Local artist pays tribute to founder of Mel Cotton’s
Temporary murals spring up on wall of defunct San Jose store
The old Mel Cotton’s Sporting Goods building at West San Carlos and Race streets in Midtown San Jose is finding a new purpose — at least for now.
San Jose artist Nicole Margaret has painted a largerthan-life likeness of the store’s founder on one side of the building that used to house the popular sporting goods outlet.
But if you want to see it, you’ll have to act fast. The mural will disappear when the building is redeveloped.
It’s not the first temporary art Margaret has painted.
“The first giant face that I painted was in a warehouse that I lived in, which was in downtown San Jose,” she said. “It was an old cannery, the warehouse we lived in, so the bedroom was just a giant concrete room, and I did a giant Jackson Pollock thing on one of the floors.
“On one of the walls, right before we left, I painted a big old blue face,” she added. “I did that knowing we were going to
be leaving but I just wanted to leave my mark. I did it with that in mind.”
The idea for the latest mural came when Travis Osterback was asked by Stan Cotton, son of the late founder Mel, to do security work there. Osterback, Margaret and other friends stumbled across an old newspaper clipping of Mel Cotton inside the vacant store one day.
“We wanted to pay our respects to this man, his son, and the opportunity and just the spirit of the place,” Osterback said. “It’s the end of an era, and San Jose is turning into a very different thing, and this street is kind of right in the middle of it.”
Margaret has created temporary art for events at West Valley College and other places, so it only seemed fitting to make another when approached about painting the mural right before New Year’s.
“When Travis asked me to do Mel’s, I knew it was going to be demolished, and I thought, “I should make a trend of it; just paint a big old face that’s going to go away,’” she said.
Although many think of art as permanent, Margaret said creating something temporary is “liberating.”
“I like the concept of ephemeral art, art that doesn’t last forever,” she added. “It helps me to loosen up and just sort of be in the experience and not be thinking about (whether this) is going to be in a museum in 500 years, because that’s something I’d rather not spend my life being preoccupied with.”
As she painted the mural over the course of two days, “dozens and dozens” of passers-by stopped to ask what she was doing and share their memories of shopping at Mel Cotton’s.
“Every single one of them—I came here every Christmas, I’ve been coming here since I was a kid,” she said.
Margaret hopes the mural will remind people of the area’s agricultural history as the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight” and has a lasting impact on the descendants of locals who shaped San Jose with their contributions.
“I put the year of (Mel Cotton’s) birth and the year of his death and as I was painting it, I thought, his son is going to see this, and that to me is super significant,” she said. “I didn’t go into it thinking that, but throughout the process that sunk in, and that to me ... was something that seemed integral.”