Bob Zoell, Happy Place, 2022, screenprinted ceramic pigment on porcelain tile, Trinity Place Learning Center, Manhattan ​

Happy Place is a site-specific artwork created by Bob Zoell for Trinity Place Learning Center, Manhattan. It consists of two screenprinted tile murals: one in the entrance vestibule and the other along the main lobby staircase. The colorful murals greet visitors with an array of whimsical abstractions and familiar signs and symbols including punctuation marks, hashtags, cartoon-like birds and musical notes. In a distinctive and inspiring manner, the piece references learning, education, reading, writing, mathematics, maps, language, music, games and artists such as Mondrian. The visual elements are arranged against a white backdrop creating a floating landscape that invites viewers to read the artwork as if it were a poetic text or a sprawling, musical cityscape. An exclamation point carries with it the feeling of exuberance; a greater-than symbol followed by two parentheses provides movement and leads the viewer’s eye up the stairs; and dashes, semi-colons, periods and pound signs provide resting places for colorful, singing birds, who treat the forms as paths, trees, buildings and clouds.

For Zoell, Happy Place is meant to be “fun and playful with happy marks that give meaning to place and create a statement of poetic graphic beauty.”