“The POP project, an acronym for Pockets of Perception - We Are One Community, focuses on young people, encouraging multicultural understanding while cultivating their creativity and investment in the community through the creation of public art,” says the slogan for the POP project.
Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly came up with the idea of the Intermodal Passenger Rail Station and pictured it to look identical to the Henry Ford train station. A ceremony for the $28.2 million station was held on April 10th inside the Henry Ford Greenfield Village. The Mayor invited 80 key leaders, including U.S. Senator Carl Levin of Dearborn Michigan, U.S. Representative John Dingell of Dearborn, Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo, Michigan Department of Transportation Director Kirk T. Steudle, and Amtrak board chairman Tom Carper, as well as various transportation and industry officials, to gather around the Smiths Creek Depot inside Greenfield Village to talk about the project.
The location for the train station is on Michigan Avenue near Brady Street in Dearborn. The construction began in March and is expected to end in the fall of 2013.
Ten students from the Dearborn High School, Edsel Ford High School and Fordson High Schools, were chosen to be part of the POP project in order to design the individual tiles of a mosaic wall for Dearborn’s new Intermodal Passenger Rail Station by the Dearborn Community Fund, a nonprofit organization with a point to support cultural and recreational programs in Dearborn. The students include Mona Beydoun and Mary Charara (11th grade), and Jack Ashraf Davis, Francisco Nunez, and Leah Wendzenski (12th grade) from Dearborn High School; Khalid Amin McDowell (10th grade) and Claire Young (11th grade) from Edsel Ford High School; and Siham Saleh (10th grade), and Reem Aoun and Aleen Bazzi (11th grade) from Fordson High School. The POP team went on a field trip visiting mosaics and murals at Detroit’s People Mover Stations, the Detroit Public Library and the College for Creative Studies for inspiration.
The Henry Ford Community College Art Department partnered up with the Dearborn Community Fund and the Dearborn Public Schools for the project and is giving the POP team access to the work space and ceramics lab equipment. The students will meet almost every Saturday on the HFCC campus for the next 10 months to work with educators and artists to develop their mosaic designs. The POP team is currently making mosaic tiles for the new Dearborn Intermodal Passenger Rail Station.
The POP team also designed two complementary aluminum sculptures for a separate project previously this year, which were both uncovered in April. One sculpture was placed at the Dearborn City Hall and the other at West Dearborn Pocket Park.