Monday, September 26, 2011

Joplin Globe Dedication Article


JOPLIN, Mo. — More than 100 Joplin residents, artists and city officials gathered Sunday near 15th and Main streets to dedicate a community mural that, to some, has become a symbol of the city’s healing.

The mural, titled “The Butterfly Effect: Dreams Take Flight” is the brainchild of Dave Loewenstein, an artist, writer and printmaker from Lawrence, Kan. Loewenstein enlisted the help of more than 200 area children and about 15 local artists to develop the theme for the community mural. It occupies an exterior wall of the Dixie Printing building.
Students from St. Mary's Elementary School singing their school song at the mural dedication.

Although the organizers never intended to feature tornado-related images in the project, Loewenstein said, the storm was a recurring theme in the children’s drawings. He said he was inspired by the way children depicted the dramatic and chaotic events of May 22, when an EF-5 tornado destroyed about a third of Joplin.

“Without the fear of phantom reprisals, or allegiances to social or business interests, children are free to tell it like it is, and they do,” Loewenstein told the audience at Sunday’s dedication. “Kids, up to a certain age, draw the way we grown-ups sing in the shower, with full force and heart, emotion, and little concern for how they sound to others. “Without ever mentioning the tornado, children in this community expressed the complicated, heroic and tragic stories of the storm and its aftermath with an honesty and integrity that adults would be wise to emulate.”

In his opening remarks, Rob O’Brian, president of the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce, talked about images of “butterfly people” that several children who survived the storm reported seeing. Those images made their way into the mural as well. “I think they were our guardian angels looking over us,” he said.

The mural is a depiction of the Joplin community. If viewed from left to right, it begins with historical images of a miner and of George Washington Carver. Next is a depiction of students at a table drawing a design; those designs appear in the mural, and near the center are chaotic images of the tornado’s destruction. The right side of the mural is a hopeful image of the future, with a phoenix flying into the sun. Two stanzas from Langston Hughes’ “In Time of Silver Rain” are featured in the design.

State Rep. Bill White, R-Joplin, said his daughter and a friend of hers were among many in the community who helped paint the mural. Now, he said, they have a real sense of attachment to it. “My daughter and her friend got a chance to help paint this; they took ownership of it. Now when we go by, they say, ‘There’s my flower,’” He said while viewing the mural from a distance. “Would you rather have a blank wall here, or would you rather have something like this?”

Ashley Bilke, an artist and Joplin High School senior, was the youngest member of the design team. She said the opportunity to work on the project is something she will never forget. “It was an incredible experience, especially to be treated not for my age, but as an artist,” she said.

The project began months before the May 22 tornado destroyed about 7,000 homes and claimed the lives of 162 people. Organizers said the timing of its creation, and the community support it received, seemed perfect for a wounded but proud community. “What’s behind me is something that is so important to Joplin,” Jo Mueller, director of Spiva Center for the Arts, told the crowd. “It is the perfect gift to us right here, right now.”

Loewenstein said the effect of the Joplin mural highlights the possibilities of future community art projects to bring communities together. “This project and other ones like it remind us that we can make beautiful things and meaningful things together, even when we may not agree on certain issues of the day,” he said. “We can be colleagues, and we can be friends, and also disagree sometimes. This may seem like a mild statement, but these days, in some circles, it may seem radical. If we can do this, what else might we do?”

Music and more
The dedication ceremony included musical performances by Rick Banfield, and Robert and Drew Pommert, as well as a choral performance by students from St. Mary’s Elementary School. Mayor Mike Woolston read a proclamation. The finishing touches on the mural will be completed this week.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Joplin Globe Editorial and Dave's Essay

— Hundreds of Joplin area residents helped create a design — and later paint it — for a mural set to be dedicated at 2 p.m. today at 15th and Main streets.

The Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce’s Cultural Affairs Committee, working with David Loewenstein, the project’s lead muralist, envisioned the project as the first of many community-based murals in Joplin. Sharon Beshore, vice chairwoman of the committee, said: “It’s something that’s very visible to the public. This is hopefully the first of many community-based murals (in Joplin).”

Loewenstein said it is important for Joplin residents to have this opportunity. In a blog for the project, the Lawrence, Kan., artist wrote that creating the mural could give people “an outlet” and could help in the healing after the May 22 tornado. “Our project has always been centered around the opportunity for community-driven art to inspire, remember and envision,” he wrote. “As Joplin begins its long process of recovery, our project and how it can engage the community may be more relevant and useful, pertinent and powerful than we could have imagined.”

