Downtown Mural

Leah has arrived to begin work on the two murals we are completing on on Grand Turk. She is with an organization called Artists on Call. She arrived on January 15, while I was in the states. The museum received a last mintue grant to bring her down, but it has been a work in progress because nothing was put together until after she arrived.

When Leah came we did not really have a wall to paint. I had some ideas, but no wall. The wall mural project is part of a grant aimed at hurricane restoration. I hoped to use art to restore hope to the community.

I was driving by Ona Glinton Primary school one day and realized that they use to have a mural. It was evidently lost to hurricane Francis in 2004. The first wall became

My vision was to paint a mural on one of the standing walls from one of the buildings demolished after hurricane Ike. I want to take something that is a reminder of our loss here and paint it with a big sign that says “One day Grand Turk will be better.” Not literally. But get it? The idea is that everything does not have to look dismal and destroyed.

Leah spent two weeks meeting with local artists and community leaders. With their input, she planned and designed the mural from a list of images that people felt represented Grand Turk. The images represent the history and culture of Grand Turk, which was actually very surprising to me. The mural has been titled “Looking at our Past, Rebuilding our Future.”

I have been making the rounds with Leah to Kiwanis and then to Rotary selling the idea. Kiwanis gave us a work day.

So, on Saturday, February 7, we started the downtown mural. This was also the first Saturday of the museum's children's club. Leah and I went to the wall mural at 8:00am. Ok, really 8:ish am. Leah had to leave at 9:00 to set up the children's club program, which was a water color painting clinic.

I had to stay and paint the wall. By about 10:00 a few others began to show up. I think we had a total of six volunteers. The wall took 15 gallons of a bright blue base coat.

We finished at 1:00 and I went back to the museum to clean up children's club. We had 40 children come, twice as many as they had been prepared for.

On Saturday night we held a musician's party in the wet lab. Four guys came out to play and about 30 people showed up to hang out.