Visitors to the Leinweber Building on U-M's North Campus are greeted by Waterfall Abstraction, an 11-by-7-foot mural made of 308 six-by-six-inch tiles. The piece was commissioned through a gift from Professor Emeritus John Laird and Ann Alpern, whose earlier stained-glass gift to the nearby Beyster Building inspired this companion work.

Nawal Motawi, a Stamps School of Art & Design alumna, based the design on a drawing by Eugene Masselink, a Taliesin Fellow under Frank Lloyd Wright. She had long admired the drawing but found it too intricate for a single tile; this commission finally offered a canvas large enough. Nawal streamlined the original's linework, arranged the composition to follow the building's stairwell, and expanded Masselink's blue-and-tan palette with deep yellow set against a black ground. As she put it, "With a black background, the design really sings."

The mural was made using the Cuenca technique. Veteran Motawi artists Dee Dillaha and Stacey Weid hand-piped raised clay lines onto each tile, creating wells that our glaze artists filled with color. Every tile was marked for position and orientation so the installation would come together seamlessly on site.

Waterfall Abstraction joins Motawi installations at UM-Dearborn, Michigan Medicine, and the Michigan Union, and is open to the public.