“Peace Love Laughs.”

Patti Loth regarded her message to future generations, just etched into a six-inch-square tile of clay.

Loth, 44, of Cedar Rapids, works at Options of Linn County, the county’s workplace program providing jobs and services for the developmentally disabled. Over the next two weeks Options clients are collaborating on the art that will greet them and other visitors to the agency’s new southwest Cedar Rapids facility when it opens late summer or early fall.

Sonata Kazimieraitiene, second from right, consults with Amanda Hall, right, and Patti Loth, left, Tuesday at Options of Linn County's temporary home in Cedar Rapids. (Liz Martin/SourceMedia Group News)

“Even when I’m gone,” said Loth. “It’s really interesting, to be the first in the new Options building.”

Next month, Chicago artist Sonata Kazimieraitiene will assemble the hundreds of tiles created by clients and staff of Options and other agencies into a an 18.5-foot-high, 13-foot-wide ceramic relief work. When viewed from across the lobby, it will look like a relief map of the county. When the viewer moves closer, the individual designs will become clear.

“It’s like a photo montage,” said Lynda Black-Smith, a retired art teacher and member of the county’s public art commission assisting with the project. “When you look up close, it looks like one thing, and when you step back it looks like land.”

“Everyone making a tile will be making a connection,” said Kazimieraitiene.

“I like flowers, butterflies, and stars, so I was just making a poster, kind of,” Stephanie Vincent, 22, of Mount Vernon, explained of her contribution. “Can I do more than one?”

“Not for this project,” said Kazimieraitiene. “Maybe for another project.”

The commission selected Kazimieraitiene’s proposal from among hundreds submitted in response to a call for five works for county facilities built or renovated after the June 2008 flood. County supervisors voted in spring 2010 to spend up to 1 percent of each project’s budget on public art.

The $38,0000 the county is paying Kazimieraitiene for the project buys more than the piece itself.

“They were looking for artists who would be willing to do a residency,” said Kazimieraitiene. “I wanted to spend as much time as possible here.”

So Kazimieraitiene and her son Rokas, 10, are living this summer at the  Cherry Building in Cedar Rapids’ New Bohemia district.  She’s also renting the studio there where she and volunteer helpers will glaze and fire the ceramic tiles before assembling them into the final work.

“One of the things we found interesting about her proposal, besides the fact that everybody liked her art, was that some of the money she’s being paid for this will be staying in the community,” said District 2 Supervisor Linda Langston, D-Cedar Rapids, also an art commission member.

The county relief will be framed by images from the Midwest landscape, and Kazimieraitiene will also incorporate images from historic photos she’ll select from the The Carl & Mary Koehler History Center’s collection.

Kazimieraitiene, 43, came to the U.S. from her native Lithuania in 2000 for a planned two years to earn an MBA at Concordia University in Wisconsin. She’d worked as a graphic artist and designer for an advertising agency, and started working in ceramics while in graduate school.

“It was more like a hobby in the beginning,” she said. “By the time I had to go back to Lithuania, I had a green card. I felt like I was supposed to stay here – you know that feeling? Like I would reach my potential here.”

Kazimieraitiene has done about 20 public-art projects and school residencies, but this is her first outside Illinois.

“It’s a big step for me,” she said.

The finished work will hang in the two-story atrium of the new building at Sixth Avenue Court and 12th Street SW that will also house the county’s community service and veterans’ service agencies. Staff and clients from those agencies will also contribute tiles.

The work will hang opposite a set of eight-foot-tall images from works by Grant Wood, and Kazimieraitiene took inspiration from his work, too.

“It’s a different angle, maybe, but it’s also regionalism,” she said. “This kind of sense of place is also his idea. Anyone making a tile will be making a sense of place.”