I’ve spent thirty years making mosaic art at institutional scale — commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History, documented in Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and featured in a BBC documentary presented by Stephen Fry. I self-financed my magnum opus, the Anatomy Set in Stone series — 22 monumental mosaic works across a 160-foot gallery — the same way I have built everything: outside institutional structures, on my own terms. The Museum of Mosaic Environments is the next work.
On March 27, 2025, an executive order commanded the Smithsonian to remove all mention of trans women from its exhibits or lose federal funding. It was the opening move in a sustained assault on cultural institutions that has only escalated since.
I am a woman. I am also trans. Under the current administration, that distinction does not matter: any institution that shows my work, names my name, or acknowledges my existence does so at risk to its federal funding.
As of January 2026, I have spent ten years and $101,748.97 building Anatomy Set in Stone — 22 monumental mosaic works — as a touring museum exhibit. The work was ready. The institutions weren’t free to show it.
I will not wait to be erased. I decided to build.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments will open in Lisbon, Portugal. Not because I am running from the United States — but because I am running toward a culture that does not require institutions to choose between their funding and their integrity.
The founding of this museum is not a retreat. It is an argument, made in stone and mortar, about what culture is for.
I am not building a museum because it was the obvious next step. I am building it because it needs to exist and no one else is going to build it.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments will be the world’s first institution dedicated to the complete global history of mosaic art — from the cone mosaics of ancient Mesopotamia to the monumental public works of the present day, spanning every major cultural tradition on earth. Thirty galleries. A school of mosaic practice. Artist residencies. A visible production studio where visitors watch the work being made in real time.
The school is not a weekend workshop program. It is a full vocational and artistic training ground — passing down five millennia of accumulated artistic knowledge, training artists in community based practice, and creating an entry point into public art production for people who would not otherwise have access to it. Students leave with a command of technique, professional career skills, and the business literacy to defend their work and their livelihoods in the market. The MME trains artists who can sustain themselves.
The galleries do not move original works. They move the experience of them — through full-scale environmental reproduction, immersive spatial design, and scholarship that treats mosaic as what it has always been: fine art, not craft. This is an anti-colonial act. The fragments stay where they are. The knowledge travels.
I have spent ten years and over $100,000 of my own money building the proof of concept. I have 22 monumental works ready for the founding collection. I have 22 research reports documenting the structural conditions that made this institution necessary. I have a business model, a governance structure, and a location in active consideration.
What I am building next is the museum itself.
For ten years and $101,748.97 — entirely self-financed through the sale of other work — I built the proof. Anatomy Set in Stone is a series of 22 monumental mosaic works, each one a life-sized anatomical figure rendered in hand-cut marble, averaging over 600 hours of labor each. The series has been documented in Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, the National Library of Medicine’s Circulating Now, and exhibited at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY.
It was conceived as a touring museum exhibit. Covid shut the museums down. I doubled the size of the project. When they reopened, federal executive orders made the work politically toxic for any institution dependent on federal funding. I decided to build my own museum instead.
Anatomy Set in Stone will be the capstone exhibit of the Museum of Mosaic Environments — completed in the Visible Studio as live programming in the first years after opening, the final eight works made in front of an audience. The proof of concept becomes the founding collection.
La Siren III was commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History for their traveling exhibition Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids — one of the most widely toured exhibitions in the museum’s history. The New York Times called the show “a brilliant curatorial idea.” The New Yorker gave it “a mythical ten.” The piece has been shown in museums across the country and appeared in the BBC documentary Fantastic Beasts: A Natural History, presented by Stephen Fry.
When one of the world’s great natural history museums needs a mosaic artist, this is the level of work they commission. La Siren III is the institutional credibility argument made material.
Old Glory is a ten-by-sixteen-foot American flag assembled from over 20,000 Budweiser bottle caps, commissioned for the Stagecoach Music Festival — one of the largest country music festivals in the United States. It is the largest bottle cap work I have made, designed to function simultaneously as monumental artwork and selfie destination for a crowd of tens of thousands.
