3 years. 175 feet. 15,000 tiles. 1 masterpiece.
In 2022, the City of St. Petersburg, Florida put out a public art call for Sunset Park—a small, quiet patch of green at the edge of town before the beaches.
Alex Kaufman saw the opportunity and asked fellow artists George Retkes and Miss Crit with a simple question: “Want to make a mosaic?”
They said yes.
And it was super easy, and they all lived happily ever after.
Just kidding.
If you’ve met this trio, you know they aren’t the “take it easy” type. These are bootstrap-pulling, heatstroke-risking, walk-through-10-miles-of-Florida-snow-to-get-to-school kind of artists. Over the next three years, they wrestled with machine breakdowns, hurricanes, flooding, boats in the park, and maybe one showdown with City Council. And they never compromised—not on a single tile.
The result? The longest mosaic in Florida. Actually, the longest in the Southeast.
Fifteen thousand custom waterjet-cut porcelain and glass tiles, arranged into nine intricate scenes celebrating St Petersburg’s natural wildlife. A walkable artwork at the scale of the city itself.
Miss Crit’s sketches brought each vignette to life. Alex Kaufman transformed them into a functionable mosaic through his design skills. George Retkes powered through the cutting, surfacing, and assembly with unstoppable grit. Together, they spent the entire Florida summer installing every single tile by hand.
It’s more than a mosaic—it’s a love letter to their hometown, a test of endurance, and proof of what’s possible when artists dream bigger than they’re “supposed” to.
The Sunshine City Mosaic 