Rice Street Mural
Rice Street Mural
2017
Q: What's worse than a "block party" that no one attends?
A: A block party with NO ART.
The high school art club learned to create a public mural to satisfy the client.
Their criteria was:
1) Create a mural that was meaningful to the place. In this case, Rice Street, which before being a county center, was planted with sugarcane fields.
2) Incorporate a countdown to the block party that could be changed daily to reflect the amount of days until the party. The students created a central focus of the mural by painting 2 stalks of sugarcane black, using chalkboard paint. A community member changed the number of days till countdown, daily.
3) Incorporate community participation. During the block party, community members were encouraged to write wishes on small colored note papers, clothes-pining them to the line that was strung at different heights, to be accessible to young and old.
Creating a place based mural
This mural was done completely free hand and scaled up to fit the dimensions of the site. This was the students first free hand mural.
Student mural design
Discussing brush techniques
Vanessa discusses layout
Community member to the rescue with a boom truck to hoist students to the second floor.
The Block Party!
Wishes of the community drawn and pinned to the mural for the night.
The finished mural
