How'd we miss this?

I use the table of murals to keep track of the more than 250 murals on this blog. (It's gotten so long that it's a bit confusing, but it still helps when I want to know whether a mural at a particular place is on the blog — and for you, I hope, when you want to know what murals are in an area.) Anyway, thousands of people walk and ride past this mural, at the corner of Broadway & Church, every day, but it wasn't on this blog... until now.

Update (October 1, 2014): Here's an article from the Tucson Citizen archive — May 30, 2008 — about the dedication of the mural: New downtown mural dedicated Friday.

Update (June 6, 2023): Elizabeth Bernays wrote on Facebook (with a photo) that the mural was removed for a new building:



I think it's been gone for some time, but I hadn't updated this post until now.

New woman, same spider

The last two weeks' posts have covered murals around Fourth Avenue — and changes in murals at the Tucson Museum of Art. This week, here's more on both of those themes.

First, Fourth Avenue. Back on May 17th, as I was headed for the finish of that week's Meet Me at Maynard's walk, I spotted this mural at Sacred Art and Piercing Studios, 315 N. 4th:

Last week, as I rode my bike along Fourth Avenue, I noticed that the mural had changed... or, at least, I thought it had. The spider looked the same, but the woman had changed... or had she? I snapped a photo and checked it against my backlog of mural photos when I got home. Sure enough:

Things change... murals do, too.

And that leads to the story of the murals painted by students at TMA's Museum School for the Visual Arts, covered here in our August 9th post. Two days ago — on Friday, only a week after I'd posted that story — I heard that a tagger had ruined the murals, and that the murals and the tags had just been erased. More students will get a chance for fame outside their school... but let's hope that thay'll have longer than these muralists were given before a tagger trashed their hard work. Here's a photo of the spot where the murals were: the (newly) red wall in the middle of the shot. Keep your eye on this wall!

Found around Fourth Ave. #3

What reason would United Fire Equipment Company have to hire a muralist to put a huge work like this in a storage area behind two fences and razor wire? (Maybe there used to be a different company or setup?) It's on the northeast corner of 7th St. & Arizona Ave. — though I took the photo from the corner of 7th Street & 5th Avenue. (To get this shot, I needed the maximum zoom setting on my little point-and-shoot camera.) When you go mural-hunting, bring your binoculars...

Found around Fourth Ave. #2

A block west of 4th Avenue, just north of 8th Street on Herbert (an alley), I spotted this painting on the back wall of a building, facing a trash bin.

Why would an artist put something this interesting in a spot where people have to track it down? I don't know... but it's one of the things that makes murals interesting to me.

Update, January 22, 2011: The mural is gone — behind one of the many new-looking rectangular patches of paint on the alley walls.

Found around Fourth Ave. #1

Fourth Avenue (the section between downtown and the U of A, that is) has so many murals that I'm always spotting something new. This mural has been at 526 N. 4th for a while, I guess — the store opened and closed before I caught this early-morning photo:

(Update: By October, the mural was gone. You can read more here.)

Update (January 15, 2015): BreakOut Studios has a new mural on the north side of their new location.

Murals at the moment

Last week's post showed a mural with a pretty certain time limit: until Dave Ewoldt is elected (or not) — or maybe, if he gets into the Senate, until he finishes that job. We'll see!

In the meantime, in this 250th post on the Tucson Murals Project, here are a couple of murals in transition. They're views while the murals were being painted, back in May, and the finished views in July. The artists were students in the Tucson Museum of Art's Museum School for the Visual Arts (which is having an open house on August 12, by the way).

Here's the south side, during and after:

And, next, the north side during and after:

Mural for the moment

Many murals are painted to be in the same spot for years. Others stay up for a few weeks or months. This one, for Arizona State Senate candidate Dave Ewoldt, is the second kind, I think — there until the election.

Painted in July, it's at the corner of Grant and Forgeus.