Today we started a new painting job in the arts district of our local town. The arts district has been undergoing a lot of development in the last ten years. It used to be a heavily industrialized part of town and it’s still full of abandoned buildings, factories, and homeless people. It is also known for its high rate of crime. More and more people keep moving to the metro area of town and developers have bought up large portions of land and turned them into high end housing developments. This has done a lot of good for the area and it has become quite a lovely place to be. With the development of housing brought more business establishments, recreational facilities, and restaurants.
The mural will be completed by our international street artist, Kayla Henderson, after five days of painting on Wednesday, when bystanders can approach the wall and take pictures. For its newest project under the Forest City Beautiful program, the public and corporate collaboration for public beautification through landscaping design, public sculpture, and murals, the Area Convention & Visitors Bureau spent months organizing and screening artists.
According to John Gilbert, president and CEO of the Visitors Bureau, “We want to use our community as a canvas. “Murals may serve as time capsules for a location’s history. We anticipate creating many more murals across the neighborhood as a result of our years of collaboration with artists.” The initiative, whose contributing members are the Visitor’s Bureau, the Arts Council, the Art Museum, River District Association, and the Park District, commissioned Henderson to paint her third-largest mural, which is also the first significant mural project for the bureau.
Older sister of the artist and company manager Courtney Henderson called the artwork a “fanciful forest scene.” Two monochromatic trees that are united by a bridge stand out against the background of a vivid blue. In the branches of one tree is the home of a gnome. We came up with the idea to paint a beautiful forest mural on the side of their new commercial business building. In this forest mural, we put a lot of our focus into the trees. We wanted to emphasize the lush green of the trees because in this area of the arts district there is a lot of concrete structures and not a lot of plant life. So we really wanted to try and bring plants and trees to life through our mural. In other spots of the mural, a ladder, a tire swing, and a swing were painted to offer three photo-posing opportunities for visitors.
This was a very fun project for us to do. We were able to add a beautiful work of art to a growing community that’s slowly filling up with young children. We hope that as the children walk by they will become inspired by the artwork and maybe one day they will want to paint a mural for their community as well. We feel the arts community as a whole is very underrepresented and we want to see more people get involved with the arts. It’s a wonderful and very rewarding career path should someone decide to go for it.