This installation has been donated to The Maxine Greene High School for Imaginative Inquiry and The Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus in honor of Dr. Maxine Greene on behalf of the Eugenia Balcells Foundation. The Maxine Greene HS, located on the campus, was established in 2018 in the name of the education philosopher, Dr. Maxine Greene. The United Nations has designated 2019 as The Year of the Periodic Table.
 
We would like to honor this symbolic image by offering the mural Homage to the Elements for placement in public cultural spaces, such as the halls and corridors of libraries, schools and universities, research centers and museums where human heritage is kept and passed from generation to generation. 

– Eugenia Balcells, Artist

HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTS recognizes the symbolic character of the Periodic Table by adding the light signature of each element to its chemical description, proclaiming that light is the voice of matter.The installation celebrates simultaneously the inner power of light and the priceless treasure of human enlightenment. No other image has the symbolic character of unity in diversity that is contained in this mural. 
 
The light of the elements is present in our daily life: street lamps, light bulbs and fluorescent lamps. It is also present in the color of the flames of the kitchen stove, which change when the soup splashes or in the sparks displayed by fireworks colored by the elements incorporated into the magic gunpowder for that very purpose. There is both history and poetry in the spectra of the elements. Of all these stories, Homage to the Elements offers us an evocation, and fosters our reflections on the essence of matter, its energy, its light.

-Santiago Alvarez, Professor 
Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona

Presented by The Maxine Greene High School in Partnership with The Maxine Greene Institute.