Glass is treated here like a substance that remembers — refracting light and rearranging it around those who move through.
Mozeart Designz is an art, research, and technology studio transforming glass and other materials into immersive objects, environments, and civic-scale experiences.
Led by artist and designer Chris Mosley, the studio's work is shaped by a journey through Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley, where exposure to STEM, innovation, and emerging technologies continues to inform its approach to design.
Each project brings together the intuitive language of art with the rigor of engineering — balancing material exploration, structural thinking, fabrication, and technical precision with imagination, emotion, and visual storytelling. Through experimentation and collaboration, Mozeart Designz brings ambitious ideas into the built world, creating work that is as much engineered as it is artistic.
The Ocean Street Gateway Beautification Project is transforming the entryway into Santa Cruz — where Highway 17 becomes Ocean Street — into a vibrant, art-filled welcome for visitors and residents alike. The initiative is led by the City of Santa Cruz in partnership with SWA Group Architecture, blending public art, landscaping, and design improvements into a more welcoming, safer, and visually striking gateway.
I was selected to lead the public art component: a series of life-sized native wildlife sculptures in glass and metal — a Blue Heron and a Fox. The work draws on the redwoods and Santa Cruz's biodiversity, with particular attention to rare and endangered species, so the gateway tells the story of what actually lives here.
The forms are developed digitally in a faceted, low-polygon language — enough resolution to be unmistakably fox or heron, spare enough to stay architectural — then fabricated in glass and stainless steel with engineered footings. They read clearly at vehicle speed and reward a closer look on foot.
Currently in active fabrication — renders below reflect the approved design intent.
The project is more than aesthetic. It sharpens the city's first impression for visitors arriving over the hill, improves the feel and safety of the intersection while remaining welcoming to every member of the community, and celebrates Santa Cruz's natural and cultural heritage through storytelling in art rather than signage alone.
It also creates living-wage opportunities for local artists — this is one of the first times I've been paid a living wage for my craft, and that precedent matters as much to me as the sculptures themselves.
Alongside the artwork, the gateway will feature iconic signage, sustainable landscape planting, and potential lighting and pedestrian improvements.
Figure 01 · Render
Seated and alert, tail curled forward. The faceting carries a copper-to-rust gradient across the flanks with a pale chest, so the form separates cleanly from its backdrop from either direction of travel.
Figure 02 · Render
Standing tall, neck folded into its signature S-curve. Slate grays across the body drop to slender stainless legs, giving the piece height and silhouette without visual mass.
Site study, ecology research, and selection of native species as gateway figures.
Digital modeling and faceting studies. Form resolved for legibility at road speed.
Panel unfolding, material specification, structural footings, and permit coordination.
Glass and stainless fabrication, assembly, and finishing — in progress with fabrication partners.
Site preparation, placement, and public dedication along the Ocean Street corridor.
Commissioning public art for your city, campus, or development?
Start a commissionMeaningful art made with purpose — and the essence of our elders in mind. Inspired by a two-week trip to Egypt.
Mozeart Designz · Afrofuturism
The combs are made from yellow and white brass — real materials with weight and presence. No coatings, no shortcuts.
The design is inspired by ancient Egyptian combs and artifacts, pulling from a time when everyday objects were treated like art, not afterthoughts. Each piece is hand-designed and hand-crafted — every line, every curve, every detail intentional.
It's not just a comb. It's a return to building things with purpose, quality, and pride. Each comb ships sheathed in a hand-stitched, Mozeart-embossed leather case.
I knew I wanted to be an artist when I was around twelve years old. I was always drawing, building with Lego, taking my toys apart to see how they worked, and thinking about how I could turn creativity into a real life.
I didn't know yet what kind of artist I would become, or what material I would work with. I just knew that making things was going to be a major part of my life. It took a graphic-design degree, a furnace, a scientific glass program, a research lab, and a global pandemic before I fully understood what that meant.
I was born in Rochester, New York, in 1984. At eighteen I moved to Atlanta to attend the Art Institute of Atlanta, where I studied graphic design and earned my associate degree in 2005.
After graduating I spent several years trying different jobs, creative paths, and materials — still figuring out where I fit, and what kind of work would let me fully use what I could do.
In 2011 I became part of the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, building custom designer books for furniture showrooms. Being surrounded by working artists changed how I saw my future — for the first time I was around people who had built real careers through their art. It made me realize being an artist didn't have to stay a dream. It could be a business, a profession, a way of life.
