Donation wall is a work of art
Beautiful displays of glass will soon welcome visitors to the Patient Tower at Butler Memorial Hospital.
Butler Health System Foundation is working with the Pittsburgh Glass Center to create a display to honor those who donated to the Patient Tower at Butler Memorial Hospital and to show a photographic history of the hospital.
Ground breaking for the new tower took place in June 2008, with construction ending in July 2010.
Heather McElwee, executive director of the Pittsburgh Glass Center, was excited to work with the health system.
“The staff at Butler Hospital has been so forward thinking about the whole placement of art in the hospital and making it a welcome environment,” McElwee said.
The hospital has been working with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts to have local artists' work placed throughout the hospital. The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts also works with the Pittsburgh Glass Center.
“They brought us some samples of the glass and everybody that we presented to really liked that concept,” said Kris Anne Bowser, development specialist for the Butler Health System Foundation.
The donor wall will have more than 40 pieces of glass displaying 375 names.
“The tiles will be mounted at different heights off of the wall, some will be really close into the wall and others will be out and overlapping each other,” said McElwee.
Each tile takes about 10 hours of working time and 24 hours kiln time to make.
The artists begin by cutting out two panels of glass and placing them in the kiln to be fused together.
Fusing makes the glass thicker and stronger.
“It takes them up to about 1,500 degrees to fuse them together,” said Becky Smith, artist and instructor for the Pittsburgh Glass Center.
Smith is one of six artists who worked on the project.The donor pieces have light blue bottoms with small decorative shapes.To get the shapes, the artists sprinkle little shards of glass on top of the panels before they are sent into the kiln.“When it goes in and it's cold, it's very textured. By heating it, it all melts smooth and flat and that's how you get a nice clean tile,” McElwee said.After the piece cools, it is shaped into a perfect square by being ground and polished.The name of each donor is made into a photo mask that is applied to the front of the glass so only the names are visible.Each sheet is then sandblasted so the names are etched into the glass and appear frosted.“It's basically serving two purposes: paying appreciation to those who donated and a beautiful piece on its own,” Smith said. “It's great.”The timeline display has nine 11-by-17-inch photos and 15 5-by-7-inch photos.Cheryl Ramsey and Mark Edwards of the Butler Health System searched through old photographs at the hospital, in the Butler Eagle, at the Butler Historical Society and the Butler Library to make a visual history of the hospital's progress.“There will be major photos of actual structures and then we tried to find photos that related to the building, but were more of human interest,” Ramsey said.The photos were scanned and sent digitally to In Plain Sight art studio where they were made into decals.The decals were then placed on the glass sheets that had already been fused together and sent into the kiln at the center.“They're not painted and couldn't be scraped off the surface,” McElwee said. “It's really bonded with the glass.”Some of the photographs were too poor resolution to be placed on the glass, but much of the hospital's history is still displayed.“The oldest photograph I think is of the Butler County General Hospital and that's on the other side of the viaduct and was open in 1898,” Edwards said. “That was the first hospital in town.”The new donor wall display and photographic timeline will be unveiled to donors at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at a celebration event.
