Cowbells and Paint Pails Paints murals on university drive
This past Thursday, a group of Starkville community members participated in Cowbells and Paint Pails, a project that has been working for the past several weeks to paint small sections of university drive. On August 4, from 3:00-7:00, the intersection of University Drive and Fellowship Street was shut down, allowing volunteers and staff members of the Fred Carl Jr. Small Town Center to paint the street.
“We are with the Fred Carl Jr. Small Town Center,” said Lisa Kemp, the project leader yesterday. “We work in small towns all over the state of Mississippi. We're a community design center and we provide design and planning assistance for the community.”
The Fred Carl Jr. Small Town Center is based out of Mississippi State University, out of their college of architecture and design. The cowbell murals they have painted, though beautiful, also had another mission to help the city.
“The idea of the project is to connect downtown with the university. To link those two together physically through public art, but also to provide safety for bicyclists and pedestrians,” said Kemp. “The art is supposed to help slow… traffic down and make things a little bit safer, and we think, a lot cooler.”
The bright colors and visually interesting design on the road naturally draws the eye of motorists, helping to bring their attention back to the road rather than other distractions. The cowbell murals are strategically placed at several busy intersections on University Drive.
“We want to bring attention to these critical intersections,” said Kemp. “And to incorporate public art in a positive way. This is temporary, but we've gotten a lot of really great response from the community.”
The Cowbells and Paint Pails project has required a great deal of support from the university, the city, and Starkville community members as volunteers. It has also required monetary support, which was provided by the Bloomberg Foundation in the form of $25,000 worth of grant money.
“We saw a grant opportunity with the Bloomberg Foundation. I applied for the grant and we did get the grant,” said Kemp. “It was $25,000…So now we've got cowbells ringing all the way down the street.”
The support of the Starkville community was also demonstrated through the presence of volunteers helping staff members paint the road in the middle of a hot August day. There were only a few paid members of the Small Town Center out on the road, while everyone else working was volunteering. One student volunteer, Ellen Overstreet, expressed her excitement to be a part of such a large art project that would help her community.
“It's really exciting,” said Overstreet. “It's really important to me to keep a city beautiful like this, and I think this is so special for Starkville. Especially with our opportunity to bring the cowbells into it, since no other college does that.”
To stay updated on the Cowbells and Paint Pails project, or to volunteer in the future, you can follow @smalltowncenter on Instagram, or Fred Carl Jr. Small Town Center on Facebook.