Hidden Murals

By Alicia Kelly
(C)2010 Newsquest Media Group

PICTURES of a mural at the back of a Worcester restaurant have brought back memories of the swinging sixties for many of our readers.

Last week, your Worcester News featured the striking collage of dancing girls which is now on display at the back of Shakeey’s restaurant and takeaway in Angel Street.

Owners Sheikh and Haroon Latif decided to unveil the historic collage, made of cut-up magazines, as part of a major revamp of the restaurant.

It was previously hidden away in a part of the building used for storage and had survived a severe fire in 2006.

Archivists at the Worcestershire history centre in Trinity Street believed the decor might have been from a gaiety bar underneath a pub called the Fountain Inn – but many readers have disagreed.

David Glazzard, aged 69, from Lowesmoor, Worcester, said: “I remember that great big mural being there. It was about 40 odd years ago and it was in the Ewe and Lamb.

See the full story plus a series of pics at worcesternews.co.uk

By JORI FINKEL
(C)2010 The New York Times

WHEN the Watts riots swept Los Angeles in 1965, Noah Purifoy, an artist who was in the thick of things as the director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, quickly took to the streets with a friend. Their mission was to gather debris — charred railroad ties, wood from burned-out houses, melted scraps of neon signs and other wreckage that could serve as raw material for sculpture. The resulting artworks soon went on tour throughout the country in a group show, “66 Signs of Neon.”

For years this work was thought to have been destroyed or trashed, “returned to its origins as junk,” in the poetic phrasing of Abby Wasserman in a museum essay written a few years before the artist’s death in 2004. But Andrew Perchuk, who is organizing a 2011 show for the Getty Museum on painting and sculpture in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1970, has a surprise. He plans to include a Watts riot sculpture by Purifoy in his exhibition — an assemblage rescued last year from a private owner in Las Vegas.

“It’s a very powerful, visceral — also melancholy — piece because of the burnt materials,” said Mr. Perchuk, who is deputy director of the Getty Research Institute. “And its whereabouts were completely unknown since the 1960s.”

This Purifoy assemblage is just one of a number of scholarly discoveries being made during the preparation of “Pacific Standard Time,” a set of exhibitions in and about Southern California opening in the fall of 2011. The Getty Foundation, which is organizing the initiative, has granted $6.7 million to nearly 30 institutions, from small university galleries to major art museums. Each is focusing on a different slice of California art history, from World War II to 1980.

See the full story plus one large excellent pic at nytimes.com

By GAZETTE STAFF
(C)2010 Bliss Communications

JANESVILLE — Two are up, one is coming, and now a fourth mural is under way for downtown Janesville.

The new Janesville Women’s History Mural will celebrate the role of women in making Janesville a better community from 1860-90. The project is co-sponsored by the Janesville Design & Development Center and the Friends of Judi Kneece.

The new mural will follow the template of the earlier mural project sponsored by the design center.

The Heart of the City Outdoor Art Campaign featured three murals celebrating the founding of the community. Each mural highlighted a decade of history from 1830-60, and all of them featured male central figures.

Two of the murals have been hung. The first is on the north side of the Prospect 101 building at 101 E. Milwaukee St., and the second is on the east face of The Janesville Gazette building at 1 S. Parker Drive.

The third mural will be hung on the backside of the city building, 18 N. Jackson St., by the end of March.

A fourth mural will feature a female central figure. All of its subject matter will reference women’s contributions to the community in the late 19th century.

Sponsors hope to enhance the project and convey the full history of women’s contributions to the community with follow-up educational activities targeting both children and adults.

See the full story at gazettextra.com

By Loveland Connection staff
(C)2010 coloradoan.com

"Kent Pendleton: Scale," an exhibit of paintings by the well-known museum mural painter, will open with a reception at 6 p.m. April 9 at the Loveland Museum/Gallery.

The exhibit will be on display through July 3 at 503 N. Lincoln Ave.

"Kent Pendleton: Scale" represents a painting style that has evolved into what Pendleton refers to as “Stylized Realism – an attempt to interpret the landscape more simply and abstractly, emphasizing color and design rather than a literal recording of the scene.”

In addition to the opening of the Scale exhibit, Pendleton’s mural, surrounding Mariano Medina’s cabin, which has been partially reconstructed in the Museum, will be officially unveiled.