The mural was painted along the south wall of Dixie Printing, on the northwest corner of 15th and Main streets. Beshore said the committee had first scouted downtown locations for the mural before switching gears after the tornado. She said a centrally located mural could draw attention and spur interest in a section of Joplin that will need to be rebuilt. “We moved it to 15th and Main, which is halfway between the tornado area and the downtown, so it can kind of be what we call a gateway — a transition from one area into another area,” she said.

The design was created based on views from about 100 Joplin residents who attended a handful of recent meetings. More than 200 children from the Joplin Family Y, the Boys & Girls Club and Spiva Center for the Arts also were consulted, Loewenstein said. Then, on the last weekend of August, members of the community were asked to come apply the paint.

The mural will be the second in Joplin through the Art in Public Places project, which falls under the chamber’s Cultural Affairs Committee. The first project brought a mural by Anthony Benton Gude, grandson of Thomas Hart Benton, to City Hall. It also will be the third mural regionally to be created with the support of the Mid-America Arts Alliance, which last year supported community murals in Newton, Kan., and Tonkawa, Okla. “There’s a big push for public art — art that people can just enjoy in their everyday life,” Beshore said. “You don’t have to go to a gallery to see it; it’s just out there in the public domain.”

Loewenstein, at the Globe’s request, has written a column about the project.

‘The Butterfly Effect’
by Dave Loewenstein

If you had asked me a year and half ago what I’d be doing right now, I doubt I would have given this answer: “Painting butterflies on a wall in Joplin, Missouri.” But here I am, along with what’s now been more than 300 Joplin volunteers, engaged in a challenging and wonderful project painting a giant mural on the Dixie Printing building at the corner of 15th and Main streets.

But why make a community mural here and now? What makes murals different from other art forms? These are questions I often hear at the first community mural meetings. My answer usually starts with this quote:

“The highest, most logical, purest and most powerful type of painting is mural painting. It is also the most disinterested, as it cannot be converted into an object of personal gain nor can it be concealed for the benefit of a few privileged people. It is for the people. It is for everybody,” Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949).

I like Orozco’s quote because it distinguishes murals from other types of painting, and puts them in a field more closely allied with collaborative arts like theater and music, which for the most part are not hidden away and are rarely considered objects to be bought and sold.

This is important to me because my mural projects — and Joplin is a good example — are at their heart an exercise in collaborative community action where the finished work is important, but is not the only goal. Writer Arlene Goldbard, author of the book “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development,” says it much better than I:

“Someone taking part in a collaborative theater, for instance, is able to have a very full and rich experience of citizenship: to be one among many whose ideas and efforts are welcomed equally, who pursue common aims in a climate of respect and affection, who together make something meaningful to themselves and the whole community. Even in a dark time, this experience foreshadows true democracy and full vibrant citizenship.”

And here in Joplin it was apparent when I visited in early June that residents of this community were focused and sincere when it came to discussing issues of history, identity and a vision for the future, all of which would be essential in creating a meaningful and resonant mural. Young people have been especially candid and expressive. We worked with more than 200 children at the Boys & Girls Club, YMCA and Spiva Center for the Arts making drawings about their idea of “home” in preparation for our mural.

Drawing with kids is illuminating. Kids, up to a certain age, draw the way grown-ups sing in the shower — full-force with heart and emotion and with little concern for how they sound to others. This is especially true when you give them just enough of a prompt to get their wheels turning and then get out of the way. The drawings Joplin’s youths made are remarkable — remarkable for their beauty and their honesty, and remarkable for the way they examine and illustrate the joy and sorrow of living in a time of confusion and contradiction on one hand, and unparalleled community spirit on the other.

Like a visual poem, the drawings created by these young people and their older counterparts on our design team form the heart of our mural. It’s a mural we’re calling “The Butterfly Effect: Dreams Take Flight.” It’s a bit silly for me to try to describe the mural in words when you can go down to 15th and Main streets at 2 p.m. today for the dedication and see it for yourself. But that said, here’s a sort of caption that might be written under a photo of it in the future:

Inspired by the metamorphosis of butterflies, the myth of the Phoenix, and the capacity for renewal expressed in the imaginations of children, the design is like a short picture story in three chapters.

In the far left panel, a miner standing atop giant crystal formations points out toward the future and a young George Washington Carver examines the roots of a plant specimen. Above the figures is the first part of a quote from Langston Hughes’ poem “In Time of Silver Rain.”

In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry.

