ArtIsEverywhere

It’s pretty inspirational to me to see projects that come together based on innovation, talent and public participation.

When I first saw this mural, I thought I recognized the unique stylistic hand of C.F. Payne, one of my favorite contemporary illustrators, but with all the scaffolding in front and even with the resource post, Mural, mural on the wall by Soapbox Media, it seemed unclear and I wasn’t sure I understood. After several reads now I see, or at least I think I understand the background and how it has come together.

Singing Mural by CF Payne - Photo by Scott-Beseler of Social Media

This Singing Portrait Mural is by C.F. Payne, who’s not known as a muralist, but MuralWorks in Cincinnati (a public art sub-branch of ArtWorks) has painted it in collaboration and according to C.F. Payne’s illustration. This is what I like about ArtWorks’ MuralWorks program:

ArtWorks employs teen and professional artists to work side-by-side with communities to transform our region.  Since MuralWorks began in 2007, ArtWorks has painted 34 murals in 25 neighborhoods in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.  Your neighborhood can be next!

Here’s a little secret — they even hold Secret Artist Events called Secret ArtWorks. The next one is November 18 but wait, you can attend the best of all their past Secret ArtWorks events on October 6 at their MasterWorks event.

The other part of this collaboration was in in relation to JR, a street artist who won the 2011 TED award with his international Inside Out idea to get everyone and anyone involved in art by submitting their portraits, in which they would receive posters on which they were printed and they would then paste the posters in a public area in order to be a part of the public art, global community project. The teen artists painting C. F. Payne’s Singing Portrait Mural for MuralWorks participated in Inside Out with their own portraits that they had pasted on the wooden planks surrounding the scaffolding on which they were working to paint the mural.

INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Upload a portrait. Receive a poster. Paste it for the world to see.

I like this idea but I do not consider individual photographic portraits pasted to singular spots in public spaces as murals. They are more like pin-up posters or similar to something you could see as billboard advertisements in Times Square. However, I did a post on JR and the strategic placements of large scale photographic portraits that he uses in his own work is different in how they are used collectively to transform an entire village or community or public space and it’s people is truly remarkable. No wonder JR is the winner of the 2011 TED Prize.

From the streets of Paris, where he started to the heart of the Middle East conflict to Brazil and Cambodia, here are a few of his works from the latter location. The changing eyes on the train is brilliant.

This is where “street art” can be powerful and leaves a lasting impression long after the artwork is gone.