Mural design approved

On May 2, 2013 the Sioux Falls City Council unanimously approved the design for the Whittier Neighborhood Mural in Meldrum Park. The resolution that was made to record their approval reads:

RESOLUTION NO.

32-13

A RESOLUTION APPROVING DESIGN AND PLACEMENT OF A PAINTED MURAL ON CITY-OWNED PROPERTY AT MELDRUM PARK.

WHEREAS, in April 2011, Whittier Middle School students in Mrs. Lela Himmerich’s eighth grade social studies class presented their hopes and dreams for a Neighborhood Revitalization Program that included development of an artistic neighborhood mural project;

WHEREAS, the Whittier Neighborhood Mural Project is coordinated by the Sioux Falls Arts Council and is supported by an “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts;

WHEREAS, visiting artists Dave Loewenstein and Ashley Laird, and local apprentice artist, Nate Buchholz, collaborated with Whittier Neighborhood residents, Whittier Residents Association, students from Terry Redlin Elementary School, Whittier Middle School, Joe Foss and Washington High Schools, and the Sioux Falls Arts Council on the project’s vision statement, conducted research for the mural, and created the neighborhood design team, in which over 30 community meetings were held with over 100 participants;

WHEREAS, this project exemplifies community collaboration, creative place making, neighborhood identity and pride, and colorful community-based public art within a city park;

WHEREAS, Whittier Neighborhood residents and students will help the artists paint the mural to be located along the west face of an existing water reservoir structure at Meldrum Park during the month of July 2013;

WHEREAS, on April 8, 2013, the Sioux Falls Arts Council reviewed and unanimously approved the attached Whittier Neighborhood Mural Project design and placement at Meldrum Park;

WHEREAS, on April 9, 2013, and on April 16, 2013, both citizen boards—the Sioux Falls Visual Arts Commission and the Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation Board—reviewed and unanimously approved the attached design for the Whittier Neighborhood Mural Project and placement at Meldrum Park;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY OF SIOUX FALLS, SD:

That it approves and authorizes the attached design and placement of a painted mural on City‑owned property at Meldrum Park.

Date adopted:

05/07/13

                                                                                                      Mike T. Huether 

                                                                                                              Mayor

Reviewing the Design

On March 8th the mural Design Team met to review the preliminary design. Ashley presented the scale drawing and then opened the conversation to comments and questions. Overall, there was a very positive response. Ashley and Nate took notes of the Team's suggestions which were brought back to Lawrence where we worked them into our next draft.

A month later we returned to share the updated design and color study in progress. The Design Team approved it by consensus. The following day we presented it to the Sioux Falls Visual Arts Commission. Our presentation included our vision for the mural, a mock-up of the mural at Meldrum Park and a description of the mural's content.

Our mural welcomes people to Whittier, a working-class neighborhood that embraces its heritage, celebrates its dynamic cultural and ethnic diversity, and looks forward to addressing and overcoming challenges to a prosperous and peaceful future. Our mural recognizes this as the past and present home to Native Americans from many tribes, as well as the place where settlers have come from across the globe. Our mural sings with a chorus of many languages and radiates with the colors of many cultures.  And, our mural shows the neighborhood working together to care for its natural beauty, the education of its young people, and the welfare of its most vulnerable residents.  Our mural is beautiful, engaging, and is the product of many dedicated hands and minds.

From left to right, the design includes:

·       Whittier Middle School students from Lela Himmerich’s class exploring their city, illuminating aspects that have cultural, historical and personal significance. Their research project is our inspiration and has been integral to developing the mural design.

·       Symbolic hands holding the Falls of the Big Sioux River as a gateway to the city. In the distance, the Statue of Liberty is visible welcoming those of us who at one time were immigrants to the U.S.

·       The waters of the river are gradually transformed into a march of nations familiar to residents as the annual Festival of Cultures parade. The figures here are taken directly from photographs of the march. The flags they carry are a representative sampling of the many countries of origin represented in the neighborhood, including South Sudan, Norway, Cuba, India, Lakota Sioux, Nepal, Somalia, Iraq, Ireland, Sri Lanka and El Salvador.

·       At the head of the march, the flags in the hands of marchers are replaced by seedlings and tools for planting. This signifies new immigrants’ intentions to put down roots in Sioux Falls, and that they represent more than just their homeland.

