Called to Walls

(footsteps echoing) (birds twittering) Okay. (whistling) (jazz music) These projects are inspired by a long tradition of community muralism. It really started with the Wall of Respect in 1967 in Chicago. It was one of the first projects that we're aware of where the mural process was not only for people in a local neighborhood or community, it was also about them, and it used their help in the creation of the design and the actual painting.

This was coming out of other struggles that stemmed from the Civil Rights Movement, where people were trying to have more of a voice in public life. So about 20 years ago, right about the time I was getting out of graduate school, I was really frustrated as an artist, and I'd been thinking about public art a little bit, so I went down to the art library, and I pulled out a book called, Toward a People's Art, it was supposedly about the community mural movement, which I didn't know existed at the time. I was going through the pictures, looking at these fabulous murals that were obviously by people in neighborhoods, and about real issues, you know? And I come to this page, 140.

I had this amazing, overwhelming sense of deja vu, looking at the photograph, and the caption reads, Ruth Felton, Miller School Mural, 1975, Evanston, Illinois. And gazing across this photograph, I realized that I was in it. With a pencil in my mouth, I was one of the young muralists working alongside Ruth Felton, on this mural. I guess I saw it as a sign.

So 20 years later, here we are, inspired by the tradition of the community mural movement, bringing people together to talk about the issues that matter to them most, and then collaborate as a group to translate those experiences into large pubic murals. (acoustic guitar music) It began in the spring in 2010 in Oklahoma, where communities across the state were encouraged to apply. And so then here on my desk lands this application for a community mural project, and like, damn right, you know. We can do this, we deserve it, and it would indeed just give you that one more relationship-building project.

This is together painting, togetherness. It's so much fun. I need to know if you're on board for this mural project. We may not get it, but I want to know that you know about it.

I'd like to put the bank's name in here, I'd like to put the Lion's Club name in this application, I'd like to put the Tonkawa tribe in this application, and they all said yes, of course. Of course put us on there, maybe thinking, this ain't gonna happen. We're not gonna get the only mural in the entire state, and then we get notification that we're a finalist, so then I get to tell all these entities, guess what? They're coming to see us, they're like, what?

So we get a call from Dave Loewenstein, and he basically proposes to us that there's a project going on in Oklahoma, it's gonna be a three-month thing, and it's a mural project. That's what we know. He had seen some murals we made in Junction City, Kansas, and he asked if we would like to be muralists on the project. Exactly two weeks after, we are packing our bags, and we're traveling to a town of 3000 people, where we're gonna live for the next three months.

When we get to town, we stop by the place where we're gonna be staying, which ends up being the Rest In Peace Bed and Breakfast, a bed and breakfast that exists above the Tonkawa Funeral Home. (old time piano music) In the great little town where we live (laughing) In Tonkawa Oklahoma. Cheesy, Cheesy Three museums, one ambulance. And a great little town.

And a great little town. -

Dave

Let me tell you the story of Tonkawa. Pulling up to Tonkawa's lone stoplight, at the corner of Main and Grand, I recognize features common to many small towns in the Midwest, the two-block downtown with as many vacant storefronts as those doing business, the water tower emblazoned with the high school basketball team's recent state championship, and at the heart of downtown, standing taller and sturdier than any building in town, the Coop grain elevator. For someone like me who grew up in a big city, towns like Tonkawa often elicit a hard-to-pin-down emotion, a sort of quaint sentimentality, mixed with concerned sadness. I love the look of these places, the unrefurbished beauty of bricks and boards that have been worn and colored by time.

But I'm also aware that these weathered surfaces may be signs of the precarious economic position they are in. August of '04 I moved here. At the time, the town had not started a real renewal project to speak of. It just wasn't happening.

The way I saw it is, the people that were living here had lost hope and they had lost their pride in their community, and so, it showed. -

Audrey

This project is looking for a community who needs art to make a change in their community, and that would be the most powerful aspect of it. -

Dave

The process that we use on these mural projects, is meant to re-engage participation as citizens in the decisions that get made, where they live. And so as part of that, when we have our original community meeting, we ask folks, if you're still really interested, and you feel like you can commit to meeting some more, then you can select yourself to be part of the design team. And that goes for young people, kids, older folks, artists, city officials, it doesn't matter. You're all equal at that point in the project.

Dave said, I don't want the regular 10 people who always come up to work on something for the community, that the design team has to have Native American representation, we have to have hispanic, we have to. It wasn't like, he said, do your best Audrey. And so, I thought okay, that's good. In our first real design team meeting, we go around the room and we just ask what do you think would be good for the mural?

You oftentimes get the same kind of suggestions. There's a particular landmark in town, there's nostalgia about the way the town used to be, in its glory days. And then there's some industry, like the railroad, or mining. There's also gonna be at least one airplane in the mural.

Let me get a closeup of that. -

Photographer

Hey, I can zoom. Oh, you got zoom? Okay. So look out for that ladies and gentlemen.

