After-School Enrichment Teacher Brittain Peck Creates Mosaic for New NFL Stadium
By Dylan Howlett
5-minute read
The last week of January had, for Brittain Peck, become something akin to clockwork. His family would gather in their Greensboro living room to watch the Super Bowl — or, more precisely, to watch the Buffalo Bills, who would advance to the NFL’s championship game for four consecutive years, from 1990 to 1993, and lose each time. Peck’s mother, Laura, grew up in small-town Western North Carolina. But his father, Tim, hails from Victor, New York, nestled southeast of Rochester and some 15 miles south of Lake Ontario, with a population of about 7,000 residents by the time the Bills made their first of four Super Bowl appearances. Much of Tim Peck’s family remained in Western New York, where Brittain and his family would make biannual summertime and Christmastime visits — “I was the Southern cousin with an accent,” Peck said, laughing — to a region where Subarus were abundant, Wegmans was revered and the Buffalo Bills were religion. On those Super Bowl Sundays, each of which began with renewed hope and ended in familiar anguish, Peck would watch his father clutch the family’s corded phone in their kitchen, where he’d call aunts and uncles and cousins who watched and cheered from Western New York.
Among them were Brittain’s uncle Bud Peglow and aunt Nancy Peglow, both of whom worked for the Rochester-based manufacturing company Gleason Works, which specialized in gears. “We make the machines that make machines,” Bud would say. The auto racing aficionado would stay with Brittain’s family whenever he made a trip to watch a NASCAR event at Virginia’s Martinsville Speedway. As a Southern kid, Brittain delighted in his chance to play in the snow during his holiday visits to New York and would laugh as Bud grumbled about shoveling, worn down by the region’s eight feet of annual lake-effect snowfall. Western New York had been a bastion of American industry and blue-collar work — iron, steel, Kodak, Xerox — for the better part of the 20th century. But the arrival of the ’80s and ’90s brought to Buffalo’s doorstep a raft of globalization, factory closures and economic hardship. It did nothing to dent Bud’s affection for his city or its football team, which embraced — and reflected — the tenacity of a region. “In a lot of ways, through Bud,” Brittain Peck said, “I got to understand what Western New York was really about.”
All of it — the regional pride, the unforgiving snow, the steadfast allegiance to the Bills — now endures forever in the new home of Buffalo football thanks to a Durham Academy After-School Enrichment teacher and parent. Peck’s “A Line in the Snow,” a glazed ceramic tile mosaic depicting the Bills’ defensive line as snowflakes dance around their helmets and pads, now stretches across 37 feet of a corridor on the south end of Highmark Stadium, the $2.1 billion colossus that hosted its first NFL regular-season game on Sept. 17. The illustrator and public artist — and father of Nia Peck ’30 and Teo Peck ’33 — became one of more than 40 visual artists and art teams to earn selection to the Buffalo Bills Public Art Program at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, New York.
Peck has worked as a freelance illustrator and comic artist since 2012 and is now in his second year of leading DA Middle School's Cavalier Comics After-School Enrichment class. Through the class, students learn the basics of creating their own comics — panel layouts, composition, drawing and story development. They then share their work, and unique points of view, with classmates via Cavalier Comics, a printed publication available in common areas of the Academy Road campus.
As for the Highmark Stadium program, artists applied via a competitive RFP (Request For Proposal) process and were selected by local art representatives and project stakeholders who comprised the program’s selection panel. The artists were commissioned for site-specific, new artwork for the stadium’s permanent collection. Each artist either resides in the Buffalo area or — like Peck — has close ties to Western New York. “I was very aware that I was making it for a bigger community that’s much bigger than me — for the city of Buffalo, for the whole region of Western New York,” Peck said in a mid-September conversation with DA Marketing and Communications. “I knew it had to really connect and resonate with the story and the identity of Bills fans in the city.”
Peck first learned of the initiative in the spring of 2025, when the program put out three separate calls to artists. He connected with Holly Hayden, who served as a liaison for the duration of the project between artists and the Bills. “I have so many ideas,” Peck told her during one of their initial discussions. Hayden counseled Peck to choose the medium with which he felt most comfortable. He pitched multiple ideas — including a piece that featured his favorite Bills player from his childhood, running back Thurman Thomas, and former star quarterback Jim Kelly — in multiple locations around the new stadium.
