Rise Up: Mural Makeover In Klondike-Smokey City Neighborhood
by Natasha Main, Crosstown Development Intern
Big changes are in the works for an abandoned storefront on the corner of Looney and Decatur. Middle school students from Humes Preparatory Academy will work with a local artist to complete a mural on the façade of a blighted building at 989 Looney Street. The painting is scheduled to begin in September and will be completed in late October.
The idea stemmed from a partnership between the Klondike-Smokey City Community Development Corporation, UrbanArts, Crosstown Arts and the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, as another installment of the Delivery Team’s 25 SQ project. 25 SQ is a plan to reduce Memphis’ 53,000 vacant buildings by initiating a series of low-cost, high impact public art programs.
Artist Shea Colburn is leading the creative process with 15 middle school students. Along with Colburn, Nat Akin of Crosstown Arts, and Melissa Lorenz, an art teacher at Humes, are developing a curriculum to introduce students to muralist painters like Hale Woodruff and Diego Rivera, who will serve as inspiration for the budding muralists.Colburn explains, “the students are the soul behind this thing; their ideas in the classroom will be translated to the mural design.”
Siphne Sylve of UrbanArt hopes and expects to see “positive outcomes, especially with those involved in the process,” and since it is public art, even someone driving by is included. Sylve says that the outcomes of similar projects that UrbanArt has completed were beneficial to the communities they engaged and often sparked the question “What more can we do now knowing that something like this is possible?”
Nat Akin of Crosstown Arts hopes to build on this momentum by exploring the possibilities of future mural projects through Crosstown Arts’ free after-school arts program, story booth. The idea, Akin explains, is “to involve youth in the greater Crosstown community in an initial mural project that might be a model for a mural program that could be sustainable over time.” The artist and community partners mirror Akin’s sentiments of the project being replicable.
Central to this project is also community involvement. Dorian Spears, Public ArtDirector with the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team wants community members to be able to say, “I was a part of that change, part of adding something great to my neighborhood.”
The project intends to also stimulate small businesses in the Klondike-Smokey City neighborhoods, by hiring licensed and insured paint contractors to complete preliminary paint work and priming on the building. Additionally, the project seeks in-kind donations of painting materials and supplies like primer, paintbrushes, tarps, etc. Please contact the President of Klondike Smokey City CDC, Ms. Quincey Morris, if you can provide any of these services or donations.
What matters most is that the community gets involved and engaged with their environment before, during, and after the public art creation, Spears adds. “Participation is open to interpretation. You might not be an artist, but what kind of ownership and initiative are you going to take to participate in a better future?”
