Bad luck for this Joe Pagac mural?

Joe Pagac painted a mural next to the children's section of the Joel Valdez Main Library downtown. Today is Frday the 13th, so I'm posting this as “bad luck” because the main library may close at the end of the year. (This Arizona Daily Star story from September 3 tells more: Closing Tucson's main library included in cost-saving plan. The big building needs $90 million in renovations; they also can't hire enough staff.) The bright spot at top is from the floodlight shining on the mural:

If the library closes at the end of the year, the mural would have been there only nine months. Joe posted on Facebook April 1, 2024 that the mural was inspired by Byrd Baylor — who's also the author of the book in the photo above. Joe started it on March 30. (Both of those are Facebook videos.) But a label next to the mural says it was unveiled at Byrd's Centennial Celebration March 28, 2024:

See it in person while you can! (I'm guessing it wouldn't be moved to a new, smaller library… though of course I could be wrong.)

Bringing the countryside to the children

Joe Pagac and Katherine Joyce painted this mural along an outside walkway at outside of patient rooms at Banner main campus hospital, Diamond Children's Cancer Center, along the main walkway through the 2nd floor, tower 3:

I zoomed in to get photos of the two sides:

At the bottom left (cropped from the first photo above):

As this sign at the left edge shows, the mural moves if a child uses the Artvive app:

The walkway is for staff only, so I didn't go outside when I was there on April 10th.

Long lost (by me :) Joe Pagac butterfly mural

Tucson has so many murals that it's easy to lose track. David Aber and I share a spreadsheet listing murals to post on this blog, but sometimes I forget to add a mural. That happened with this mural. Joe painted it in 2019. The photos are from April 12, 2020. Last week, I started looking for them on the blog. Oops.

One advantage of my forgetting is that these photos show the mural when it was almost new. By now, four years later, the mural has started to fade.

First, the whole mural — which fills almost the whole block of 8th Street from 4th Avenue to Hoff Avenue:

If you stand close, you'll notice that the top left corner of the mural shows the stages of the butterfly's life:

Even closer:

The left side of the mural, to the left of the glass doors:

Middle of the mural:

Right side:

If you're looking at this on a small screen, you might not notice the people riding giant butterflies or the prickly pear cactus pads flying as if they were butterflies. (As always, you can click on a photo for a slideshow of larger views.)

Salvador Duran and El Tour de Tucson

At the end of October, 2023, Joe Pagac was replacing a well-known mural which had been in that spot for about six years. Below is a story of the new mural, photos of the old mural, and something surprising Joe did after he finished the new mural.

The original mural

First, the mural painted in 2017 by Diego Roa. It shows Tucson artist Salvador Duran:

Thanks to BG Boyd Photography and his mural database TucsonAZMurals.com for that photo (taken from https://tucsonazmurals.com/murals/salvador_duran.) It looks like someone may have painted something between Salvador's hands since the mural was created… an older closeup below doesn't have the blob.

You can see the mural in 2017, a photo of Salvador and a bit of his story, and more info, in the original post on this blog: Parking lot morphs into cracked earth.

The new mural is coming…

On October 31, 2023, Joe posted a photo to Facebook with his car in front of part of the new mural:



(If you can't see that, here's a link to the Facebook post.)

The new mural

I took these photos near sunrise on December 16, 2023:

Murals are usually replaced after some period of time. This one had been here six years. Still, I was a bit sad that the portrait of Salvador Duran was gone. So I was surprised and happy when I read on the Facebook group Tucson Murals and Street Art that Joe had painted the same portrait on the Toole Avenue side of Hotel Congress:

In case you'd like to see the original and Joe's re-creation side by side, here they are. As always, you can click on the (single) image below to see it and others much larger:

(The exposure on Joe's version — to the right — might not be correct. The bottom looks pretty dark to me.)

Lohse Family YMCA

 Each mural "...highlights different aspects of YMCA offerings."

                                   Swimming and Basketball

By Joe Pagac

                                                Gardening

By Joe Pagac

                                           Horseback Riding

By Joe Pagac

 Click on any photo for larger images.

Murals being made, part 75: Volcano in detail

Happy New Year! Here's news for you about this blog. David Aber and I have been posting here twice a week — Tuesdays and Fridays. But we have so many murals on our to-do list that we'll start posting three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — until we work down the backlog (??).

On December 12, 2023, in Volcano, David Aber posted a photo of Joe Pagac's volcano mural on the northeast corner of 6th Street and 6th Avenue. I had taken photos on May 12, 2023, while Joe was painting… but I forgot to update our to-do list of murals, so David didn't know about my photos. After I saw David's post, I decided to stop by again and take a few close-up photos. So this is another post about the same mural.

May 12, 2013

Here's Joe painting. He told me that scaffolding is so expensive to rent that he decided to buy his own. His car — I believe that's a shark — is parked next to the scaffolding. In the vertical photo below, check out the poster he hangs at the top of the scaffolding.

