Photo by Alex Boerner

After adhering a clay angelfish to the wall of the restrooms at Stuart Beach, Christy Schneyman, 16, removes excess cement from around the edges of the sculpture.

STUART — A group of Jensen Beach High School students spent most of the day at Stuart Beach Wednesday creating a sculpted, mosaic mural for the surface of the public restrooms.

Part of the county’s art in public places program, the mosaic has brought together community members, local artists, county government and Treasure Coast businesses in a beautification that is shaping up to be a city landmark.

Beach-goers stop and stare as they pass the restrooms on their way to the sand, calling out encouragement to the students. County commissioners have been out to photograph the work in progress and many local residents have participated by donating materials from shell rock to seashells for the walls and strands of pearls, which will be carefully arranged in a mermaid’s hair. Local artists have stopped by to help and many merchants have brought over bins of tiny glass tiles.

“The Living Reef” has become a true community project.

”These students are my Sculpture 1 kids,” said Tracy Canada, art teacher at JBHS. “They have not had a lot of experience, but this project worked right into the curriculum. They learned how to work with clay making fish, glazing them and firing them. Today we are attaching their fish to the mural.”

The 300 fish are magnificent, as are the moray eels, sea horses, manta rays, dolphin, sea turtles, coral and starfish.

“The students made one fish and then created a mold and were required to make 10 more fish,” said Canada. “They learned a lot about Florida reef fish and our marine biology teacher worked with them on making them as close to the real species as possible.”

Drawing student Tara Pusateri, 18, who worked on the project, said it was a great project and very environmental. “I love it.”

The original design for the mural, which will be completed by Aug. 31, is by Taylor Komara, 18, who won a design competition and internship that brought in more than 120 submissions.

“I wanted to do an underwater scene with a mermaid and use items from the beach to make the mural look realistic,” said Komara. “Then we started sculpting. It’s really amazing, it’s become something else.”

Stuart artist Brenda Leigh was named the artist on the project and has worked with the students to make the restrooms a masterpiece. Her expertise in mural painting has added a whole other dimension to the project, as has her pet African gray parrot, who sits on a branch watching all the activity.

“You can see that we took a beautiful piece of artwork from Taylor and then transformed the concept into a complete design,” she said while buttering the back of a ceramic fish to be mounted just above the bas relief of coral. “I have loved every single day I have come out here. Building the reef was so fantastic.”

Leigh will continue working on the project fitting in the glass tiles and painting the coral reef in Stuart and then moving down to Hobe Sound to work on the second installation, a three-dimensional work about nesting sea turtles. The Hobe Sound project will begin Aug. 15 and be completed in early fall.

Linda Fasano, public arts administrator for Martin County, was the lightning rod behind the project. She sent out the call to artists an, worked on allocating the $15,000 for the Stuart project and securing an additional $5,000 from the Jupiter Island Art Committee for Hobe Sound. When she realized most of the student applications were from Jensen Beach High School, she reached out to Canada to include more of her class in the project.

“We want these murals to educate the public on turtle nesting, costal reef preservation and beach restoration,” Fasano said. “When we decided not to continue taking shells and coral from the beach, we worked with New Wave Taxidermy who taught the students how to make rubber molds of the coral and shells.”

“It was fun,” said Nicole McDonald, 17, while deciding exactly where to place a large pink grouper. “The mural is related to our area and it was interesting to learn about the fish.”