Color on the side
Internationally known artist paints murals during Yuma visit
Agroup of Yuma art supporters collaborated to attract an internationally known artist to paint two murals in the city last spring, who injected a jolt of color onto side walls of a muffler shop and a self-storage business.
Claudia Foret, a local curator who spearheaded the effort to bring the muralist known as Gaia to town, has brought an art form more commonly found in urban areas but is popping up everywhere, and brings fine art from behind museum walls to venues where anybody can see them.
“The project with urbanism is a result from wanting to beautify the city and make it an enjoyable place to live. While there is much work to be done yet, we see have seen this city grow exponentially with works by all of these artists and the players who make that possible, both in and around the city,” Foret said.
Gaia’s Yuma murals are on the south wall of Economy Muffler, 2337 S. 1st Ave. (north of 24th Street), and the west wall of All Secure Self Storage at 7505 E. 32nd St. (between Araby Road and Avenue 8E).
Foret began this process in 2013-14, when she brought in two street artists, who paint many of today’s murals and usually adopt “street names” under which to produce art, as Britain’s Banksy did.
Jetsonarama (aka Dr. Chip Thomas, a physician who practices on the Navajo Nation) and Los Angeles-based Bumblebeelovesyou painted the two murals facing the public parking lot just west of Main Street, flanking the rear entrance to the alley of storefronts at 224 S. Main St.
It was through Thomas that Foret
first met Gaia, and found out his ideas matched her own: “His vision is really to bring up and beautify Yuma, and help the city to be the best version of themselves.”
Gaia grew up in Baltimore and remains based there, but spends most of his time traveling across the country and world, painting on whatever surface he’s able to. He has done some gallery pieces but is best known for his murals, many of them several stories high.
They can be found in and around New York, in Baltimore, Detroit, Seattle and Washington D.C., but the majority are overseas, in Italy, Paraguay, Kenya, India, Argentina, Russia and Australia, to name a few. In 2016 the website Matador Network put him at No. 2 on a list of “30 worldwide street artists who are blowing people’s minds around the world.”
Gaia told the Sun in an email interview: “I do not necessarily believe it is important to incorporate art into the public landscape, but I do believe that murals function in a certain capacity. The mural is an opportunity for interrogation or conversely decoration.
“The mural becomes a site of celebration of identity and resistance against homogeneity. The mural can act as a thorn or a backdrop, depending on which issue the artist, the organizers and the community wish to confront,” he said.
Foret, who has lived in Yuma for about five years and studied and worked on art projects in France and Spain, has curated other local exhibitions, including “Beyond the Horizon,” a conversation panel with two artists held last year at the Yuma Historic Theater.
When Foret decided to expand on the idea by bringing a series of murals to town, she turned to three people who sit with her on the city of Yuma’s Public Arts Committee for help in raising money and finding walls he could paint: Michael and Maria McKivergan and Shirley Burch.
Burch and her husband Kevin Dale offered to commission one mural for the wall of his business, Economy Muffler, having gotten the idea after seeing a similar business during a trip to Bisbee.
“We happened to park down the road, and were walking and there was a muffler shop, and it had kind of designs on it, like an advertisement, and that put in at the back of my mind that we wanted to do something, bigger, and this kind of fit the bill because it was similar to that but more,” said Burch, a retired Kofa High School art teacher.
Michael McKivergan, a business owner who works at his family’s Yuma Carpet and Tile business, took on the task of finding other buildings with exterior walls Gaia could paint.
“I had secured a few walls, and then we discussed some of the artists that Claudia had some relationships with who would be interested in coming down here and doing murals,” he said. “She suggested Gaia, and we thought that would be great.
“We approached the other business owners who had volunteered their walls, and they backed out,” he said. So he ended up approaching his parents, Terry and Kay McKivergan, who donated an exterior wall of one of their businesses, All Secure Self Storage at 7505 E. 32nd St. That provided enough work for Gaia to come to town.
As for the others who backed out, McKivergan said they made business decisions. “You’re kind of taking a leap of faith because you’re going to pay an amount of money to an artist who, in some cases you don’t know, or the work you’re only passingly familiar with. And you have to embrace an image, it’s not something you came up with, that’s their vision and you’re going to put that on your building.”
McKivergan was also able to get other businesses to contribute: Lowe’s donated paintbrushes and painting tools, Valspar Paint (for which Lowe’s is a vendor) kicked in the paint, Reddy Rents loaned some scaffolding.
“We supplied all of the other tools, ladders and paint sprayers, vehicles, and he supplied the talent,” he said.
So Gaia came to Yuma for 10 days in April, doing one 50-foot long mural on his own and another about the same size with two collaborators.
Burch said the artist submitted several ideas for Economy Muffler, rejecting his first idea of prickly pear cactus pods superimposed on a scene from the Nile River in Egypt as not really fitting in with the Yuma community. “Then he came up with this, which is perfect,” she said. “He listens.”
The mural depicts a swarm of hummingbirds surrounded by local mountain peaks. Gaia wrote in his email:
“The hummingbird, the colibrí (in Spanish), is a symbol of migration, an agent that transgresses unnatural man-made boundaries and borders. The repeated hummingbird imposed over the landscape is an entreaty to respect the human condition of movement and migration in a region that is defined by the hindrance of this most basic aspect of all of our lives.”
Burch and Dale said they enjoyed getting to know the artist over the four days he worked at their building, and Burch would have loved to have him speak in some local classrooms, but he was on a tight schedule, because he had to go back to Baltimore to take care of his taxes, then Seattle to set up for a three-story mural on the side of its W Hotel.
“He said it was his dream job,” Burch said.
The couple said the reactions he’s gotten to the mural have been unanimously positive, though a few were taken aback at first, wondering if he’d sold his business after 25 years.
“I had a few customers come in and say, yeah, that’s really neat to look at, something to see coming down First Avenue,” Dale said.
Burch added, “He had a friend that he does work with, and his wife, they sat out in front of the business looking at it for half an hour, and then came in to talk to him, and exclaim about it. It has an impact, on different people it has an impact.”
The mural on the selfstorage facility faces an open field and is clearly visible to anyone driving east on 32nd Street, but the subject matter is a little more abstract: the shoulders and torso of a man wearing some sort of military-type costume with a medallion, and a comet streaking across one side.
Gaia worked with two Arizona-based artists on this painting: Mata Ruda from Tucson, with whom he’d worked previously, and Lucinda Yrene of Phoenix
McKivergan said he believed it was one of Gaia’s favorite selections, if not his top choice, and its ambiguity has set off debates in Facebook and elsewhere among Yumans trying to figure out who it’s supposed to be. A popular theory is that it’s Michael Jackson.
“Yeah, my father said that too. He’s a big Michael Jackson fan, so he really liked it,” said McKivergan, who’s been happy to let the discussion continue as more people notice the artwork.
Gaia posted the mural on his Instagram and Facebook pages, explaining the figure represents Mexican president and general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the medallion is associated with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War and ceded to the U.S. the land which became Arizona (except for the Gadsden Purchase), New Mexico and part of Nevada, Utah and Colorado.
Foret, who has lived in Yuma for about five years, attends Arizona Western College and has studied and and worked on art projects in France and Spain, said she is hoping to bring several more painters from France, Japan and other nations, creating a series of public artworks which could enliven different parts of Yuma, and perhaps inspire new tourists to stop and take a look.
“This is a small component to a bigger whole, I’m looking for funding to sponsor artists from abroad, or from here, who are famous within the art world,” she said.
She said the overarching title she has created for the four murals she’s already curated in Yuma is “You Walk the Lines of Invisibility Yet I See Your Threads Everywhere” (Short Title: -IN-Visible Threads).
“This beautification project resulted in a remarkable feat of bringing together artists from around the world,” she said. “I feel very fortunate and blessed to have the opportunity to work with some truly remarkable people who are specialized and leaders in their own respective fields.”
Gaia said he has not ruled out the possibility of a return engagement: “Currently I do not have any plans to return to Yuma, but I would absolutely love to come back and continue working.”
“I do not necessarily believe it is important to incorporate art into the public landscape, but I do believe that murals function in a certain capacity. The mural is an opportunity for interrogation or conversely decoration.”