December 16, 2023

A few days after David posted his photo of the mural, I was downtown in the middle of a day of mural-hunting. (I was trying to shorten our long list of murals to photograph.) As I drove by the corner of 6th and 6th, I decided to take photos here with my point-and-shoot camera that has a 40x optical zoom lens; it let me get detailed shots from the fence along 6th Avenue, quite a distance from the mural. I could even zoom in on Joe's signature at the bottom right corner.

The Monica by The Joe (Pagac)

It's been more than a year since Joe Pagac painted a mural for El Tour de Tucson 2022 on the patio wall at The Monica downtown. (So many murals to post here, so little time!) On October 31, 2022, Joe posted a photo on Instagram by Randy Metcalf.

I stopped by on April 29, 2013 to snap photos. Unfortunately, the light wasn't good… there were shadows and reflections:

The caption at the bottom, Aventure dans le désert à vélo! is in French. It means Desert adventure by bike! You can read more about why on The Monica's web page Who was Monica?. It's an interesting story!

The (very) short version is that Monica Flin was a Tucson restaurateur (a person who runs a restaurant professionally) from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. “Monica was the daughter of Jules and Carlota Brunet Flin, both early settlers of Tucson who hailed from France. She grew up speaking French, English, and later Spanish.” The family home was on Court Avenue; it's now the site of El Charro Café downtown — which Monica opened there in 1922.

Volcano

There's a mural at the back of a parking lot on the NE corner of N. 6th Ave. and E. 6th st.

Painted by Joe Pagac

 

Click on the photo for a larger and sharper version.

Update (January 1, 2024): There are more photos in today's post Murals being made, part 75: Volcano in detail.

Historic Motels

By Joe Pagac

There was a dark shadow on the lower right corner.  I lightened it as best I could.

Click on the photo for a larger image.

This aerial photo from BG Boyd Photography was taken November 12th:

Three days later — November 15 — Joe posted a photo on Facebook of himself and the mural in the background:



We posted another car mural of Joe's, at the same address, on December 27: Autos In Black And White.

Autos In Black And White

By Joe Pagac, Stephanie Pagac Garcia and Lenka Vasiekova.

GM no longer manufactures Pontiacs. Thus, Quebedeaux Pontiac is now Quebedeaux Buick and has moved to E. Speedway Blvd. from N. Oracle Rd.

The mural is located at 1430 N. Oracle Rd.

Click photo for a larger image.

On October 28, Joe posted a photo to Facebook showing himself in front of the mural:



Next time, December 30, we'll wrap up 2022 with another Joe Pagac car mural at the same address.

Joe Pagac mural we haven't published in five years

For some reason, this mural on Roadhouse Cinemas hasn't been on the blog since Joe painted it in 2017. I mentioned a newspaper story about it, A movie crew chases outlaws chasing a train, but then forgot to go see it until September 20, 2022:

It's high on the wall, so I used the digital zoom on my phone camera. It doesn't have the quality of a real (optical) zoom, but the photos look okay shrunken for the Web:

Thanks to BG Boyd Photography for this aerial photo taken February 23, 2022:

(It's a wide panorama, so the straight line of the building front looks curved.)

Murals being made, part 72: Scrub this street!

One side of the Union on 6th student apartments runs along Herbert Street, an alley between 4th and 5th Avenues. (The official address for Union on 6th is 316 East 6th Street.) I took the photo above at sunrise on August 23, 2022. The patterns from dancer's dress stretch into the distance.

Unfortunately, trash containers obscure parts of the beautiful mural. I watched for months, hoping they'd be taken away. But I finally gave up after noticing that at least one was labeled with the name of a 4th Avenue business, Drunken Chicken. (I guess that there's really no other place to put a trash bin… it couldn't be on 4th Avenue itself.)

In the summer of 2021, Joe Pagac was painting this mural-in-pieces along with Nolan Patterson (@basik__art, with two “_” characters) and Dixie Vonne (who has a private account, @dixievonne). Here are three photos from Joe's Instagram account @joepagac:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joe Pagac (@joepagac)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joe Pagac (@joepagac)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joe Pagac (@joepagac)

(If you'd like to see the original posts with comments, here are links…

• Joe painting the black background before there's color, on July 26
• the dancer taking shape, on July 27
• Joe climbing a grate that opens from the parking lot inside onto the alley, on August 1

…)

I snapped photos on August 10, 2021, showing the stripes and bubbles finished (?) and the dancer almost done:

David Aber took this photo on September 19, 2021:

Lighting was difficult around sunrise on August 23, 2022. But, later in the day, there might also have been trucks parked here and other stuff that obscured the mural even more. So here are photos from right (stripes starting, from near the dancer's dress) to left (bubbles):

It's so sad that such a creative and cheerful mural is hidden along an alley lined with trash bins. When Joe, Nolan and Dixie painted it, I wonder if they knew…?