Community Glass Public Art Sculpture Completed in Kempsville, Virginia
The Washington Glass Studio has completed Harbor of Stories, a major new public art sculpture for the Kempsville area of Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Rising nearly eighteen feet high at the intersection of Princess Anne Road and Witchduck Road, the sculpture combines steel, cast glass, fused glass, and LED illumination into a landmark artwork shaped by community participation and layered local history.
Modeled after a stylized sail, the sculpture references Kempsville’s historic relationship to waterways, trade, movement, and cultural exchange. By day, sunlight activates the colorful glass surfaces; by night, integrated lighting transforms the work into a glowing beacon within the surrounding streetscape.
But Harbor of Stories was never intended to function as a traditional monument.
Instead, the project asked a more complicated question:
How can public art hold many histories at once?
Designing a Collective Portrait of Place
The RFQ for the Kempsville public art project stood apart from many civic commissions because it did not seek a single heroic narrative.
The project called for artwork that could acknowledge overlapping histories connected to Indigenous communities, colonial settlement, Revolutionary War events, ecology, segregation, architecture, waterways, and contemporary neighborhood identity.
For artist Michael Janis and the Washington Glass Studio team, this became an opportunity to explore how glass can carry layered narratives simultaneously.
The final design uses a sweeping sail form as both visual landmark and metaphor. The structure references Kempsville’s history as a working port while suggesting movement, migration, exchange, and shared memory.
Embedded throughout the sculpture are narrative glass panels created through multiple processes.
Clear cast glass bas-relief panels designed by Washington Glass Studio reference Indigenous presence, the Powhatan Mantle, the yehakin, local plant and aquatic life, colonial history, and the Battle of Kemp’s Landing during the American Revolution.
These imagery-rich cast panels are interwoven with vibrant fused-glass panels created directly by community members during a year-long series of public workshops.
Together, the sculpture becomes less like a single memorial object and more like a collective portrait of place.
Community Collaboration Through Glass
A central component of Harbor of Stories was public participation.
Washington Glass Studio held hands-on workshops at the Kempsville Community Center and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia MOCA), inviting local residents to create fused glass panels based on personal memories, experiences, and connections to the area.
Participants translated family stories, neighborhood imagery, landmarks, symbols, and aspirations into colorful glass compositions that now fill the sail structure.
For many participants, this marked their first experience working with glass as an artistic material.
What emerged was not simply decoration, but authorship.
Each individual panel is modest in scale, yet together the hundreds of handmade elements create a unified visual voice that physically embeds community participation into the sculpture itself.
This process reflects one of Washington Glass Studio’s continuing interests within public art practice: creating projects where communities actively shape the artwork rather than simply receiving it after completion.
The Challenges of Public Art Fabrication
Like many large-scale public art projects completed in recent years, Harbor of Stories faced dramatic material and fabrication challenges during production.
As the project moved through engineering, approvals, and construction phases, steel prices rose substantially beyond earlier projections.
At one stage, the structural steel alone threatened to consume nearly the entire project budget.
Working closely with structural engineer Sante Taroli of Greenman-Pedersen, Inc., along with fabricators and city representatives, the team redesigned portions of the internal framework while preserving the sculpture’s outward appearance and structural integrity.
The project ultimately benefited from partnerships with fabricators more commonly associated with Defense Department construction work, including VTG Defense, whose expertise helped realize the complex steel structure.
The experience reinforced an important aspect of contemporary public art practice: successful civic artwork depends not only upon artistic vision, but upon sustained collaboration between artists, engineers, fabricators, architects, and public agencies.
Light, Glass, and Living Narratives
Back at the Washington Glass Studio, fabrication of the cast glass narrative panels continued simultaneously with construction of the steel armature at the metal shop.
For Washington Glass Studio, glass remains uniquely suited to commemorative and civic artwork because of its ability to hold texture, imagery, transparency, and light at the same time.
As sunlight passes through the sculpture, the embedded imagery continuously shifts throughout the day. Reflections, shadows, and transparency create an artwork that changes according to season, weather, and viewing position.
Rather than functioning as a static monument, the sculpture behaves more like a living visual environment.
This relationship between light and narrative has long been central to Washington Glass Studio’s public art practice, particularly in projects involving memory, identity, and collective history.
Installation and Dedication
Installation of Harbor of Stories took place over multiple phases as the steel framework, glass components, lighting systems, and structural elements were assembled on site.
The public dedication was held in April 2026.
For the artists and collaborators, the most rewarding moment came when local residents began recognizing their own contributions within the finished sculpture — locating individual glass panels while experiencing the larger artwork as a shared civic space.
The sculpture now stands not simply as an object placed within the neighborhood, but as a work grown directly from community participation and local history.
Project Team
Artists: Michael Janis, Erwin Timmers, Tim Tate, Arden Colley, and Ladan Ebrahimian
Structural Engineering: Sante Taroli / Greenman-Pedersen, Inc.
City of Virginia Beach Cultural Affairs and Public Art: Chad Clark and Emily Labow
Fabrication Partners: Thomas Willis / Production Welding and Fabrication; Randy Williams and Stephen Bittner / VTG Defense; Nick Lotuaco / L4 Builders
About Washington Glass Studio
Washington Glass Studio, based in Mount Rainier, Maryland, creates contemporary public art, architectural glass, sculpture, and community-engaged projects that integrate fine art, narrative imagery, and innovative glass techniques.
The studio’s public artworks frequently combine cast glass, fused glass, steel, and community participation to explore themes of history, identity, environment, and collective memory.
