Eggshell Mosaic Art Project:Located outside of the VCC office on the library’s second floor is a portrait of Alexander Pushkin that is meant to be a community creation. Beside the portrait are trays with eggshells to be applied to the portrait. The shells are to represent the fragility of all our lives and the thousand of pieces that come together from our experiences to make us who we are—complete and whole. Pushkin was a person of multiple cultural heritages combining in their entirety to form a celebrated, complex, colorful literary artist, lyricist, poet, musician, artist, partisan, and lover. Each of us touches the life of another. Even in the smallest way, we can decide to add something unique to magnify that other person. Come visit the VCC as we celebrate the life of Alexander Pushkin and participate in this unique community experience by adding some eggshells to the portrait.
Here are pictures of the portrait before anyone added shells (left), on March 28th(middle), and as of May 10th. 
Biographical Information:
Alexander Pushkin is considered by many to be Russia’s national poet. His contribution to Russian literature is said to be immense. His style moved from the conventional romanticism of the day, where he wrote a great deal about love, friendship, and the good life, to an accessible realism typified in the novel length and somewhat biographical poem, “Eugene Onegin.” His humorous, irreverent writing has a ‘naturalness of expression.’ Another popular novel-length poem is his political novel, Boris Godunov.
Pushkin was born during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasions of Egypt and George Washington’s death. Russia established peace with England and France, and there was an industrial revolution in the west. He was the son of Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, an aristocrat in a position as an officer of the Imperial Guard, and his mother was the granddaughter of Peter the Great’s ‘favorite Negro,’ the Moor, Ibrahim Hannibal/ Abraham Petrovich, the ‘Negro of Abyssinia (i.e., Eritrea),’ Nadejda/Nadezhda Ossipovan Hannibal.
He grew up during the west’s educational reforms and Russia’s deteriorating social structure, and when the Zulu military was reinvented under Tshaka Zulu. He lived at the end of the revolutionary period and the Golden Age of Enlightenment—the period of a politically restrictive serfdom, economically chaotic, morally open, and socially pretentious and frivolous Romanticism. The period of the Russian nobles and Serfdom was nearly as descriptive as the same period in the U. S. with the landed gentry and slavery.
Pushkin spent a number of years in exile because of his political beliefs. He died at an early age in a classic duel.
The Voices & Choices Center Group 2007
