Seattle CityClub is thrilled to announce that award-winning artist Yeggy Michael will create an art installation for a new festival that celebrates civic life for all Seattleites.
Flag Day Festival: Celebrating Seattle’s Civic Life on June 14 is a free public event which will feature a naturalization ceremony for new citizens, a “sworn again” oath-taking for current citizens, free food representing diverse ethnic cuisines and local musicians. We’re taking the iconic American holiday, Flag Day, and amplifying it with a focus on celebrating our diverse community, citizenship, and all the ways we build civic health together. With roots in Eritrea, Africa, Michael’s talent and vision will help define this festival and help represent our growing community. Michael’s public mosaics and murals can be seen throughout Seattle including Pike Place Market, Central Cinema and Greenbridge housing project.
Artist Statement:
My vision is to provoke questions about natural cycles, provide a sense of place and to reflect on the movement of time. My paintings, I consider personal works though they are for others. They are positive contacts for vibrant thoughts and spiritual moment. I use mosaic to illustrate the unity and lusciousness of diversity. While the use of mosaic creates a metaphor for these cycles with pieces and rocks in fragments, my mosaics are public art
To provide a sense of place for my audience to connect with, I reinterpret the abstract and reality of the cyclical nature of things. I integrate my green approach to art with growing a design solution as part of a team. I integrate architectural structures and mosaic works, using recycled stone, glass, aluminum, and ceramic with ease. Sharing my work with spaces of infrastructure is the synthesis of a long-term relationship, and embedded in it will be this very moment in history that prolongs its memory in our minds.