Airplanes in the mural, blowing your mind. One rule that I always set down for the project is, if we're invited to do something, we have to say yes. One of the first things that we went to, was this Sunday morning pancake breakfast that one of the local churches, they saw that somebody they wanted to introduce us to was there. We had to tell them well that's Mister Carr.

Of course everybody knows him, he's one of the I think in this county, one of the last Word War II vets. -

Dave

Early in his life, during the oil boom, he, as well as a lot of other young men mostly, instead of getting new cars to drive around town, they got airplanes. All these guys learned how to be pilots, like in the 30's and 40's. So Max was a pilot. He delivered the mail out of his airplane.

He would fly over farmsteads mostly, and he would literally throw the mail out of the cockpit, as close as he could to the house. The only thing that you had to do in throwing it out the window, you had to throw it down, away from the airplane, so it wouldn't hit the back end and hit the tail in the rear. If you just tossed it out like that, it was liable to go back and tear the tail off. So we dropped it straight down.

Dropping papers out of airplanes was a really bad idea. He said they never got their newspaper. He said, I go twice I went out looking for it, and a cow had already used it. That was a great story, but this says something about the process, because what came of that, we said, you know what, Max has to be in this mural.

Max has to be in this mural. What we ended up doing was introducing the narrative of the mural through Max. You're looking over the landscape of Tonkawa, and you see Max's yellow plane there. And he's got in his hand a newspaper, and he's throwing it out of the cockpit, but what we added was, like five or six other newspapers that he'd thrown just before that, and they're unfurled, so we can actually read what the headlines are, and the headlines refer to significant events from Tonkawa's past.

So we're introducing the town and its significant players through Max. So Max's story and his memory of Tonkawa is really significant, but it reminds me of how, often when we come to these towns, there's a narrative, or a story about the place that starts really in the 1880's, and we have to always remember that's not when the community began. There were a lot of other people who were here, before Max, and there was settlement, and there was culture, and it can be tricky and sensitive, to explore that history that comes before what people normally associate with the place. (acoustic guitar music) -

News Reporter

For years, oil, much of it on Indian land, has been the backbone of Oklahoma's wealth. Today, modern oil derrick forests have encroached on the very capital in Oklahoma City. You spend a lot of time doing your own research on these projects, going to the library, the historical museum, talking to elders, trying to get as deep a feel for the place as possible. Two things I knew about Tonkawa, are the Cherokee land run, and how that corresponded with the time, when the Tonkawa tribe lost the majority of its land.

So I asked a couple of questions about the relationship, between Tonkawa the town, and Tonkawa the tribe. You are asking questions that's really making us think about, is that really what Tonkawa's about? Is that really something that is important? And I think you really bring out new ideas, and new thoughts about the community and our history, that we don't think about, and that I think some of us didn't think about.

-

Dave

One of the places that we went when we had time off between our design team meetings, was out to the Tonkawa reservation, which really isn't a long trip. You can see it from the edge of town. We were invited out there, and we got to meet and talk with the Tribal President, Don Patterson. At one time, this was all Indian country.

All that's Indian country now is what you see in red, you see? And how did that become? How does a people in 1492, how do discoverers come to a country, and then shortly thereafter take it over? I'll tell you, what was the law of the world in those days?

The doctrine of discovery, remember? It was a Christian principle, it was an international law, that says, any Christian country that discovers any land that's not claimed by any other Christian country, can claim it by right of discovery. -

Dave

How much of an area did they have at the time? I'm glad you asked that question. -

Dave

And he started to draw the state of Oklahoma. Then he drew within it, the reservation of the Tonkawa, which was this fairly large square in the north central part of the state. And he said, this is what our reservation was. And then he erased that, and he made this little tiny rectangle, that would be inside that square, and he said this is what we have now.

And I could see it, this doesn't happen a lot, but I could see that image in the mural, somebody drawing the outline of what had been their homeland, erasing it, and then making it a smaller piece. And sure enough, as we developed the design, the group agreed that this was important, to tell the story of how the land run happened, and how the Tonkawa tribe was affected by it. (singing in Native language) The town is named after the tribe, and that word, Tonkawa, means 'they all stay together.' that phrase was given to the Tonkawa by other tribes. So they referred to them as, oh that group?

They're Tonkawa. They all stay together. I think that's a legacy that I don't know, some people seem to, sometimes dismiss, that that is what our name is. We love Tonkawa And we'll tell you why On a list of "super towns" it ranks so very high -

Melinda

We have to do motions, we have to do actions We have civic pride Down deep inside We are proud of the town where we live We have lovely parks, caring churches too And the kind of friendly people who come shining through See our fine museum Our library too -

Dave

I think our measurements actually were sort okay That always terrifies me. Because we did 75%. There was some multiplication and adding. Excellent schools here Their achievements...

