After 5 years of work, Watsonville celebrates completed mosaic public art project - Lookout Santa Cruz

Watsonville will celebrate the completion of one of Santa Cruz County’s most ambitious public art projects, a six-story mosaic mural called Watsonville Brillante, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday. The project, led by local artist Kathleen Crocetti, began in 2019 and illustrates the different cultural identities that make up Watsonville.

After five years of work, one of the most ambitious public art projects in Santa Cruz County’s history, Watsonville Brillante, has reached completion. To celebrate, there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the massive mosaic mural on Saturday. Festivities will include tours of the project narrated in English and Spanish.

The almost all-day celebration kicks off at 11 a.m. with a performance by the Watsonville Community Band, followed by various local dance troupes throughout the event. It will also include food and art vendors and kid-friendly science activities. There will be road closures on Rodriguez and Second Street for the event.

Local artist Kathleen Crocetti, a longtime Watsonville resident and teacher, launched the project in 2019, but began to envision it a few years prior, she said.

Her vision for the project was to illustrate the ethnic heritages of Watsonville’s people — Indigenous, Latino, Asian, European and more — with meaningful and beautiful imagery. The project stretches across the six-story parking structure at the Watsonville Civic Plaza.

“I’m still so wrapped up in everything that’s going on, trying to get ready for the party, that I don’t think it’s really hit me yet,” said Crocetti. “But there are so many people coming into town from out of town to see this that are calling me about it.”

The four large vertical mosaic murals were designed by San Francisco artist Juan R. Fuentes, who grew up in agricultural labor camps outside Watsonville. Each of the four mosaic murals — “The Strawberry Picker,” “The Apple Picker,” “The Flower Grower” and “Hermanita” (little sister) — represent different aspects of Watsonville’s cultural identity.

Apart from Fuentes’ murals, the project includes 185 horizontal faces in between each mural, said Crocetti. Each horizontal mural represents a cultural identity in Watsonville. They were designed by 120 local artists, and 105 of those artists were high school students when they initially submitted their designs.

In total, more than 600 volunteers — many of whom were high school students — participated in putting together the mosaics, said Crocetti. Enough money was raised for the project to create an internship program for students to gain experience.

Crocetti’s goal was to empower youth by teaching them job skills as they helped create the murals. In reality, the images on the murals and what they represent were the strongest form of empowerment for the community, she said. When “The Strawberry Picker” was installed, Crocetti recalls one of her students thanking her because it was the first time they felt proud of the work their parents do as strawberry pickers.

“After ‘The Apple Picker’ went up, I was talking to my assistant at the time, Brianna Flores. She and I are standing below ‘The Apple Picker,’ and she’s like, ‘We’re changing the archetype of public art’,” said Crocetti.

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Tania Ortiz joins Lookout Santa Cruz as the California Local News Fellow to cover South County. Tania earned her master’s degree in journalism in December 2023 from Syracuse University, where she was... More by Tania Ortiz