrounded by flowers.

Many volunteers described the mosaic panels as the proper introduction to the village.

“It’s such a special place,” said Rita Jaros of Shelburne Falls, “and these are the kinds of things that make it special.”