That Engage The Community
About Betsy Kopshina Schulz, Artist/Creative Director
Betsy Schulz is the owner and creative force behind the creative design studio known as A Design Garden. She has provided creative solutions for local governments, businesses and private individuals across the nation for over 19 years. Notable local clients include the City of Solana Beach, Friends of the Fallbrook Library, The Port of San Diego, Sentry Partners, San Diego Opera, Adventure 16 and Ecke Ranch. In addition to being an accomplished designer, Betsy is a painter and environmental landscape artist.
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Betsy earned statewide recognition as a painter and ceramic artist leading to a full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While earning her Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts, she received a scholarship from the Heinz endowment to study in Switzerland under such notable designers as Paul Rand, Armin Hoffman, and Richard Sapper and noted artist Dorothy Hoffman. She is also a published author having written a complete guide to graphic design production titled “Macintosh Design to Production, the Definitive Guide”.
In recent years she has focused her efforts to create exciting environments for a number of local municipalities, foundations and schools. She designed and installed a mixed-media seascape mosaic complete with a concrete dragon tail wall to encircle the Hanna Fenichel School for Child Development’s organically shaped sand box play area. She also completed a mosaic wall mural at the La Jolla United Methodist Preschool, as well as a sculptural tide-pool inspired sand box, planter, and bench. A natural-looking, concrete patio incorporating a mosaic stream surrounds a bronze fountain. Working as Artist-in-Residence for Del Mar Heights Elementary, she directed a sixth-grade student project to design and build a 22-foot long sea serpent bench. Built of cement and covered in colorful tiles and stone, the bench is a lasting and beautiful addition to the school environment.
The scope and complexity of her work has continued to grow. She has completed ambitious projects in Solana Beach including the design and installation of entrance arches welcoming people to the city and the Coastal Rail Trail, and a comprehensive thematic sculptural art treatment for the remodeled Fletcher Cove Park. Both projects actively engaged local volunteers, historians and children in the collection of information and creation of art pieces. Her project at the Sapphire Tower residential high-rise in downtown San Diego, artistically recounts the history and development of the city from pre-history to the present. She worked extensively with the San Diego Historical Society and local Native American tribes to ensure the accuracy of the representations.
Her most recent projects include murals for The Barona Band of Mission Indians, Sentre Partners, and the Fallbrook Library. In Barona, two large sculptural murals frame the entrance to the Barona Band of Mission Indians government building. The murals sensitively depict the history of the tribe’s way of life and respect for the natural world. The Harbor Point ceramic wall mural frames an entry stairway for Sentre Partners redevelopment project at 5055 North Harbor Drive. It depicts the history and natural environment of Point Loma. Two murals were completed for the Fallbrook Library. The first is the donor mural on the front of the building near the entry and a second art wall is located in the Library’s central courtyard. Both works contain sculpted tiles, screened tiles, found objects and minerals from the Fallbrook Gem and Mineral Museum.
Her Gateway Arches in Solana Beach won a 2006 Orchid Award from the San Diego Architectural Foundation for environmental graphics and a 2007 Spectrum Award from the international Coverings expo for outstanding achievement in the use of ceramic tile. The Arches were also featured in a short piece by Ken Kramer on NBC San Diego’s About San Diego. The Fletcher Cove Park in Solana Beach, in which thousands of handmade tiles are installed in the concrete walls throughout the park, received the 2007 AGC Build San Diego Award of the San Diego chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America. Her work has also been featured in newspapers and magazines, both in print and online, as well as in several books. Her Surfboard Cedar sculpture is pictured in Our San Diego published by Voyageur Press and American Art Parades published by The Trail of Painted Ponies, Inc., and her Java Kai mural and Gateway Arches are featured in 500 Tiles, published by Lark Books.
