Paper Mache
Last weekend, I was part of an event like nothing I could have ever imagined. I’m talking about the Mural Marathon, Art and Health Festival that occurred at the Sutter Theater Center for the Arts in Yuba City. The event centered on the creation of five
450 square foot murals by five different artists in just 48 hours. In our work at Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture, we have commissioned many murals over the years. Typically, the artists take a week or two to complete a mural. In this case, watching artists start on Friday afternoon and finish on Sunday was really breathtaking. I refer to it as the creation of public art as a spectator sport.
In picking the five mural artists, the committee faced the daunting task of reviewing over 100 renderings submitted by 54 different artists. Thanks to the A-D for the great article on Tuesday about the event, but I wanted to provide some additional background information about the project. Wearing my Rotary hat for a moment, our Yuba
Sutter Rotary Night Club received a $47,500 grant to pay artists to create the murals and the musicians who played music during the festival on Saturday. The funding for the project came from the Upstate division of the statewide CA Creative Corps program. A key requirement was that the grant had to be used to pay artists and reflect the following themes in the artwork; health awareness, environmental issues, social justice, or community engagement. Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture was on board from the start and offered up the wall on the Church Street side of its theater. Our friends at the Partnership for Health Equity and Inclusion acted as the fiscal sponsor.
Along with the muralists, we invited many local artists to display their work on
Saturday. We also invited health information vendors to share their resources with the community that addressed a variety of healthcare needs. And we scheduled live music all afternoon with the Yuba Sutter Big Band rounding out the evening to a standing room only crowd. As work on the murals progressed over the weekend, social media platforms lit up with images and videos of the artwork. The outpouring of enthusiastic and positive comments about what this means for the community were quite overwhelming. However, one comment caught my attention. It went something like “These murals look woke to me.” Woke has come to have a negative connotation indicative of a liberal bias. Currently used as a derisive politically charged slang term, it actually means “aware of and attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice,” according to Merriam-webster. Woke is an adjective derived from African-american Vernacular English (AAVE) originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. It has come to encompass awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBTQ rights. Conservatives use woke primarily as an insult and increasingly to criticize liberals. That said, the murals are proudly woke and speak to a variety of important social and environmental issues.
Witnessing all the events of the weekend, I became quite emotional on several occasions. Pulling an all-nighter on Friday probably contributed to my altered state, but it was all for a great cause. Our little Rotary Club that could, or I should say, the little Rotary Club that did, has left a lasting legacy on our community to be admired and appreciated for years to come. These thought provoking works of art are worthy of a close look and consideration by all.