By Pat Stinson
The sound of breaking dishes in her great-grandmother’s kitchen one evening was Tricia Boucha’s introduction to the fine art of mosaics. Sent at age 7 to live for the summer with her relative Eva Strauss, Boucha felt her presence in the household had upset her great-grandmother’s life and angered her.
Instead, Strauss told her, “You’ve gotta learn art; we’re gonna heal your soul.”
At the time, Boucha was relearning how to walk and talk after severe trauma.
She said her great-grandmother taught her mosaics on a TV tray, using broken dishes and glue. She also learned from Strauss that she is Native American, and that her great-grandmother was also known as Silver Cloud, whose birthname was Boucha.
“My parents never talked about it,” Boucha said, adding that she later learned her father, who had experienced discrimination, was “a half breed,” and his race was listed as “mulatto” on a 1940 Census form.
Boucha said she was under the impression from her father that she was a “little Catholic white girl.”
Her family tree, however, includes fur trapper William Boucher, who traded with the Ojibwa and lived for a time near present-day Naubinway in the Upper Peninsula. Boucher, whose heritage was Native American and European (a mix known as Métis), married an indentured servant, also part Native American, and the two had many children. One of their sons was Eva’s grandfather. When Eva married, her last name changed from Boucha – a variation of the Boucher name – to Strauss. She and her husband moved to Traverse City, where Tricia’s grandfather was born.
In her first year exploring her Native American heritage, Tricia Boucha learned embroidery and beadwork from Strauss. During the second year, she learned the language and foods. Her third year, she said, “was a primer of the whole thing.”
“She instilled in me a love for that part of my life, the Earth and the Spirit,” Boucha said.
As an adult, she honored her great-grandmother by changing her last name to Boucha.
The owner, artist and self-proclaimed “general nuisance”
By Boucha’s own account, she had an “unusual and dramatic” past, one that compels her to work on a memoir. Her business page on Facebook, Mended Pieces Mosaics, includes her artist’s statement: “Fine Art outside the box … Mosaic is a healing art, therapeutic and serene. An ancient art for a modern time. Where objects fit together in a sparkling dance of mended pieces.”
Boucha said she has spent 50 years creating artworks, and her intricate mosaics, tilework, beadwork and embroidered pieces honor history, art history and culture.
Honoring her heritage, she said she gives her creations away to fellow Native Americans, as well as to many others.
Once an Ann Arbor gallery owner, the artist and art teacher – she taught classes downstate and last year was scheduled to teach at the Ramsdell Regional Center for the Arts – has found a niche in her new home of Kaleva, where she moved last year.
She has been embraced by the artists’ cooperative known as the Kaleva Art Gallery. To give back to her new community, she is currently creating a glass mosaic mural depicting a scene from the Kalevala, Finland’s epic poem. It is the second of three such murals she plans to donate to the village. Working for the cost of materials only – some donated by her suppliers, Laticrete International and Swarovski, others provided by the Kaleva Historical Society and grants – Boucha is donating her time as she works to complete the five-foot, 150-pound mosaic panel.
When completed, the three panels will be installed in the Sculpture Park outside the Centennial Walkway, at the corner of Nine Mile Road and North Walta Street. The panels will be displayed in a triad, with mountings fabricated by metal artist Andy Priest. (The first mural was installed during a ceremony in September.)
Boucha’s work also includes contemporary works – with pieces such as her mosaic garden gazing balls and mosaic-covered found objects, (a wheelcover, for one). She also accepts commissioned work. She created a public work of art, a 15-foot-tall sculpture of glass mosaic marigolds installed in a rain garden of the Pittsfield Township Hall, outside Ann Arbor. Other commissions have included mosaic tables, reliquaries, shower walls and kitchen backsplashes, as well as beadwork.
Every Friday, she posts updates of her work on the village murals to the Kaleva Kaleidoscope group page on Facebook. She also posts photos of her works-in-progress or finished artwork on her Mended Pieces Mosaics Facebook page.
On her Mended Pieces page, she wrote: “This is a window with a view. A display of creations to cause the viewer to pause for a closer look … perhaps to distract you from reality.”
They are welcome distractions.