Dividing this panel from the rest of the mural is a large serpentine shape taken from the Wilders Restaurant neon sign on Main Street. To the right of the Wilders sign, two children sit at a table drawing. Their pictures activate an imaginary landscape that unfolds in front of them, beginning with a small butterfly that floats above the surface of the wall.

At the center of the mural, images made by children in our drawing workshops depict cleanup activities after the tornado. After the challenges of the storm, new flowers bloom, trees sprout new leaves, and children come out to play. Butterflies float magically over the surface of the mural carrying its images within their wings.

In the far right panel, divided from the imaginary landscape by a neon sign inspired by Wilders Restaurant, eagles carved from tree stumps downed during the tornado are illuminated by the light of a Phoenix that has taken flight. Inscribed above the Phoenix is the second part of the quote from the Langston Hughes poem “In Time of Silver Rain.”

And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky.

This short description pales in comparison to seeing the mural firsthand, so please come visit us as we add the final touches.

Thank you Joplin for working together with our mural team with such serious purpose and for being such gracious hosts. I hope the mural we have created together will inspire others. You have many great stories to tell and many big walls calling out for a little color and imagination.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Joplin - Mural Dedication and Celebration


PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE
Joplin Community Mural
Dedication and Celebration

Sunday, September 25th
2:00 pm
15th & Main 
Joplin, Missouri

Friday, September 23, 2011

Joplin - First Satellite Project Completed

Last Monday the satellite project team carefully transported the mosaic design for Cleo's tree stump over to its intended home on Pearl Street.

With six of us working non-stop for a couple of hours, we set the broken tile and mirror glass piece by piece.

And just as the sun dipped below the western horizon, we finished, as an almost perfect full moon rose above South Middle School.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Joplin - Painting Begins

The 100+ degree heat couldn't keep away more than 275 volunteers who came out to kick-off painting of the mural. Plenty of cool drinks, sandwiches, and fresh fruit donated by friends kept the painters fueled, while I worked double-speed, like a hot-shot barista, to mix enough colors to keep their brushes busy.


We started at the bottom and gradually worked our way up the wall so our smaller volunteers wouldn't have to climb the scaffold
Painters checked in with mural assistant Amber Hansen before they got their assignments.
Heather, an artist from the neighborhood, lent us a tent to provide a welcome spot of shade.
Colors for the mural are based on the color study we developed using cut-paper collage. To see a short film of this collage process from our project last year in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, click here.


We continued by blocking in large areas of color in the background before working on details.

After a week or so of painting...

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Joplin - Dave (sort of) Cuts the Ribbon

I was honored to be given the task of cutting the ribbon for the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce as they celebrated the beginning of work on the mural. But truth be told, the over-sized scissors were only for show. As I went through the motions of cutting, an unseen hand did the dirty work with a more modest pair of shears.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Joplin - Satellite Projects / Signs of Hope part I

When we visited Joplin in June to talk about how the tornado would impact our plans, a few people at the meetings we held at the Spiva suggested that we do some small, perhaps temporary, projects that would reestablish some points of reference and sense of direction in areas that were damaged by the storm. The group also felt that, in a landscape drained of color, embellishing damaged buildings and objects with beautiful handmade artworks might help raise spirits, inspire, and reconnect residents to their neighborhoods. I thought about this and offered that we might be able to make some small mosaics using found tile and objects on existing structures. I also knew it would be a lot of work...

A month or so later when the design team was just getting started, I asked them if they still wanted to make what we referred to as these 'Signs of Hope' out in the tornado path. They emphatically did and so we formed a small sub-design team of about seven people who began to research and design for this project. Our first question was where? Where was the right kind of place for these smaller artworks to go? And where could we quickly get permission to do them? The problem was solved when design team member Cleo offered that we could use the area around her house at 22nd & Pearl as a site for the projects.

At our next meeting, we visited Cleo's house, still standing but heavily damaged, and decided on three locations for our temporary projects - an 80+ year old tree stump left after the tree was taken down by the tornado, a small set of steps that had led to Cleo's front door, and four pillars at the entryway to South Middle School across the street from Cleo's.



Next, we began collecting bits and pieces of tile, glass, mirror, and other debris from around Cleo and Shaun's homes.





We brought all of this collected material back to the studio and started to design for our three sites - the stump and stairs we decided would be mosaic and the pillars in front of the school would be painted.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Joplin - Wall Preparation and Design Transfer

In 100+ degree heat we started work on site at 15th & Main. Here are pictures from Powerwashing,  Priming, and Transferring the design.

