Those enjoying the walking trail at Troy University’s Dothan Campus will notice some beautiful additions to several of the picnic tables.

Headland-based artist Frederic Lecut, originally from France, recently turned the stone tables into mosaics made of smaller mosaics created by his students throughout the area.

The mosaics were sponsored by the Troy University Dothan campus library.

“The Troy University Dothan campus library was excited to sponsor this creative event,” said Dean of University Libraries Dr. Chris Shaffer.

Under the leadership of interim director Donna Miller, the library provided funding, space, and helped coordinate events so that workshops went smoothly.

“The library is the intellectual and cultural heart of a university, and projects such as this are exactly the sort of thing we want to be involved with,” Shaffer said. “Through Mr. Lecut’s work, many of our students–as well as members of the community of Dothan–learned more about, or possibly were exposed for the first time to, a traditional and beautiful medium of art.”

According to Merriam-Webster, mosaics are surface decorations made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns.

A total of 390 people participated in Lecut’s mosaic classes at TROY, the Wiregrass Museum of Art and Enterprise Middle School, creating their own small mosaics, which were then turned into tile and added to the tables.

“I designed a small mosaic project where everybody would do the same pattern and one was negative of the other,” Lecut said. “Everybody would do the same size, and we would glue them later.”

There are four round tables and one square table covered in the tiles.

Lecut said the object was to show local people that anyone – even those outside the “art community” – can contribute valuable, meaningful art.

“The point is to show them that they can be creative,” he said. “It’s also to show them that they can work together to create something.”

He said Dothan has vibrant works of art such as building murals, but people often feel disconnected from artists.

“They see art as being away from them,” Lecut said. “This art will have been done by each citizen who has participated in the project. All of a sudden this (work of art) starts to belong to them. They can bring their grandchild 50 years down the road and say, ‘I did that.’ It becomes their own art. That’s what I really believe in, trying to show people they can contribute as an individual and as a group.”