Artist: Arthur Stern
Material: Architectural glass (24 individual panels of stained glass)
Date: 2013
Location: Fire Station #8 | 408 Mills Park Dr.
Commissioned: Town of Cary

 Artist website

The artist Arthur Stern responds to his time spent in Cary with the Cary Fire Department and students from Mills Park Middle School. Themes that repeatedly came up during his research meetings was to depict things that deal more directly with the Fire Department, the tools and equipment. He started with a series of ladder shapes, symmetrically placing them over the grid pattern. Then added fire hoses and nozzles, in a framing pattern around the perimeters of the windows. The different kinds of glass in the palette allow a varying vista through the window, with the background glass featuring ‘water glass,’ adding a conceptual aspect of the design. This material distorts the vista beyond in a pleasing way that looks like reflections on water. The design also features red and orange hand blown glass areas, used heavier towards the top of the design, leading the eye upward, and when lit at night, presents a colorful “beacon to the Community”.