Monday, October 13, 2014

Oury Community Center repainted

The longstanding mural on the east wall of the community center at Oury Park (one of the first murals on this blog: here's the 2006 page Ooh... Ahh... More Oury Park) was fading. In 2013, the city of Tucson made repairs (details below). Last month, Mark Fleming sent close-ups of parts of the repainted mural. What a change in the color!

The repainted mural isn't exactly like the previous version. For instance, compare the last photo above, from 2014, to this edited version of Randy's photo from 2006:

The United Farm Workers eagle is black; it used to be red. The man at right is clean-shaven; he used to have a mustache and goatee.

After Mark sent me the photos, I stopped by the mural to get a photo of one section he didn't photograph. It was a cloudy day — September 28 — so the color didn't look as brilliant as in his shots:

I haven't been able to find a photo of the whole mural. (And now that there's a roof over the basketball court in front of the mural, it'll be hard to get a photo of the whole mural.) I did find some of the building's history and a photo of the south side of the mural as it was being restored. It's about two-thirds of the way down the city of Tucson's page Preservation of Historic Buildings and Structures. (For a much bigger version of the photo, click there.)

I also found two older close-up photos by David Lee Guss at pixels.com: If you have any old photos of this magnificent mural, please let me know!

Update (October 15, 2014): David Aber sent a photo that shows almost all of the repainted mural:

(As always, you can click on the photo for a bigger view.)

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