See the full story at coloradoan.com

By Christian Ponte
(C)2010 The Tanooki

You’ve gotta check this out. I’ve very picky when it comes to posting fan art because, well, most of it isn’t that great. Sure, it’s a form of admiration for the great video games out there, and it’s the thought that counts. But every so often, a piece of fan art pops up somewhere in the world that’s actually worth showing to others.

Allen Hampton, an artist from Tampa Bay, does all kinds of work from sculptures, to drawing, to aerosol paintings, and more. The beauty you see above is a 9′x30′ mural on the side of the Central Art Supply building out in St. Petersburg. Not only that, but it was done entirely using aerosol paints. You can’t find talent like this just anywhere. Click the image above to check out all of Allen’s amazing creations, or click on through to see some close ups of the Metroid mural.

That's the full text, though more of a blog post. Also see a couple of large excellent pics at thetanooki.com

By LAURA WIKSTON, CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
(C)2010 Sun Media

About 125 people came out to strike a pose for the Dunnville Commemorative Mural Project photo shoot at Dunnville Library Saturday, March 13. The event, spearheaded by Lacie Williamson, will see all the images pixilated into a giant mosaic mural of a sunset over the Grand River. The completed mural will be applied to the storefront of IDA Hauser's Pharmacy by John Pridmore of Mirror Imaging.

Williamson is an events planner and fundraising co-ordinator, and a Dunnville resident. Last winter she formed a partnership with Hauser's Pharmacy and Gatineau, Que., artist Jean Rene, to create the mural that will be unveiled June 5 during the Mudcat Festival's Movie Under the Stars event.

Rene is founder and artistic director of Human Mozaik, an Ottawa- Gatineau-based group of photographers who have been turning blank walls into works of art since 2003. Their murals adorn the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Novotel Hotel in Ottawa, the Downtown Rideau BIA, the E.B. Eddy Tower in Hull, as well as locations in Gatineau.

Williamson, who attended Algonquin College in Ottawa, met Rene when she was volunteering at Festival X, a festival of photographers.

"Lacie knew what we do and she thought it would be an great idea to do a mural in Dunnville as part of its 150th celebration," Rene said.

"I thought it would be an interesting way to get the whole community of Dunnville involved in the celebration," Williamson explained. "It's a way of uniting a community."

See the full story plus one pic at dunnvillechronicle.com

By Cathy Spaulding, Phoenix Staff Writer
(C)2010 Community Newspaper Holdings

Old pictures outside the walls of a downtown music store are getting a new look this week.

University of Central Oklahoma painting instructor Bob Palmer and four past and present students are repainting murals outside Square Deal Music, 212 W. Broadway.

Palmer and eight UCO art students painted the original scenes in April 2001. The scenes, drawn from historic Muskogee photographs, were painted on remnants of a building that housed S&Q Clothiers. The building was torn down in the late 1990s, opening the former store site as a downtown park.

Since 2001, artists have returned several times to repaint parts of the mural when plaster fell from the wall.

“When the plaster kept falling off, we decided to do a more extensive renovation,” said Kim Walton, past president of the Muskogee Area Arts Council. She said Palmer and four artists arrived in Muskogee on Monday and are expected to work through today.

See the full story plus several large 'work in progress' pics at muskogeephoenix.com

(C)2010 The Daily Star

DUBAI: Hala Elkoussy’s “The Myths & Legends Room: The Mural” was unveiled at ArtDubai on Tuesday. The finished 9 meter by 3 meter work was one of three projects to have been awarded the Abraaj Capital Art Prize last fall.

“This piece presents itself as a proposal for an artwork in the Cairo City Museum,” the 36-year-old artist said while introducing her work. “There is no Cairo Museum, so [the premise] itself references the idea of ‘myths and legends.’”

The mural references public art – wall murals and dioramas – that celebrate modern Egyptian history, invoking notions of how to write an alternative history of the city, and how to read “multiple narratives of how people live in a big city – not just from the unilateral perspective of the economic, political and social context, the mega-narrative for state and media, but from the perspective of a single citizen, navigating life under the pressure of consumerism, political apathy and [ever] harder global economic conditions.”

The central figure in her work, Elkoussy continued, evokes a “traditional story from the turn of the 20th century about [a policeman] with the leg of a bull. Parents still use this story to frighten little children, highlighting the apparently contradictory image of the policeman as symbol of safety and security and, just beneath the uniform, a boogeyman.

See the full story plus one unfortunately-tiny pic at dailystar.com.lb