One action is not reflective of Yuma community
Instead, Del Sol hate crime brought city together
I’ve always been smitten with art. I’m the daughter of an art teacher, I married a graphic designer, and I’m fortunate to count several artists among my friends. Everywhere I go, I look to the arts to see a community.
Yuma’s art scene has been growing tremendously over the last few years, and my friends and family have been a part of that in a variety of ways.
The Del Sol mural is part of the NexGen Arts Committee’s Mural-A-Month program, an organization on which my husband serves as president. The mural program has one basic goal: bringing art to public spaces in Yuma.
NexGen has placed several murals all over Yuma so far, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. To get a call last weekend that the beautiful Del Sol mural had been marred by an ugly hate crime was simply shocking.
I drove over to the Del Sol a few minutes after getting the call, and already, a sweet older man was outside, gently trying to remove the graffiti.
“Who would do this?,” he asked me. “This mural is beauty. And this hateful message is not right. It does not belong here, and I will not leave it here.”
Within hours, that message was gone, erased by a community in shock that it appeared in the first place.
Messages of hate have been popping up across America lately. Do a search in Google News for swastika vandalism, and the list of stories is appalling.
But that is not Yuma. Never in a million years did I think someone would take such an action here, especially on that mural.
I know that hate exists in this world. But I also know that a fraction of the population does not stand for the whole. This action doesn’t diminish the beauty in this world, and there’s nothing more beautiful than the multi-cultural melting pot that is Yuma.
The point of public art is to bring the community together. This mural is a lovely example of that. And in the end, as the owner of the Del Sol pointed out, this vandalism served to bring Yuma together in the best of ways. “There was an Hispanic person, a black person, a white person, all three working together.”
If the person responsible for that hate message wanted a reaction, they got one. Yuma stood together, strong and united in the face of an ugly action, and took back its mural.