Artwork: "Children at Play" (Josie Gonzalez Albright)

"My initial submission for this project was a sketchy idea showing children playing in a park or playground against a swirling background. I sketched and photographed children over a six-month period in various stages of play in parks, playgrounds, outside, and inside. Soon this evolved into a study of how children move into and through space, stopping to observe, spinning, crouching, sliding, and running. My young son Billy was a readily available model, and can be seen in my sketches running after the birds and pointing at the kite. Other models were Liam and Madeline Galvin who were inspirations for the swing and bench designs. My visits to the Woodlawn area, with its extensive park surroundings, provided much visual inspiration as well.

During this time I also met with Willet Fabricators in Philadelphia to understand how to design work for fabricated glass. Experimenting with these images, I created collages with silhouette-like figures and marbleized and handmade colored papers. I increased the scale of the children to fill each window frame. For fabrication in the faceted glass, I wanted a lot of clear glass to be used that would capture the transparent quality of the children's figures. Warm shadows were created by using fritte glass crystals that were fused over the glass allowing for more flexibility and detail with the material and adding a bubbly, raised texture to the figures. Lots of clear glass also allows for light from adjacent colored glass pieces to spill over and create exciting, new color combinations as the sunlight moves through the station each day.

I worked with the architects' measurements from the beginning, visualizing how these images would fit into the 15 designated window spaces for this project. Later, as measurements were corrected, the intended five window designs at the center were changed to four instead to allow for a wider window width that would better complement the look of the fabricated glass. What you see here on view are 13 of the 14 window designs.

In November 2005, nine of the fourteen windows were installed at the Woodlawn Avenue Station, with the remaining five scheduled for installation in the spring of 2006." -- Josie Gonzalez Albright. Source: cuny.edu.