It's supposed to be cheesy. Have made us proud -

Arlene

The most skilled practitioners rely on qualities of sensitivity and intuition, that cannot be quantified or standardized. Indeed, those who focus too closely on models, replicability and best practices, tend to produce dull work, lacking depth and heart. And we're here to say That we'll always stay In the great little town Where we live -

Randy

(crooner voice) In Ton-ka-wa Oklahoma -

Woman

You're a little rough but like you said, it's all for fun. It's all for fun. Hey little town in the OK Everyone here is mighty fine -

Dave

When it was time for us to leave Tonkawa, I had a real feeling of sadness and understanding that I was gonna really miss this place. The art MURAL! Mural! Group cheer MURAL!

-

Dave

It's unnatural and awkward to have to uproot yourself, after you've been so deeply involved with people who you consider to be close friends now. What's better than a heart in the park -

Dave

Moving down the road, in this case up to Newton, Kansas, we encountered a unique situation. During the application process we received two proposals from Newton, one from the city, and the other from Bethel College. When this came to light, we proposed that these two groups collaborate, and that's exactly what they did. In Newton, one of the most amazing things, was when one of our design team members, Sarah, organized a group of community volunteers to choreograph a dance that was in response to the mural design.

My name is Sarah Dick, and I am a pastor here at Shalom Mennonite Church. We began by kind of creating a tableau to in some ways, mirror, or interact, engage with the mural itself. I'm not a visual artist, I'm not a great drawer, and so this was kind of something that I felt like I could really add to the mix. We asked people, what's your favorite place in Newton, or North Newton?

And they said, my favorite place in Newton is the bike path. especially the bridges. I think it's both in the process, and in the imagery that we've developed, it was about working together as a community, and I love the imagery of the people around the table. Are they playing a game?

Are they working on a quilt? Are they building something? What are they doing at this table? Or maybe all of the participants are doing something different.

But they're all there, they're present, and I especially love the one figure off to the left, that he is next to the table, and he's not actively engaged, but he's still there as part of that community. Does it mean that he doesn't know about the table? Does he feel not invited to the table? What does it mean that he's there?

I like the storyline. Our history defines our future, but it's the people engaged, who are the bridge between the two. You know we got a Hispanic community, we're a farming community, we're a railroad town, all those issues back and forth, I think came into it and then how much of that history do you want to develop? Some kid told me, Mister O that looks like you, it's just a symbol of what the community is about.

The railroad provided that opportunity and exodus of people coming from Mexico to come to Kansas, and slowly, slowly, become part of the patchwork and the quilt work that's synonymous with Kansas. To me honestly, I think of course it's still running because I still see that Hispanic community growing, and coming to live here, and now, being accepted. And by the way, they said, my least favorite place in Newton, is waiting in my car, for a train. (laughing) -

Dave

So as much as we're trying to create beautiful murals, in the communities that we visit, we're also trying to do something else, and I think it's best expressed in a quote by the writer Arlene Goldbard, in her book,

New Creative Communities

The Art of Cultural Development. And it goes like this. Someone taking part in a collaborative project like this, 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. (soft choral music) (thunder) I want you to know and feel what I experienced. I want you to understand how the connection with other people, through this experience, saved me, or saved the others, and how important it was to us. And I want you to understand how this shared experience helps to create what it is to be a community.

And the only thing I saw, I saw power lines break over on State Line Road, and I knew something was up. There was no funnel, there was a long skinny horizontal white cloud, just a few hundred feet off the ground that came sweeping out from all that blackness, and sort of made a turn as it went over me, and the kicked up to probably 70 miles an hour. But I never saw anything, just that darkness coming, and that skinny white cloud floating under it. (soft choral music)

Dave

New Creative Communities

When you guys wake up in the morning Do you sometimes remember a little bit of a dream? (kids talking) Sometimes the dreams don't even really make sense. (kids responding affirmatively) And sometimes like even when you're sleeping, and you wake up in the middle of the night just for a minute and you're having a really great dream, and you want to go back into it? Have you ever had one?

You can do it? Sometimes you can do it. Sometimes dreams are really a little bit scary, sometimes. So dreams are sort of these incredible worlds outside of our waking lives.

And what I'm thinking about today is, do you think tigers dream? Do you think frogs dream? Do you think plants dream? All right, so here's what I'm thinking about.

What if, all of the tigers and all of the frogs, and all of the plants and all of the people, and all the other animals and buildings and bicycles, here in Joplin had a dream together? What would that dream be, if it was dreaming about how it wanted to be in the future? What would the dream of Joplin be?

Child

New Creative Communities

-to be fixed Okay, what we're gonna do is, instead of talk about it, we're gonna draw it. Dream a dream for Joplin. Got blown away from the tornado like. So there's only the metal structure left?