Yes, the irony that I made an enormous American flag and now feel compelled to build my museum across the Atlantic fucking slays me. But Old Glory proves something the MME will need at scale: I can execute large-format, corporate-sponsored, crowd-activated public art. The pop-up experium model the MME is developing for revenue draws directly from this — bottle cap mosaics, pop culture subjects, festival and brand activation at scale.
One of three mosaic panels created for Manly Career Academy High School in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, commissioned by the Chicago Public Art Group with support from Gallery 37 and the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development. I led a team of nine community youth through the design and production of 66 square feet of public mosaic — assisted by Caswell James and advised by veteran muralist Nina Smoot-Cain.
This project is the direct ancestor of the MME School of Mosaic. A detailed account of the project, written at the time, conveys how the learning experience included so much more than just mosaic technique. The methodology — community collaboration, intergenerational skill transfer, public art as civic investment — was developed here, in a high school in North Lawndale, two decades before the museum existed. The school already knows how to do this work. The MME gives it a permanent home.
This sign was the down payment on my first house and studio — and the story of how it came to be is the story of how I have always worked.
I was leasing the buildings with an option to buy when heavy snow collapsed the studio roof as I stood on it, frantically shoveling. I leapt to safety. Most of the art and tools inside were destroyed. The collapse severed the gas line; it couldn’t be repaired until the ground thawed. I spent an entire Michigan winter without heat or running water.
When the bank came to assess the damage, they commissioned a sign instead. I built something spectacular out of the wreckage and got a house out of it.
I have been doing this my entire career — meeting disaster with creativity, turning setbacks into commissions, building forward when everything says stop. The Museum of Mosaic Environments is the largest version of that instinct I have ever attempted.
The MME is not a vision in search of a plan. It is a plan in execution.
The institution will occupy a destination-scale building in Lisbon, Portugal — a city with one of the great living tile traditions in the world, a thriving cultural tourism economy, and a legal and cultural framework that does not require artists to choose between their identity and their livelihood. The location is not incidental. It is an argument.
The museum will house thirty galleries spanning six curatorial arcs — from the earliest cone mosaics of ancient Mesopotamia through Byzantine sacred art, Islamic geometric tradition, the monumental public works of the twentieth century, and the contemporary artists pushing the medium into new territory. A 40-foot diameter mosaic map of the world — the museum’s first commission, designed by the founder and produced in collaboration with mosaic artists across two continents — will present the global spread of mosaic across cultures and continents that mainstream art history has systematically excluded.
Adjacent to the galleries: a School of Mosaic offering vocational and artistic training, a residency program for artists working in the medium, and a Visible Studio where the public watches the work being made. The MME is not a place you visit and leave. It is a place where the art form lives.
The MME operates under a dual-entity structure: a nonprofit Foundation holding the mission and a for-profit Studios arm ensuring financial independence. Financial independence is not a concession to capitalism. It is the only condition under which an institution like this one maintains autonomy.
We are currently in active development — securing location, building the seed capital campaign, and completing the founding collection. The museum opens when the work is ready. The work is already underway.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments will present the complete global history of mosaic art across thirty galleries and six curatorial arcs — from the cone mosaics of ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary artists working in the medium today.
Every major cultural tradition is represented. Every gallery is designed as an immersive environment, not a display case. The visitor does not look at mosaic history. The visitor walks through it.
A full exhibition guide is in development. Follow our progress on Substack for curatorial updates as the program takes shape.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments is being built right now — outside institutional permission, outside federal funding, outside the structures that have historically decided which art and which artists matter.
If what you’ve read on this page moved you, there are two ways to stay close to what’s being built.
The seed capital campaign launches soon. When it does, every contribution — at any level — goes directly toward opening the world’s first museum dedicated to the complete global history of mosaic art. You’ll hear about it first if you’re on the list.
In the meantime, the studio collection is available. Every work sold between now and opening day supports the move, the build, and the mission.
