Prince tributes from Tucson artists (and stencil-ists)

The musician (sometimes known as) Prince, who lived in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, passed away last month. His death brought an outpouring of love. Muralists commemorated him. One was Tucsonan Joe Pagac who tweeted (from ‏@JoePagac) April 29th:

Just finished my #prince mural downtown. #princemural #princeart

The photo he tweeted looked like the side of the Rialto Theatre, where Joe has painted murals (on the northeast corner) for years. I rode over on May 1st and found it next to his always-changing event murals:

A close-up of the Prince mural:

The first story I heard about murals dedicated to Prince was a story about muralist Rock Martinez. I searched more today. Rock moved to Bloomington, Minnesota — in the Twin Cities area — a year or so ago. As Rock told me last week, his Prince mural in Minneapolis went viral online after the singer's death. Two news articles:

• Creative ways to mourn Prince blossom Saturday in Twin Cities
  
• Uptown Prince mural expanding this summer
  

I also found a couple of stenciled tributes to Prince on the walls of the building at the northern corner of Toole and 6th Avenues. South first, then north:

The second stencil is near the bottom-left corner.

Murals map updated!!

This blog has been online for almost ten years (since July 12, 2006). For most of those years, we've tried to help you find murals with both a map of the whole city and a table with details about individual murals. (You can find these, and more, on the TucsonArt.info murals page.) Eventually, though, the volunteer trying to hold together this whole project — me, Jerry — ran out of time to take photos, upload and edit them, update the table, update the map, and more. So I concentrated on keeping the blog going.

(The map and table of murals are also useful for those of you who want to contribute mural photos but don't know whether a particular mural is already on the blog. So I've been sad that I couldn't keep them up to date.)

When David Aber joined the Tucson Murals Project, his energy and enthusiasm for murals has been a big boost for me just as I got even more busy with other things. He took on the job of updating the murals map. Last week he finished. The map is up to date; I, and he, aim to keep it that way as we add new blog entries.

There's a small view of the map above, but it's only a snapshot of the map today. To see the real map anytime, go to this address:

    map.tucsonmurals.org

The map shows both current murals and historical ones (murals that don't exist anymore). When you zoom in and click on a pin, you'll get a popup box with the address of the mural and a link to click to see the blog entry (with a photo and more information). There's also a list by address in the left-hand column… though it's in no particular order, so it may not be much help.… on the desktop view, shown above, you can click the three dots at the top-right corner of that area and choose “Collapse map legend” to get rid of it.

David spent many hours going through years of this blog and updating the map. I hope you'll congratulate him for his hard work! (Post a comment below, if you'd like, or contact him through his Google+ page.)

The table of murals is still out of date. It's also confusing to use. I'll try to replace it with a long list, ordered by street name, searchable and easy to update, “real soon now.” :-/ If you have time to spare, I'd be glad for some help!

And now back to our previously scheduled murals…

McKenna Park

The complete name is the Alfonsa McKenna-Luis Redondo Park. It is a very nice pocket park with a 1/2 basketball court, a playground, a covered picnic area with charcoal grills......and 14 tile murals. Four of the murals are on the exterior wall along an alley and the rest are inside the park.  Six of the murals have already been posted on April 09, 2014.

There are photos of the park itself in today's entry Alfonsa McKenna-Luis Redondo Park on the Tucson's Pocket Parks blog. Here are the murals that haven't been posted yet:

Photographed on 12/28/2015.
Click on any photo for a slide show of larger views.

Downtown Mural Project design open house

Tuesday night the 26th, (most of) the artists who'll be painting murals downtown next month showed their work to a crowd at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library…

Some of the works were finished designs; others were still being developed. Here's a video of the artists introducing their work:



(You can also see the video by clicking on its address, here: https://youtu.be/kLSYTiEuZng.)

I snapped some quick photos of some of the designs before the presentation started. Unfortunately, I didn't get them all... but you can see more in the video above... and all in the TAB page mentioned at the bottom of this article.

Jose Ignacio Garcia, Rialto Theatre

Rock Martinez, 440 N. 7th Ave.

Pete Goldlust, 213 E. Broadway

Issac Caruso, at 9 North Scott Ave.

Jessica Gonzales, along Scott between Congress & Broadway, on Wig-O-Rama

Niki Glen, at the west corner of 5th Ave. & Toole.

Luis Gustavo Mena on CenturyLink, 142 E. Pennington St.

The Arizona Daily Star article Design selections of city mural project to be shown publicly has an artist list (though, on Tuesday evening, the online version had formatting errors and maybe a missing name).

Graffiti Protective Coatings is preparing the artists’ “canvases” with a coat of primer paint. The artists start work May 2nd. Stop by! Bring them cold drinks! (Some will be working at night to avoid the heat.)

There are more details and photos of all the mural designs on the Tucson Arts Brigade Mural Arts Program blog in the article City of Tucson Mural Program Announce winning designs for Downtown Murals Open House Tues. April 26. The next meeting, where artists will discuss their progress, is at the Joel Valdez Main Library, in the downstairs meeting room, May 24th from 6-7 pm.

Update (April 28, 2016): Tucson News Now posted a short update after the meeting in Tucson artists to revamp downtown buildings with mural project. (The “For more information” link link at the bottom of the story seems to be outdated, though.)

Update (June 4, 2016): The space for the mural at 213 E. Broadway stayed empty most of May. When I walked by today, I saw the outlines of a different design than the one shown above. I checked and found that a different artist, To-Ree-Nee Wolf Keiser, is filling the space.

Edge High School, part 8 of ??

I guessed wrong in the previous post in this series that there would be only two more posts. I just found more photos of the long wall, so it seems that there'll be a few more posts! Let's start with the panel after the last one we saw a week and a half ago:

More next time from my November 6th art overload.

No surprise behind this building

It won't take long to figure out what kind of business operates in the lot behind this building:

I spotted it on November 20, 2015.

Edge High School, part 7 of ??

A week ago, in Edge High School, part 6 of ??, we were getting near the light at the end of the (bright!) tunnel — the long wall of murals, that is, along the alley at the north edge of the Edge High School campus on Speedway just south of the eegee's location.

Here are the next three murals, left to right:

A couple more posts from my November 6th visit should wrap this up!

Park Place Chalk Art Festival 2016

April 9 and 10 was the annual festival, organized by SAACA. As before, artists drew on the north-side sidewalks. Let's start with the Kids' Zone near Macy's:

Next, artist by artist:

I didn't catch this artist's name. If you know, please leave a comment below!

Or this artist either...

Gina Ribaudo

Carolyn Watson-Dubisch

Wesley Creigh

Martín Quintanilla

Jose Ignacio Garcia

Matt Cotten

Marisa Salazar

I'll be looking forward to next year!

Edge High School, part 6 of ??

A week ago, we showed the fifth in a long series of photos from the north side of Edge High School, just south of Speedway. It showed a long series of murals. Now let's look at those murals, close-up, a few at a time — beginning at the left (west) end of that long wall:

Looks like I'll be able to fit the other murals into three more blog entries. Until next time…

Top of Tech Park

Along Kino Parkway, just south of 36th Street, are tile murals on curving walls along the edge of the (soon-to-be) UA Tech Park at The Bridges. Walking into them from the north:

Here are the sides of each wall (click for a larger view):

The credit panels are on the ends of the walls. They probably correspond to the artists who made the tiles on each wall. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of which was where…

Nearby is a bench where you can take a break. (Click there to view it on the Tucson's Pocket Parks blog.)

My first visit here was just before August 1, 2012, when three of the murals were done. I came back on March 9, 2016.