Yeah, we can color as we go. Dream of Joplin, and this is what it wants to be without all the wrecks. A dream of what it will look like when it's finished. Tornadoes are gray, tornadoes are gray -

Woman

New Creative Communities

Whose dream was this? -

Child

New Creative Communities

The wrecked-down buildings. This is what the buildings were dreaming? Yes. -

Dave

New Creative Communities

I first came out here last December to give an initial presentation, talk about what we were gonna do, and we were well on our way to organizing the project, when May 22nd happened, the tornado came, and initially we didn't really know what we were gonna do in terms of this project, so we came back and visited, it was about June 9th, and I did a couple of presentations, just talking about my thoughts about the project, and where we might go forward from there. I was also really just down here to listen, to hear what you folks thought about continuing, in light of what had happened. And what we heard was, that now more than ever, people wanted to do this. When we came into town, we were coming down Main Street and everything looked all normal and stuff, I wasn't really sure what to expect.

Then, as soon as we saw the wreckage like all conversations stopped, it was just real quiet for like three or four blocks till we go to the site. -

Man

New Creative Communities

Right there is where it starts. It's just crazy, how there's literally just like a distinguishable line of where the tornado was and where it wasn't. The trees were the weirdest part for me, because it's just like, the houses are destroyed, and you expect that, but then the trees are just like skeletons, they're absolutely skeletal. The wind is so strong through here because there's no wind breaks, there's no houses or trees or anything anymore, so it's just constantly blowing.

-

Amber

New Creative Communities

What is that? It's a photograph of somebody's house. You have no idea where something like this came from. Or whether this house is even here any more.

It's totally out of context, it's just here. You know I was just kind of focused on my neighbors and if they were okay, and just looking around my own neighborhood, and then when we got up one more block up to Joplin High, and I could just see that everything was gone, and there was a huge fire, and yeah it was just-- I think a lot of people are really desperate to pour themselves into something. I think you're gonna have a lot of participation. I hope.

We'll do what we can, and maybe something that just has to keep going after we do our part. (soft choral music) -

Dave

New Creative Communities

What role should this project really play right now? This community is facing some serious challenges. There are still people recovering in the hospital. There are still funerals going on.

And we see everywhere, people are going through their belongings where their homes used to be. And so who are we to come here and now do a community mural? What's that gonna look like? I guess what I understand now, even though in our meetings people are really jazzed, they're really excited, they really want to go forward.

I think it's gonna be an incredible challenge for us, to figure out how to reflect this moment, what it means for people who live here, how this fits in to the bigger picture of what Joplin is about, and then how does our perspective fit in? We're outsiders, we hardly know this place. We have to be really sensitive to all those things. I remember when I first saw the outline of the schedule, and it was like, it's about three months, and only the last month of it is painting.

It's like wow, so this process is two thirds other things, besides painting. That's when I realized, I have a lot to learn about how this gets done. Everybody get up here, get closer, and see what this is made of. It's not in perfect shape.

(soft ethereal music) I was initially among those people who thought including tornado imagery in the design was not a really good idea. I didn't want that to be what Joplin was known for, or remembered for. I didn't want those images to be a constant reminder of what we've been through. It was a tough time, and I for one initially started out not wanting to see any of that.

In our community meetings, I kept saying it wasn't gonna be a tornado wall, and there was pressure not to have a tornado wall, especially where it was going to be located, which was downtown, and as things transpired you just couldn't get the tornado, and the images, that went along with that, out of your mind. I'm Marta Churchwell, I'm development coordinator for Spiva, and like Linda said, I'm among the people here from the Joplin Regional Artists Coalition. I came to the meeting this morning, and agree with a lot of the folks there that this could be a great healing project for Joplin. I think it's a very positive outlook for something very tragic that happened.

I'm Patrick Tuttle, I'm the the director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and I just wanted to just pass on some things real quick. We're collecting pieces of superstructure and putting them away in the public works boneyard, to someday hire an artist to do something with that for a memorial, and the mural downtown, the 7th Street mural, or 8th Street, whatever the reference is for it, is preferably to stay on Route 66, welcome to Joplin type of thing, not a memorial for the tornado. The memorial for the tornado will come later on, when we work with Walmart on a couple of ideas, Saint Johns with a couple of ideas, kind of a feel of the Oklahoma City type memorial, if you've been to that. So we'd like, I'm not speaking officially for the city, but in terms of the City Manager is pretty happy, we'd prefer the one downtown to stay, Route 66, or as we call it, the fly paper, to get people to stop in the downtown area.

The northeast corner of the Saint Johns property, there's a tree with a semi truck around it. The city manager has told nobody to move that, that's supposed to stay where it is, and if the hospital leaves that area, that's a great location for a memorial of some sort, right in that area, preserving that tree and that truck. The I beam is literally touching itself on that thing. If you haven't seen it yet, it's amazing to see it.

