Artist Creates Striking Entrance to Children's Room

It was through a cross-country trip, discovering "memory pieces" and a summer working as a volunteer
on the Watts Towers, that Jolino Beserra developed his talent as a colorful storyteller through art.

Proceeding past the stairway at the First Street entrance to the new Civic Center Library, and off the right is a colorful portal to the new Children's Room. Visitors to the library can hardly take their eyes off the ornate entrance way which is made of a hyper-melange of mosaic glass. It's also inviting to the touch--and most people do just that.

And, that's all right, according to local artist Jolino Beserra, the creator of this artistic portal. Designed for children, it contains remnants of items close to children's hearts - animals, toys, pictures and more - and they are deliberately touchable.

It's a "pique-assiette" style of mosaic work, "bits and pieces" that start a story in the mind of the viewer, stimulating emotions and arousing curiosity. "It starts a story," says Beserra, and the children are more than capable of developing that story. And the color! Beserra's love of color was best described in an interview with Elisabeth Zarate, in which he said, "I love color and everything I do is inspired by a sense of color. That has always been, I thought, my strongest part - an unusual sense of combining color and texture. It's possible to create an emotional response with visuals."

Entrance to the Children's Room

And so he has - the success of his creation is born out in the comment of Children's Library Assistant Carlos Ortiz-Granada, who says that children entering the room are consistently fascinated with the portal, and they continue to discover new things.

Beserra's mosaic work is not just decorative (although it is to the nth degree). Check out the large, stylistic question mark(?) at the Children's Reference Desk; it's the perfect functional design to describe what happens there - questions asked, questions answered!

Jolino Beserra was born in East Los Angeles and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley (now in Silver Lake), and following two years at Pasadena City College, he earned his B.A. in illustration from the Art Center College of Design. He successfully worked for many years in the commercial art field as an art director/illustrator, creating greeting cards, posters, magazine covers (including one for TV Guide), and much more, but hadn't yet discovered that his real life work would be in a completely different artistic field.

It was through a cross-country trip, discovering "memory pieces" (described in his website) and a summer working as a volunteer on the Watts Towers, that Beserra developed his talent as a colorful storyteller through art. Whether architectural works (such as the Civic Center Library's Children's Room Portal, furniture, or smaller pieces (vases, teapots, bowls, etc.) his work creates visual stories that stimulate memories and resonate with those viewing and/or owning the pieces. And always, color is the binding element.

Visit the Alhambra Civic Center Library and create your own stories as you view, with awe and wonder, the very personal artwork of Jolino Beserra.