Confluence, envisioned and created by trompe l'oeil artist John Pugh with assistance from his staff, local artists, and apprentices, celebrates La Crosse as a sacred place shaped by the interaction of the region's rivers, landscape, and the many people who have called it home. About 26,000 years ago, glaciers more than a mile thick covered much of the Upper Midwest and scraped the land nearly flat, but the Driftless Area escaped glaciation and retained its steep bluffs and coulees. When surrounding glaciers began melting about 16,000 years ago, torrents of water carved the unglaciated landscape over millennia and formed the Black, La Crosse, and Mississippi Rivers, which converge in La Crosse. The region's first people were nomadic hunters and gatherers who pursued Ice Age mastodons and mammoths and later deer, fish, and small game, and later mound builders and farmers, including the Ho-Chunk, filled the river valleys with villages and cornfields. Centuries afterward, immigrants from other continents arrived in waves. Using trompe l'oeil, a technique meant to deceive the eye, the work makes painted features appear to project from the wall and painted bricks match the real bricks of the building. It was installed by covering the brick wall with white plaster and applying painted strips of non-woven canvas, similar to wallpaper. The 25-by-60-foot work was dedicated June 14, 2014, and funded by an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts along with state, county, city, corporate, foundation, and private support. On the west wall of the Pump House Regional Arts Center in the La Crosse Arts District, it celebrates the spirit of the place, the importance of the arts and creative people in expressing community identity, and the convergence of diverse peoples that has given La Crosse its unique culture.