·       To the right of the march, large hands from above grasp ones from below in a gesture of play and / or lifting up or helping. One of these hands has Henna decoration, common among the cultures of Africa and southeast Asia, and popular at the Celebration of Cultures.

·       At the far right, young people from our design team manifest, through drawing, a hopeful vision of Whittier Neighborhood and Meldrum Park .

·       Tying the design together in the background are a series of design motifs taken from 1) the interior of the old Minnehaha Courthouse, 2) Lakota Sioux Star Quilt, 3) Henna tattoos and 4) East African textiles.

Design team members spoke passionately about their involvement in the project and the Visual Arts Commission approved the design 4-0.

On April 16th, the design went before the City's Parks and Recreation Department and also received unanimous approval. The last administrative hurdle will come in May when the design will be up for final approval before the Sioux Falls City Council.

The Design Team in action

In our projects, development of the main ideas for the mural come from discussions and workshops held with the Design Team. These are folks who after coming to one of the community meetings are so inclined to choose themselves to be part of what I liken to the cast and crew of a small town play - think "Waiting for Guffman." Here in Sioux Falls our Design Team reflects many of the diverse aspects of the Whittier neighborhood. Among our twenty or so team members are artists, school teachers,  kids of all ages, the president of the Whittier Resident Association, arts council members, and even an f-16 pilot.

We depend on this group to help us understand the spirit of the place, its history, current challenges and hopes for the future. We also need the design team to help generate, either by making or finding, the sources of imagery that will eventually give life to the mural. To do this we begin simply by getting to know each other a little better. At the beginning of each meeting we sit in a circle, reintroduce ourselves, and then respond to a go-around question like, What's your favorite movie? Where's the best place to eat in town? What do you want to be when you grow up? or What's your nickname? The ice gets broken and we can dive into mural land.

The main focus of our design team workshops is to address questions that will help illuminate the shape and scope of our mural design. In Sioux Falls we first asked ourselves,
What do we know about Whittier?
Next we asked, What is the purpose of this project? What is its subject? Who are its authors? and Who will be its audiences?

Our answers were the fuel for collaborative drawing workshops where we tried to work out the relationships and relative significance of Whittier's culture and heritage. At one point I wanted the group to focus more on the continuing story of immigration and how it's impacted the area, so I asked an intentionally provoctive question -  Who's family at one time immigrated to the U.S.?  After a pause, all the hands went up except one, the artist Jerry Fogg. He is Yankton Sioux. From this, we launched into a discussion and then drawing session revolving around cultural diversity. At other times the prompts for drawing workshops included:

What makes a neighborhood?
Imagine Meldrum Park if it could be the way you wanted.
What are the challenges, obstacles, and misperceptions that the neighborhood faces, and how can they be addressed?

At the end of the session, each group stands up and presents their work. We do this not in order to critique the merits of style or drawing proficiency, but to teach each other about what we came up with and what we struggled with. The idea is to share our work and build off of each other, not compete. Two and a half weeks (and twenty-six meetings) later, we had amassed hundreds of drawings and written descriptions for the mural. The material was gold and enough for at least ten murals, I'm sure.

Our work now is mainly composition and editing. To start that process, Nate, Ashley and I met to draft a vision statement of sorts for our mural design. It's intended to give momentum and a frame for the design process. It's not written in stone and will continue to be sculpted as we go forward. Here it is as I read it to the design team at our last meeting.

Our mural welcomes people to Whittier, a working-class neighborhood that embraces its heritage, celebrates its dynamic cultural and ethnic diversity, and looks forward to addressing and overcoming challenges to a prosperous and peaceful future. Our mural recognizes this as the past and present home to Native Americans from many tribes, as well as the place where settlers have come from across the globe. Our mural sings with a chorus of many languages and radiates with the colors of many cultures.  And, our mural shows the neighborhood working together to care for its natural beauty, the education of its young people, and the welfare of its most vulnerable residents.  Our mural is beautiful, engaging, and is the product of many dedicated hands and minds.

Meetings, meetings, meetings and research

After a whirlwind three-weeks of meetings, drawing workshops and presentations, we're wrapping up the first stage of the mural project. In all, we held twenty-six meetings to gather input and begin to visualize the mural design. Here's a run-down of the groups we've met and or worked with so far:

Sioux Falls Parks Department
Whittier Middle School
Terry Redlin Elelmentary
Eugene Field Elementary
Hawthorne Elementary School
Washington High School
Whittier Neighborhood Association
Joe Foss Alternative School
Multicultural Center
Boys & Girls Club
Whittier Neighborhood after school program
Sioux Falls Arts Council
Community Meetings at the Public Library and Museum of Visual Materials
plus four meetings with our design team made up of local residents

This may look like a lot, but it really only scratches the surface of the the city's rich and diverse cultural landscape. Among others, I wish we could have visited with more students in high school and college, and more elders and artists in the community to hear their perspectives on this rapidly evolving city. Hopefully the word will get out and they will join us when painting begins.

