Friday, June 30, 2023

A few of Jessica Gonzales' many Rialto murals

Jessica Gonzales paints bright, sharp and very colorful murals. You've seen her work all over the Tucson area. If you're downtown fairly often, a great place to see her murals is on the east wall of the Rialto Theatre, just off Congress Street as you enter downtown. Here's an aerial example, taken by BG Boyd, from his Tucson murals database tucsonazmurals.com, as Jessica and her husband paint, assisted by Dakin Martin, on November 16, 2022:


Below are links to pages in BG's database. The photos were taken from Jessica's Instagram account. Each link will open the mural in a new window or tab. After you close that, this page will still be here. There are earlier murals in our December 9, 2022 post Jessica Gonzales paints (& paints...) the Rialto.

Friday, June 23, 2023

Morphing MSA murals

We covered some of the first murals at MSA Annex in our September 9, 2020 post BLM murals on MSA Annex (Murals being made, part 55). (BLM = Black Lives Matter.) That was too early to show the following mural by Randy L. Barton and Johanna Martinez:
Above is the fifth in a series of photos from BG Boyd's Tucson Murals database, tucsonazmurals.com. (A direct link to that photo's page is https://tucsonazmurals.com/murals/reimagine_az.)

Seeing BG's photo made me curious what else had changed on that wall since the summer of 2020. I checked my best historical resources, Google Maps Street View and Microsoft Bing Maps Streetside. Here's what I found.

May 2019

May 2019 on Street View, the whole area was under construction:

March 2022

January 27, 2021 on Streetside can't be embedded here. But the March 2022 Street View shows that the murals hadn't changed since the January 27, 2021 Streetside. The mural BJ photographed is at the left end. The wall is lined with half a dozen murals. All of them were shown in our September 2020 post except BG's at the left (which must have been painted between 9/9/2020 and 1/27/2021). Here's the March 2022 Street View. (To zoom in on any Street View photo, click the plus (+) sign.)

February 2023

February 2023 on Street View, the murals at the right end, to the right of the woman kissing a man on his forehead, have been covered with white paint:



Thanks for joining me on this short trip back a few years. I'll try to keep an eye on this fence for more changes. If you notice any, please let me know with the "Contact us" form at the right edge or by leaving a comment at the bottom of the page (you can remain anonymous).

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

A walk around Old Town Artisans

Across the street from the east side of the Tucson Museum of Art is Old Town Artisans, a collection of restaurants and stores around an inside patio between them. In the past year or two, LuxxArte Artists' Collective Members have painted doors and added a different desert plant at the top of each door. There are also murals showing desert scenes. From luxxarte.com, use the menus or go straight to a list of the artists and an overview of the Old Town Artisans Mural Project.

We'll start on the north side, walk along the west side, then around the south side (which is now a pedestrian street, closed to traffic):


Here's an example of what you'll see in the rest of the post — the east end of the north side of the building and its label. There's more information after:

Saguaro (and explanation)


Almost every mural and door has a label to its right side. (As always, you can click on the lahel photo for a larger view.) I'll include the label after every mural photo. From top to bottom, the labels have:
  • The name of the plant or the title
  • The person who speaks in the corresponding video
  • The artist(s) who painted it
  • Who made the video
The QR code opens a page on the luxxarte.com website with a YouTube video embedded. So you don't have to point your cell phone camera at the QR code on this blog page, I follow the label photo with two shortened links:
  • A link to the luxxarte.com page
  • A link directly to the video
(Clicking on the link opens the web page or video.)

OK? Let's start our walk around the building. The first doorway is to the right of the saguaro mural…

Olive

Mesquite

Prickly Pear / Nopal


Here's a close-up of the (very fun) window:

Corn / Maize

Chile / Chiletepin

Cholla


There's no label. Johanna Martinez painted the mural. She told me: “Somehow they never got an interview on the cholla.”

Tepary Beans

Agave

The south half of the west wall has three murals (Chile / Chiletepin, Cholla, and Tepary Beans), then a mural with one agave. The agave is partly hidden behind utility poles. Let's start with a photo of those, then look at the mural head-on and the agave from the right side:

Black Mission Fig

Tucson Rose


This door wasn't labeled, but Johanna Martinez painted the mural. She told me that the “mural was just for fun…not part of the Foodways project.” I didn't find a video on www.humanity360.org.

Dryland Farming

The mural's title on the label is “Ha:l Squash.” The QR code opens a video titled “Dryland Farming.”

Amaranth

Sonoran White Wheat

Pomegranate

Wrapping up...

I took almost all of the photos on November 18 and 27, 2022. I went back during May and June, 2023, for a few that I'd missed.