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:

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A post shared by Joe Pagac (@joepagac)

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A post shared by Joe Pagac (@joepagac)

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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…?

Smiling Pride mural on IBT’S Bar

In a June 29, 2022 story on KOLD News 13, Pride mural on Fourth Avenue celebrates love, LGBTQ+ community, muralist Nolan Patterson says the mural “celebrates love and the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community in Tucson”. Also: The mural shows a rainbow over the southern Arizona mountains. Patterson says the rainbow’s colors and clouds are smiling at one another.

Although he signed the mural with @basik_art on Instagram, at the end of September he only had one post. You can see a lot more of his work on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/nolan.patterson.98.

I took the first photo just at sunrise on August 23 and the second a bit later.

197 East Toole all repainted (Murals being made, part 56)

The mural-covered building at the corner of Toole Avenue, 6th Avenue, and Alameda keeps changing and changing. That's especially true of the east side wall along 6th. (Here's a list of murals on that wall.)

Usually one or two murals are replaced at a time. This past summer, though, every mural was repainted or finished. (The muralists kept the image of Che Guevara from one of the murals and painted a new background around it.) Let's start with the latest murals (I think!) before the mass repainting, from left (January 2020) to right (December 2018):

I never saw the third mural in the first photo, of migrants, finished.

At the end of July, I noticed the murals being repainted. I came back on August 3rd:

Here's the fourth of eight murals at sunrise on August 4th:

Next, a screen grab from the video Desert Delirium - The Surreal Murals of Tucson, AZ, by Rob Allen. He recorded it on August 9th. The mural at the far end is being finished:

On August 15, the blue square had a sort of wildcat (a bit different from the U of A's Wildcat):

September 13th, I came back. The scaffolding was gone. There was a white square near the right end… maybe another mural is coming? Unfortunately, a car was parked in front. But I worked around it and took photos of everything except the white square:

The Black Lives Matter mural below is by Nolan Patterson (@basik__art on Instagram):

This page from Corazones Unidos at Raices Taller 222 Gallery & Workshop will probably disappear when the exhibition ends: https://www.raicestaller222.com/copy-of-javier-valenzuela. So use the artist names:

Studio ONE Painted during the time of coronavirus, this mural was completed by our good friends, compadres, and comadres down the street at 197 E Toole Ave in Tucson: Studio ONE – A Space for Art and Activism. Participating Artists Paco Velez Anzueto, David Contreras, Chris Miller, Ses One, Crystal Triste, and assisted by Akasia Oberly and Vier Oner