Around that same time, I found glass. I talked my way into an apprenticeship with a glassblower in the Old Fourth Ward — right down the street from where Martin Luther King Jr. grew up — and from the first time I worked at the furnace I knew I'd found something important. It required creativity, physical skill, patience, problem-solving, science, and complete focus. From that point on, I went all in.
You cannot fake your way through glass.
In 2013 I enrolled in the Scientific Glass Technology program at Salem Community College in New Jersey. I wanted to understand glass beyond the artistic side — thermal expansion, material compatibility, vacuum systems, technical fabrication, precision tolerances, the science of how glass behaves under heat.
In 2014 I interned at the Corning Museum of Glass, giving public demonstrations and traveling between East Coast studios to learn from anyone who would teach me. Afterward I moved to Los Angeles for a production glass job at Philips Lighting, making projector bulbs — learning graded glass and glass-to-metal seals. It was demanding technical work for very little money. It taught me discipline — and what it meant to keep pushing as a Black artist and technician in rooms where people didn't always expect someone like me to be there.
A turning point came during a job interview, when I realized I'd been applying for positions based on what I thought other people would allow me to do — instead of what I actually knew I was capable of. So I changed my approach and started going after opportunities that matched my ambition.
That mindset brought me to the Palo Alto Research Center — PARC — as a glass-forming technician, moving between laboratories, kilns, and engineering teams. I helped fabricate advanced glass components for projects connected to DARPA's Ocean of Things and ICARUS programs, including oceanographic sensor floats and experimental aerial systems. I received a Technical Excellence Award for my contributions, and some of the research was featured by Forbes in 2020. I later advanced to Glass Specialist at Bright Ceramic Technologies — the spin-off company we built after securing $28M in DARPA and defense contracts. PARC taught me to think like an engineer while still working with the instincts of an artist.
I stopped limiting myself to the next obvious step.
When COVID changed everything, I took a major risk. I stepped away from the security of a full-time technology career and put my energy into building my own creative practice — Mozeart Designz, a studio focused on glass, sculpture, prototyping, design, fabrication, and education.
While building the business I kept working in technical environments: fabricating glass at a PARC spinoff, supporting mechanical engineering at Rios Corporation, serving as lead scientific glassblower at Thermo Fisher Scientific, and working in R&D at BurnBot on robotic systems for wildfire prevention. None of it was separate from the art. Every position gave me new knowledge about materials, manufacturing, and robotics — and I brought all of it back into the studio.
The art practice kept growing. I received the Biafarin International Art Award and was selected for both the Emerging Artist Fellowship and the Artist Disruptor Fellowship through the California Arts Council. I created and curated Melanated Expressions, a group exhibition of twenty-five BIPOC artists at Radius Gallery — my first time fundraising to fund a show and pay the artists, raising more than $2,500 for the participants.
I later served on the Santa Cruz Arts Commission, learning firsthand how public art is funded, selected, and placed. Then came the biggest milestone yet: selection for the Ocean Street Gateway Beautification Project for the City of Santa Cruz — my first permanent, site-responsive public commission at this scale, bringing together glass, metal, wildlife, and engineering. It's the foundation for the next stage, not the final destination.
They're different tools for understanding problems and building new possibilities. When I look back, what I'm most proud of isn't one award or one commission. I'm proud that I never gave up on the idea I had as a child: that I could build a life around creativity, on my own terms.
I am still the same person who used to draw ideas in notebooks. The difference is that now I have glass, metal, CAD software, engineering partners, fabrication teams, and public spaces to bring those ideas into the world.
The Social
Networking Project.
A body of glass sculpture built live, with the public — where the making itself is the artwork. Using flameworking and borosilicate rods, I set a sturdy base, then invite each participant to choose a rod and place it where they see fit. I fuse it to the structure while we talk — names, stories, their first brush with glass. Every gathering grows a one-of-a-kind lattice that no single person could have made alone.
How a piece grows
Live demonstration · ~3 min per contributorBase structure
I flamework a sturdy borosilicate armature — the backbone every contribution builds on.
Safety first
Participants sign a waiver and put on safety glasses. Real tools, real flame, real respect.
Choose a rod
Precut rods in varied sizes and lengths are laid out. Each person picks the geometry they want.
Place it
They position their rod on the structure however they see fit — no wrong answers.
Fuse the join
I torch-fuse the rod to the lattice in about three minutes, narrating the heat and the physics.
Polaroid + name
A Polaroid marks the moment. Their node is now permanent — a stranger becomes part of the work.
Bring the Networking experience to your event, school, or festival.
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