When we weren't at a meeting, we explored the neighborhood and began to do research spurred by the conversations we'd been having.

With the help of middle school teacher, Lela Himmerich, we discovered the significance of Whittier's namesake, John Greenleaf Whittier, whose passionate and reasoned stance against slavery, advocacy for women's suffrage, and support for collective bargaining for workers coincided with many of the themes that emerged in our design team discussions.

A celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier in Amesbury, MA

We had a fascinating conversation with Jim Woster, a forty-three year employee of the Sioux Falls Stockyards, who recalled a dramatic shift in the workforce at Morrell's meatpacking plant (just north of the Whittier Neighborhood) due, in part, to labor disputes and new immigrants coming to town in the late 1980's. Jim reminded us that this wasn't the first wave of immigrants to be employed at Morrell's. In the early 1900's it was Irish, Norwegians, and other Northern Europeans who came to fill the difficult but well paying jobs.

Postcard of Morrell's Plant

Long a place of many cultures, characterized by Polish and German (then) and Ethiopian and Mexican (now) businesses, Whittier has been and continues to be Sioux Falls' most international neighborhood. This dynamic coming together of peoples in this unassuming part of town is celebrated every year at the city's Festival of Cultures event.

Sioux Falls Festival of Cultures

 A huge asset to Sioux Falls, Whittier's multicultural mix also presents challenges, most prominently the need for translators, translators of the more than eighty languages spoken there, and translators of cultural practice from religion, to family structure and gender roles.  In our design team meetings, we heard that some people outside of the neighborhood have misperceptions about Whittier - 'It's dangerous' and 'It's dying' among them. Imagining solutions to the challenges Whittier faces, and countering those misperceptions were the focus of our final drawing workshop with the design team.

As a community-based artist, I couldn't be more thrilled about working in Whittier. The place has an important story to tell that hasn't yet been shared with the greater community. Finding a way for the mural design to acknowledge and engage with its complexity and challenges in a positive, beautiful, and constructive way is our challenge.

Mural Project - radio interview

Listen to Ashley, Dave, and project coordinator Tim Hoheisel discuss the Whittier Neighborhood Mural Project with Karl Gehrke of South Dakota Public Radio.

http://listen.sdpb.org/post/meldrum-park-mural-grant

TEDx talk on community murals

Great video of Katie Yamasaki talking about her community mural projects in New York, Cuba, and Mexico.

Getting to know the Whittier Neighborhood

After holding three community meetings, visiting four public schools and a couple of after-school programs, we're beginning to understand the remarkable international character of the Whittier Neighborhood. This is a part of Sioux Falls so rich in cultural diversity that nearly one hundred different languages are spoken here.  In fact, it has been referred to, by the NPR radio program The World, as the 'Ellis Island of the Great Plains.' 

Dave presenting at a community meeting

Just visit Whittier Middle School, named for the early American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, to see classrooms filled with young people from many countries of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America, and descendents of much earlier immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Germany. Or walk along 10th street to see a constellation of grocers, coffeeshops and restaurants specifically oriented to new residents from around the globe.

Whittier is a working-class neighborhood, just 'across the tracks' east of downtown, with a long tradition of welcoming new immigrants. It is also, as we've heard from many residents, the 'caring neighborhood' in that it is here where those without a place to sleep or money for food can find assistance from a host of charitable organizations. 

Listening to folks here made me think about how most, but importantly not all, of present day Sioux Falls residents come from families that immigrated to the U.S at one time. Those that did not immigrate like the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota are often referred to in the past tense, an unfortunate oversight since Native Americans from these and other tribes are alive and well here in Sioux Falls.

Drawing workshop at the Multicultural center

Highlighting and celebrating the vitality of this global, blue collar  neighborhood is our task. By creating a mural that resonates with the chorus of a hundred languages, we hope to bring a new cultural landmark to the city that recognizes immigrants old and new while honoring those who have lived here all along.