But Peck kept returning to muses from his youth. On a wall of the playroom in his family’s Greensboro home hung a series of four prints titled “The History of American Football.” Peck would stare at the posters and pepper his dad with questions about the minute differences between the players’ pads and facemasks. He was a fan, too, of Tecmo Bowl, the famed arcade-turned-Nintendo video game that rendered the NFL in pixelated glory. He watched NFL Films productions that captured the sport in its cinematic and gladiatorial splendor. And from an artistic perspective, he had gravitated toward the practicality and efficiency of tiled mosaics. His mural projects would take upward of a month, which had become a mounting inconvenience for a father of two. Yet it took Peck only three days to complete a pair of mosaics in the dining area of Pfizer’s Rocky Mount facility, and the finished product still evoked the singular imprimatur of his illustrated style. Peck could do the same at Highmark Stadium, he realized, so long as he leaned on childhood inspiration. “It’s gotta come from something where I can put a little bit of myself in it,” he said.
More than a bit of himself lives in the final version opposite a staircase on Highmark Stadium’s main concourse. The defensive linemen — in a nod to “The History of American Football” — wear idiosyncratic facemasks. (The “hero character,” as Peck describes it, boasts a reflective visor.) The harshness and closeness of the angle harkens to the field-level shots of NFL Films. The pixelated quality serves as an homage to Tecmo Bowl. The tiling lends the piece a sense of realism — and, from the right angle, illusion — through its shadows and lighting and textures. The end result is quintessentially Buffalo. “It becomes this hard, durable, solid tribute to the team and the city,” Peck said.
In mid-July, Peck arrived at the appointed corridor in Highmark Stadium’s south end to begin the installation process. He partnered with a tile company in India to produce each of the mosaic’s 1-inch tiles — more than 37,000 in all — and to assemble the 7-foot by 37-foot mosaic in 1-foot sheets. Peck hired a local tile installer, Jon Morgante, to assist with the process, and the pair worked two consecutive 14-hour days to lay out the sheets in a staircase-like fashion.
The overwhelming majority of the 6,000 craft workers who helped build Highmark Stadium — which replaced a 52-year-old building most commonly known as Ralph Wilson Stadium — were, not surprisingly, ardent fans of the soon-to-be home team. During Peck’s installation, one such worker descended the stairs and rounded the corner before stopping at the mosaic: “TECMO BOWL!” he shouted. Another group of workers similarly gawked. “I’ve seen a lot of the other art going in here,” one said. “But this…” He proceeded to embellish his superlative with the profane flair of a football fan from Western New York.
Morgante attended a preseason game and took a photo with his two daughters in front of the mosaic; Peck insisted on adding Morgante’s name to a nearby plaque that would, under normal circumstances, credit the artist alone. Morgante’s exclusion would be sacrilege, of course, in a region that celebrates physical labor. Three of Peck’s cousins went to the first regular-season game — a 41–31 win vs. Detroit — on Sept. 17, and they took photos of the mural to send to Aunt Nancy. She texted Peck shortly thereafter. “Britt, your creation is absolutely amazing,” she wrote. “What a tribute to the city of Buffalo and the people of Western New York. I’m so proud of you.”
One of the piece’s would-be admirers will never see it: Uncle Bud passed away in 2017. But the mosaic stands as an everlasting embodiment of his spirit. “I noticed through Bud that the Bills became this symbol of pride that he carried for being a Western New Yorker,” Peck said.
On the final day of the installation, Peck walked by the mosaic to catch one last glimpse before it would belong, forever more, to the public, to Bills fans and to Western New York. As he approached the wall, he noticed a construction worker walking in front of him. Uncle Bud, Peck said, had an inimitable gait. This man, passing directly in front of Peck, had the same. It was unmistakable.
“It’s the perfect example of a bigger community story,” Peck said of his mosaic, “that starts with a really personal connection.”