Design team member Hiram begins powerwashing.
The coolest job in town.
It took about 15 gallons.
Kyle when he still had his beard.
Amber touching up at the very top of the wall.
After some tinkering to get the image adjusted using a digital projector from across the street, transferring the design went smoothly.
We get to see the design at full-scale for the first time.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Joplin - Creating the Mural Design Part II

In the studio, we divided up the tasks for creating the final design. Kyle and Amber composed parts of the kids drawings into a visionary world of transition and transformation, while I integrated their work into the larger design with a section of the mural that referenced Joplin's origins on the left side and a section that symbolized regeneration and hope on the right.
Kyle and Amber sort through drawings.

Dave begins to compose the final design.
Below is the final drawing of the design for the mural. It is drawn to a 1 inch equals 1 foot scale which makes the full drawing 19 inches tall and 105 inches long. Scroll down to see details of the design with descriptions of the imagery.

Inspired by the metamorphosis of butterflies, the myth of the Phoenix, and the capacity for renewal expressed in the imaginations of children, the design is a like short picture story in three chapters. (click on the image to make it larger)
In the far left panel, a miner standing atop giant crystal formations points out toward the future and a young George Washington Carver examines the roots of a plant specimen. Above the figures, is the first part of a quote from Langston Hughes'  poem "In Time of Silver Rain." Dividing this panel from the rest of the mural is a large serpentine shape taken from the Wilders Restaurant neon sign on Main street.
To the right of the Wilders sign, two children sit a table drawing. Their pictures activate an imaginary landscape that unfolds in front of them beginning with a small butterfly that floats above the surface of the wall.
At the center of the mural, images made by children in our drawing workshops depict clean-up activities after the tornado.
After the challenges of the storm, new flowers bloom, trees sprout new leaves, and children come out to play. Butterflies float magically over the surface of the mural carrying its images within their wings.
In the far right panel, divided from the imaginary landscape by a neon sign inspired by Wilders Restaurant, eagles carved from tree stumps downed during the tornado are illuminated by the light of a Phoenix which has taken flight. Inscribed above the Phoenix is the second part of the quote from  the Langston Hughes' poem "In Time of Silver Rain."

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Joplin - Creating the Mural Design Part I

Fashioning together a mural design from the hundreds of images and ideas generated is a daunting task. And there is always an inclination to try include everything and create a kind of patchwork mural. We challenged ourselves to take things a step further and create something more integrated and dynamic that reflected our shared experience in a beautiful and interesting way, while incorporating the work of a large and diverse group of participants.

To do this we first needed a theme, a general visual and conceptual idea, to work from. As a group, the design team considered:
  • The significance of this moment in Joplin's history.
  • The input we had received from community meetings and drawing workshops.
  • Where the mural was going to be located.
  • Who the audiences viewing the mural would be.
  • What we wanted to communicate.
From these considerations, a few key ideas kept coming up. They were transition, vision, metamorphosis, and revitalization (including the myth of the Phoenix). There was also a strong feeling expressed for using the drawings that young people created as a significant part of the mural. In the studio, the design team took these ideas and began to form images that symbolized a kind of visionary metamorphosis, while Amber, Kyle and I searched through all of the kids drawings to find ones that seemed to best capture the moment.

Here are some of the design team drawings that used visual icons like trees and  butterflies as vessels to be filled with ideas about transformation and revitalization.





And here a few of the drawings kids made that we chose to use parts of in our design.




Then I had an idea... What if the kids drawings were somehow brought to life by something symbolizing a beautiful transformation - like a butterfly.  It felt right and so I quickly did this mock-up where a butterfly takes flight from one of the their drawings.
The next piece of the design puzzle came from one of my favorite poets and Joplin native son Langston Hughes. We had been looking for poetry to enhance the mural's developing story when Sharon, one of our design team members, brought in the poem "In Time of Silver Rain" by Hughes -

In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads
      Of life,
      of life,
      of life!
In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,
In time of silver rain
      When spring
      And life
      Are new.

Amazing. The poem's tone and imagery seemed too fit perfectly with the direction our design was taking. All we had to do was figure out how to bring together all these sources - the kid's drawings, the design team's work, my ideas about the butterfly, and the poetry - into something that looked and felt like a short (picture) story.

The mural design we created from this material is just one of the countless designs that could have been made, and it couldn't possibly include all of the incredible images that were created as part of the process. The good thing is that Joplin has many other walls calling out for a murals - hint, hint.