Daltile Helping with the Healing in Uvalde, TX
Helping with the Healing in Uvalde?
Note: The following is a preview feature from the winter 2022 issue of The Scoop, the quarterly printed magazine for Dal-Tile team members.
The tragedy of the Robb Elementary School shooting in May 2022 forever changed the community of Uvalde, Texas, but a grass-roots project involving art and ceramic tiles is designed to help with the healing, and Dal-Tile played a part in making the project happen.
“The ‘Love for Uvalde’ memorial tile painting project offered a way for the victims’ families and their neighbors in Uvalde to share messages of love, remembrance and honor for the victims,” explained Sales Project Coordinator?Joshua Jackson.
The project organizer is a current Dal-Tile customer: Gail Schomisch, co-owner of All Fired Up, a paint-your-own pottery studio in Las Vegas. Schomisch and her colleagues put together a memorial tile painting event in the wake of the largest mass shooting in American history: the Route 91 Harvest Festival, which occurred nearby around the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in October 2017. The tiles painted became a part of a permanent memorial to the victims.
“Gail and the owners of five other paint-your-own-pottery studios around the country were also very moved by the Robb Elementary School shooting; they wanted to try to coordinate a similar memorial tile painting project for the people affected in Uvalde,” Jackson said.
A gift of tile and another generous gesture
She reached out to Dal-Tile to inquire about a product donation and connected with Jackson, who manages Dal-Tile’s slow-moving and obsolete goods products. “I was able to locate 2,000 6”x6” bisque quarry tiles,” he said.
Schomisch was very appreciative, and Jackson put her into touch with El Paso Plant Distribution Center Manager?Zina Magnuson, where the tile was located. “When she explained the project and how the tiles would be used, I thought it was a really great cause,” Magnuson said. Schomisch offered to pick them up in El Paso but quickly figured out it wouldn’t be feasible for her do it, as it was around 2,000 lbs. of tile.
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“She was pretty frantic, as the project was completely being funded by her and the other pottery-painting studio owners (and GoFundMe donations),” Magnuson said. “I really wanted to help her, so I reached out to AAA Cooper, one of our partner logistics carriers, to explain the circumstances and ask if they did any charity work. They found a truck that was part of their regular outgoing shipment that would be heading to the Uvalde area and kindly said they would do it on behalf of the project.
“When we let her know that we’d found a way to get the product to the painting events, she was absolutely ecstatic! She was so happy we went out of our way to help.”
Pieces of a patchwork mural of love and reverence
The partner carrier transported Dal-Tile’s donated tiles from the El Paso PDC, and during a weekend in Uvalde in late October participants at three tile painting sessions were able to sit, relax and paint a tile to express their heartfelt messages and feelings for the victims, their families, Robb Elementary students and the community.
The tiles decorated at the event will be painted with kiln-fired ceramic glazes that will never fade or degrade and then be returned to city leaders for oversight and safekeeping for a future permanent mural display — to form a patchwork mural of individual messages of love and reverence.
“I’ve never had the privilege to be a part of something like this,” Jackson said. Magnuson agreed: “It meant a lot to be able to help.”
Photos courtesy of Love for Uvalde Memorial Tile Painting Project
After the donated tiles arrived in Uvalde through the efforts of Jackson and Magnuson, members of the community painted them with messages of love and remembrance to honor the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting.