Mississippi River
— — the slow brown weight of half a continent.
Not only on a wall.
“The river drains thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces — almost half the lower forty-eight — and carries it all south through ten states to the delta below New Orleans. It begins at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota as a stream a child can wade across, and ends a mile wide and the colour of strong tea. — from the studio
Mississippi River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Mississippi runs about 2,340 miles from its headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans, making it the second-longest river in the United States after the Missouri, its largest tributary. Its drainage basin covers roughly 1.2 million square miles across thirty-one U.S. states and two Canadian provinces — the fourth-largest river basin in the world. The Upper Mississippi is locked and dammed for barge navigation as far as Minneapolis; the Lower Mississippi, below Cairo, Illinois, runs free.
The river carries roughly 600,000 cubic feet of water per second past Vicksburg, and discharges about 145 million tons of sediment a year into the Gulf — the load that built the Louisiana delta and is still building the birdsfoot at its mouth. The water is famously brown because the silt stays suspended for hundreds of miles below the confluence with the Missouri at St. Louis. Above that point the river is clearer; below it, the Mississippi takes on the cast that gave Mark Twain his phrase, the Big Muddy.
The river has two seasons more than four. The spring rise, fed by snowmelt in the upper basin and rain in the Ohio Valley, typically crests between April and June and is the flood watch every river town keeps. The late-summer low draws back the channel and exposes sandbars. The 1927 flood and the 2011 flood are the modern reference points, and the Old River Control Structure above Baton Rouge exists to keep the Mississippi from finding the shorter Atchafalaya path to the Gulf.