I didn't mean to-- All of this stuff that all of you have talked about, including the guitars, things you're talking about, things that you said, things you said, were brought up this morning in the meeting, so I think if we let Dave talk, then you might here what we're wanting to do here. I've got to run, there's another meeting. I just wanted to say that, and I do know the city manager wants the mural to stay focused on the history, heritage of the city, and whether a piece of that is the memorial of the tornado, that's understandable, but the focus is, it's still something to capture people to be downtown and all and be part of that history. So, I'll get out of here.

(muffled) Thank you. A lot of us were under the impression that we were gonna be kind of conveying the message of what's going on now. I'm in no place to make a judgment about that, because I don't live here, and you guys have much more of an interest in that. What I would say, is the theme of the mural, the content of it, What you would like it to be about and depict, is up to you.

It's up to you, right? And if that, conflicts perhaps with what the city wants in some way, I think you need to bring that, we need to have that conversation. Feel empowered to tell the story you want to tell, and we'll find a place that it can go. If it can't be on that wall, that they had previously thought of, we'll find a different place, we need to.

Soft acoustic music -

Jed

New Creative Communities

You know I was talking to someone today, that I haven't seen since the storm, and he was making a statement that Joplin has formed somewhat of a reputation out of this storm, in that the people came together, and helped one another, regardless of their status, of their denomination, race, none of that mattered. It was just all about, I mean for me the story of the storm is that. You know the sad thing is, that in reality at some point we're gonna go back to what we were. I was just writing, and I said to myself, sometimes the event isn't the cause of the change, but just reveals what was already there underneath the surface, latent, ready to activate.

One of the challenges with the theme that we're using, is how do we represent that thing which changes. We're not just talking about the tornado, we're talking about a moment in time, and all those things can lead to visual clues, like, if you say shifting perspective, well you could shift the perspective. Okay, we'll turn it now. I kept having this thought about green, lush, giant blanket.

Actually there's a person over here, nestled under that blanket, very secure, and maybe some buildings coming out, and maybe that's part of what he's dreaming about, coming out of all of this. And then where is this really coming from, is it a vision, is it a dream, is it somebody's imagining? And I tried to put this little person, at the base of this tree, kind of dreaming this whole thing. Or maybe it's the big guy dreaming the little person, I don't know.

But, that's what it was. (soft piano music) -

Arlene

New Creative Communities

When someone is able to tell their story, and have that story be received, with deep caring and respect, and full attention. The act of telling and being heard can be healing in and of itself. And when you have the opportunity to take part in helping to craft those stories into a work, that can be shared with other people, and so resonate with their own experience, and give them a sense of how their individual experiences are part of a fabric of shared experience, it had a profound effect on the community. That adds to the healing effect.

Early on in the design process, there was a lot of talk about doing some other site-specific projects that would be located in the actual area that was damaged by the storm. These projects would be led by members of our design team. And sure enough, four or five of them rallied together to collect materials from the damaged area, and use them to adorn a staircase in front of Cleo's house. -

Woman

New Creative Communities

This is your house Cleo? -

Cleo

New Creative Communities

This is my house, yeah. -

Dave

New Creative Communities

It already looks like a mosaic right here, you know. We are scavenging for most anything that is of glass or ceramics or pottery to do some dynamic, mosaic works, on some particular spots, in our storm-ravaged area to bring color and a little joy to people's lives, just a spontaneous look-see, and go wow, after they've looked at all the bad stuff, they'll have an opportunity to have a good experience. By the way we found another prehistoric, this could go into a museum. That's a real fossil.

I think it belongs in the Smithsonian. And she came for my legs She came for my sight And sometimes you get so dark You think you'll never see the light Sometimes you get so dark You think you'll never see the light So I shut my eyes and listened To the grinding of the gears Orchestrate a tragic symphony of all our grandest fears And I listened as the bludgeoned blood Went pounding in my ears And those months that I was frozen Well they surely felt like years That's why I'm walking on today my friends Walking on today my friends I was not walking yesterday and may not be tomorrow While we were working on these mosaic pieces, we were still working on the design for the mural, and doing a lot of drawing workshops with kids and Boys and Girls Clubs, at the Y. And their art will be a significant part of the whole thing. It's too bad they couldn't join us in these meetings, too, because they know when to call people out, especially adults.

Group Laughing

New Creative Communities

That's not true. Don't speak on my behalf, I'll tell you what I really think. Our greatest challenge still was how to depict the storm or the recovery efforts afterwards in the mural. I want to help but I'm not sure what I can do to help, because well, I'm a kid so.

-

Dave

New Creative Communities

While we were working all of this out, we realized that we had this remarkable group of drawings that these kids have been making across the community, and there's this space across the street that could serve as a perfect gallery for that. So we got them all together, and one night we created an exhibition that was solely of these young people's drawings. It was just a one-night show, but tons of people showed up, and it was amazing to see the deep conversations and serious sort of looking at these things people were doing. (upbeat piano music) And looking at them, we realized that they had in the most beautiful, honest way, told the story of the storm.

