Friday my friend April and I went on a field trip to the Watts Towers created by Italian immigrant Sabato "Simon" Rodia. Rodia was a tile layer by trade. He used the same technique on his towers as Antoni Gaudi used in Park Güell in Barcelona: Pique Assiette which is the application of decorations by embedding carefully chosen shards and objects into drying mortar during the building process. You can also see examples of this technique on the exterior of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. 
Unfortunately, the towers are currently under renovation so we couldn't go through the sculptures, but we got a pretty good view walking around the exterior.
The director of the Watts Towers Arts Center was incredibly enthusiastic and friendly and in all ways awesome. She was genuinely sad that we came at a time that their gallery was between exhibits, so she more than made up for it by introducing us to one of the artists, Augustine Aguirre, who was dropping off or picking up a box full of wire sculptures that looked like butterflies. We missed some show!
April noticed these sunglasses hanging between the scaffolding and one of the three towers. Could it be a member of the restoration team added his own piece of ephemera to the sculpture?
Hearts are a prevalent motif in the sunken relief as well as in the free-standing sculpture. Rodia immigrated to Pennsylvania with his brother who died in a mining accident shortly thereafter. Later he married and had three children, but the marriage ended badly and Rodia never spoke to his ex-wife again. Perhaps this recurrence of love lost explains the frequency of the figure of hearts in his work. Now, for the Heart of Watts Project, R. Judson Powell creates unique, handcrafted glass mosaic hearts, inspired by the Watts Towers and the heart motif that is scattered throughout them.
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