The Ann Arbor Observer featured Elisabeth Thoburn — a retired Washtenaw Community College art historian who has spent the last seven years quietly turning her home on Silver Lake in Pinckney into something extraordinary: a house covered almost entirely in tile sourced from our Boneyard.
Thoburn didn't buy showroom pieces. She built her collection one visit at a time, sorting through racks of art tile and bins of field tile sold by the pound — first-come, first-served, in person only. Over time, those visits added up to enough tile to cover her kitchen floor, fireplace, bathrooms, entryway, house numbers, a coffee table, and a room-sized mural across her garage wall.
The story traces how she got there: a childhood in Dresden, East Germany, where art felt like a form of quiet resistance; a chance meeting with an American student in Poland in 1979; a move to Michigan in 1985 with little English and a lot of resolve; three decades teaching art history at WCC. Somewhere along the way, tile became where all of it converged.
Her reflection on the project has stuck with us since: "Without you, I couldn't have done any of this."
Read the full story — including how a strip of medieval dog tiles ended up installed upside-down, and why the rarest Boneyard finds are the ones she now wishes she'd used more sparingly — at the Ann Arbor Observer.