And so what we chose to do, was collage together different parts of their drawings to tell a narrative basically of what happened when the tornado came, and the recovery afterwards. I kept hearing about these sessions with children, that were creating artwork and I'm going, is that just for them, to recover from it? Does it have anything to do with this mural? I really didn't know in the beginning.

Then when I heard that it's gonna be incorporated, I thought well how can their immature artwork, and their thoughts about it, be meld in with adults? -

Girl

New Creative Communities

People inside them are dreaming big dreams, about how when the butterflies fly over the damaged area, it becomes all happy, and kids are playing and everything is all like it should be. I have no love to give I have no home of my own And here is a secret that comes when its called We beg it to take us, the lift and the fall (Starlings chirping en-masse) Little Starling, little Starling I want to be free Little Starling don't you leave without taking me Little Starling, Little Starling he's locked me away He's told me I can sing my way out of this grave And here is the secret We're born in our dreams And this waking and this living is not what it seems Brianna, your head's 10 feet tall on it. What's behind me is something that's so important to Joplin right now, it is the perfect gift for us, right here, right now. But beyond this mural, the larger gift I think is that ability, that process that we have learned, about how to engage people, how to bring people together, how to work together and collaborate, and initiate these conversations that might never have taken place.

Don't worry about a thing Because every little thing is gonna be all right Don't worry about a thing Because every little thing is gonna be all right Don't worry about a thing Because every little thing is gonna be all right Don't worry about a thing Because every little thing is gonna be all right -

Arlene

New Creative Communities

Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered? -

Dave

New Creative Communities

So the fourth site for the Mid America Mural Project, ended up being Arkadelphia, Arkansas, sort of in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, in a great pine forest, with beautiful rivers. In that part of the state, as you can imagine, the logging industry has always been really big. So Arkadelphia is a town of about 10,000, little county seat, two liberal arts colleges. The population's about 30% African American, 65 to 70% white.

They really have only one public artwork in town, which is at the courthouse. It's a memorial to the Confederate States of America. And when you go to the history museum, it's pretty interesting. This is an area that's steeped in the Civil War, had to face desegregation efforts in the 60's, and so on.

Yet, going through the museum, there is hardly a reference, a mention, a photograph, of African American history at all. This project is in many ways intended for you folks to tell your own story to each other, your own story to each other. But there's also a lot more. -

Woman

New Creative Communities

So how do you go about finding that? -

Dave

New Creative Communities

So when did you decide to do Mt. Rushmore? How did you get that Idea? I got a lot of ideas come in your head.

I was thumbing through an encyclopedia, World Book's encyclopedia, and I saw that Mount Rushmore, and it clicked right there, four presidents came to be and I say, why don't I do the civil rights workers, in that same concept. So that's when, it's been about four years ago, so that's when it started. Frederick Douglass, the next one is Martin Luther King, H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton.

Come on inside. Go right ahead. -

Dave

New Creative Communities

Thanks Sam. -

Sam

New Creative Communities

Sometimes you can look into a painting, and you don't have to have a lot of detail, but you see what it's all about. Looking and seeing is two different things. As an artist, I used to didn't understand that principle, but Miss Ford showed me, you could have a small painting with three or four lines. If those lines connect just right, it's a thought there.

This is what they ran in the Hot Springs paper, so anyway. Everything that we do having to do with the arts, is art education, and people education. It works both ways. I learn from the public, and they learn from what we do.

All right, we have more to do. I wanted to just talk briefly, we did these word pictures last time. They're really fascinating, because they begin to show us the way that we can compose the ideas that we're coming up with, what goes where, how important is it, do they overlap? Are they in tension with each other, and then of course the biggest question.

You gotta ask yourself What's missing, whose voices, whose histories, whose ideas are not getting the kind of amplification that they need in the process? When we held our community meetings in Arkadelphia, there's a guy there named Henry Wilson. Henry's the local president of NAACP, and had been working for years to get Pine Street renamed as Martin Luther King Boulevard. Henry was quite skeptical of the mural process, and was concerned that there wouldn't be significant mention or inclusion of African Americans in the mural.

None of those drawings out of all those groups had anything, featured anything, about the African American community in Arkadelphia. I hate to be saying it, but it's part of me. If you're gonna write the history, write the whole history. -

Dave

New Creative Communities

I understand how you could be frustrated, because I saw those things, and I saw a lot missing. Exactly, exactly. What I'm doing, how I feel, I feel is right. I feel it's right.

I want to sit down with you, because I want you to hear, and if it goes in one ear and comes out the other, it won't be that I didn't try. I won't be that I won't be able to tell people, I tried to see that this part of our history was included. How do you think it should be included? How can it be included and still be with the rest of the history?

There are differences, they're racial differences. This community is no different. However, it's not not very big, it's not a real problem. So what would it be?

What in Arkadelphia that's a problem, that we're trying to work through, or work out? Well, being equally treated, are some of the problems in Arkadelphia. You know, we've talked a lot about history, and there are parts of history that are glorious and wonderful and we all want to celebrate. There are other parts of history that are more difficult, where things weren't always accessible to everyone.

And so, we came up with a phrase that sort of helps organize our thoughts with this design. The journey from a dream to a promise, and that helps organize how we were going to lay out the composition. I've been all those above, colored, negro, black, and Afro American. Which do you prefer?

I prefer human being, but I had to go through that transition. We had to go through transition, you couldn't go around it, that's history. It is history, you've lived a lot of it right here. So now, here we come, we're not even from here, gonna paint a mural.

Yeah. What do you think about that? I think it's great. Like I was brought up in a situation, you got two universities.

We're supposed to have culture, and it's time for you got to get into the 21st century. Working with the theme of education, we knew we were gonna look closely at the two universities, look back at the history of segregation, and then desegregation, which was closely tied to Peake School. Peake to me, is like awesome, because it shows this effort that was made, during the time of segregation, to provide access to education to African Americans that wasn't there before. It was also a collaborative effort, of Julius Rosenwald, and Booker T Washington, who got together and brainstormed this idea of the Rosenwald school program.

Arkadelphia needs to know that that happened. These are important historical figures, which have a relationship to this place. If we want to bring in real people, and show way back in the 20's, how a white man and a black man got together to collaborate to make this plan, here they are. These are the two dudes.

Good-lookin' guys. -

Ashley

New Creative Communities

Thinking about this history and the significance of education in Arkadelphia, we decided to open our next design team meeting with a go around, where everyone could share memories of teachers that have been influential in their lives. In high school I had two teachers that finally made it clear to me that I could do what I wanted to do. She was the first teacher to tell me that I had potential to do things in life. They put me in a leadership position on the team, and expected me to carry it out, and he knew what he was doing.

It's too easy to quit. What do you mean? He goes, listen, you want to be an artist? Seriously?

And make that a vocation for your life? You're gonna find a hundred reasons why not to do it. It's too hard, there's no money. The criticism, and on and on and on.

He said, you're gonna just have to focus on the one or two reasons to stick with it. We're not in the right profession, if you just want to be a teacher, she said you need to work with special ed people, that's your calling. Don't you know I'm a quiet person. I went to Peake High School, and I think that all the teachers that were at Peake, they had a part in it.

Molding me, because it takes a village to raise a kid. It does, and that village was Arkadelphia, and I've got that runny eye, and I don't know what it is. (laughing) I got that runny eye for a reason. And this is, this looks like it's the school.

-

Arlene

New Creative Communities

I think that the strategy that's worth trying is the one where we tell the truth. We need to do this to be humane. We need to do this to have the empathy that sustains a society in which people are kind and caring to each other. We need to do this in order to cultivate the capacity of imagination, that enables us to see a future.

We need to do this so we can understand each other and connect with each other. We need to do it, not just to survive, but to have any hope of a livable future. Now, what is that going to be? And what is all this down here at the bottom?

And who are the two men that are shaking hands there? And also there's always been a lot of comments about it, and then you had people say, well I don't know this, that, and the other's not on it. Who is the person in the middle? What I knew, just from doing other murals, was that anytime in the United States, just about anywhere, you make a large figure of an African American, it's gonna raise eyebrows.

You don't really think about it very much, until you do it, and then you realize there are very few depictions, of Native Americans, or African Americans in public art at all. The central figure is much larger than everybody else, right? Much larger. So she is the manifestation of an idea.

She's not an individual that we all know. She's all of those teachers and mentors that we just talked about, put into one. She's an allegorical representation of education, of learning, of mentoring, of teaching, and what that means is, that she embodies the idea of it. She is the person who carries with her that notion.

She's symbolic, and she is summoning, gesturing, to this young guy to come this way. So, there was a little controversy, at the end on the color of the lady right here. And it began to really bloom about a week before Dave finished it. It was very dark.

There was probably about three or four people, that came to me. They were not speaking for everybody. But there was enough that I felt like he should know. And I'm not trying to start any controversy, it had already been started.

She started controversy when she asked us that the mural be changed from black to white, for whatever reason. So, I'd be less than a man not say something about that. We had a meeting, and anybody that came, could put input and all. And there was very little input.

The thing that annoyed me the most, is that there was a TV station there. She wanted to know what the controversy was. And so I said, you know, it's really not a big deal. It's a beautiful mural, and we're here to celebrate it, and so she just kept on.

I said, you know what, I said, usually people come to find the news, to find out what it is. I said, you're coming to make the news, so I suggest you go back to Little Rock. On Main Street in front of the Honeycomb Restaurant right behind me, and in front of that mural that's been the talk of the town for the past few days, and it's all for the wrong reasons. Now the mural was created to represent the diversity in the community, and bring the community together, but just how diverse the mural is, is what's causing all the controversy.

The most important thing that I want people to understand, is that this kind of participatory work, where consciousness and values and the basic building blocks of who we are as individuals, and as a society, are part of the material that you're working with. It's inevitable that there are gonna be challenges. They don't always have to emerge into conflict, if the community artist is aware of when an ethical challenge is starting to surface, and is able to anticipate it, and surface it fully, and engage people in discussing it before they start doing battle. Sometimes it doesn't become a conflict, it just becomes a really interesting moment to learn something.

So this is a moment where I realized, okay we're gonna have to deal with this, because she made an ultimatum. And I have to rely and depend on the process that we use for these projects to deal with situations like that. So, we called a special meeting of the design team, we were gonna meet down at the wall, and talk about this. There was a television camera there, and I chose not to give an interview about this, I didn't feel like I was ready to do that.

But we started our meeting, and I simply said to everyone, I really thanked them for their work, and we were looking forward to the dedication of the mural, but that we'd been called together because there was some concern about the skin tone of one of the figures in the mural, and we needed to discuss this. My antenna went up, because of our experiences, how things go in Arkadelphia and I just didn't want that picture to change, because it's beautiful. -

Dave

New Creative Communities

Thanks Henry. Anybody else? Comments, questions? I want to say thank you to you and Ashley, and Jordan, for the fabulous job you did.

I think that you did a really good job, getting the ideas, and getting people to open up, and say what they felt was important about Arkadelphia, the fact that we have a reflection of how important education and the timber industry, and our history, are represented on this wall. And it is, Arkadelphia is multi-racial, and multi-cultural, and I think that what we have on the wall represents that very well, and I'm proud to say that I worked on this. Thank you very much for coming and doing it. The comments that I had gotten was the skin tone, and that they felt like that to make it just a little lighter would represent everybody, the African American community, the white community.

We have quite a few Hispanics here and we had a lot of Hispanics painting on the wall. My job as the Project Manager is to bring those comments, or anything, good, bad, or indifferent, to Dave. I recall her saying something like well I thought there were other people who were concerned about the skin tone of this figure but I don't hear them, I don't see them here today. And that was it.

-

News Reporter

New Creative Communities

A piece of art in Arkadelphia started some squabbles, but after today's meeting, citizens say, they're satisfied. The Journey From a Dream to the Promise. We want to dedicate this to the community, and the people of Arkadelphia. That was something we needed, this town needed.

It needed to show that people of all races can work and get along, have worked and got along. In any project, there's not gonna be people who agree 100% on everything, so I think the mural project was not an exception to that. And I believe we have the guidance from the mural team, to steer us beyond our disagreements into one common goal, which was something that we'll be very proud of, and which we are proud of. Sometimes I think because it's a small and conservative community, you have to be creative in how you can have those experiences, so they will come and take a taste, and not just say, oh, I don't do those type of things.

I think that's how the mural was effective in the very beginning. It was a project, and I think some people came because they were curious to see what this was about. And it was such a cool concept and such a cool project, that they stayed. That to me is one of the lasting effects of the project itself.

It's really something that's most fully experienced, by being present. It felt like a gift to give those who had worked on the mural, in all different capacities, and to give to the community to say, here's who we are. Look at us, we make stuff. We make art.

If anything, I think it told us that we could begin something that we hadn't ever done, that involved many, many people in the community, and we could make it happen, we could complete it. So three years later, I mean we still direct people, oh have you seen the mural, and there are lots of murals in Joplin now, but when you say, the mural, that's pretty much the one you think of. The creation of this mural points to an untapped potential for regular citizens like us, to re-inhabit the public spaces in our hometowns, and fill them with images and conversations that reflect our own hopes and dreams. To begin to occupy our visual environment with something more than advertising, and sloganeering, and to bring a sense of shared culture, memory, and possibility, back to civic life.

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. We can be colleagues, and even friends, and also disagree sometimes. This may seem like a mild statement, but these days, I think in some circles, it would be considered radical. And if we can do this, what else might we do?

You make culture by your actions, your choices, your words, your relationships, including your creative acts, and that everything that's been created has been imagined first, and you can be one of those imaginers, who helps to bring into people's awareness a different way that things could be, a way that's more equitable and loving and just, but in order to do that, you first have to have this underlying transformation in your awareness where you see yourself, no longer as acted upon, and just things happen around you, but as an actor who makes things happen, who makes things world. (soft ethereal music) Boats trapped in corners they've distracted motor The moon shimmered back a soap-green It's easier for farmers When it gets lighter warmer daily The river is for hiding When you've got ducks in a line you Floating toward that summer shade The ripples are unwinding The light tower is blinding I think I'm right that if we're smart half the time We can find all the ways that we could be And the things that surround moving fast round and round Are slow in their drift to the sea But that won't bring you back to me Under your covers there might be another But I cannot dare think of that Stumbling through the summer You have found a lover I'm wrecked