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)

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-saguaro
Video: youtu.be/CcFPwELbyqU

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

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-olives
Video: youtu.be/X_iKSEetZ3Q

Mesquite

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-mesquite
Video: youtu.be/qROrJq_jM_0

Prickly Pear / Nopal

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-nopal-pricklypear
Video: youtu.be/Mm5R608neGM

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

Corn / Maize

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-corn
Video: youtu.be/PR5j9B_zEHE

Chile / Chiletepin

humanity360.org/ilm-chitepines
youtu.be/FWTSsP7mMBY

Cholla

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

Tepary Beans

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-teparybeans
Video: youtu.be/Z_J795Qe738

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:

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-agave
Video: youtu.be/rKdzL8zwwqI

Black Mission Fig

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-blackmissionfigs
Video: youtu.be/17twRz4o8sc

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.”

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-drylandfarming
Video: youtu.be/e8RVKPD-HFg

Amaranth

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-amaranth
Video: youtu.be/7E1xruuEOZc

Sonoran White Wheat

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-sonoranwhitewheat
Video: youtu.be/KNgL9BejtTc

Pomegranate

Web page: humanity360.org/ilm-pomegranate
Video: youtu.be/c0MRQeIerL0

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.

Hidden (not) in Barrio Viejo

We don't show photos of murals hidden in people's yards or barely visible from the street. But BG Boyd spotted this one on the side of what seems to be a home in Barrio Viejo, right next to Meyer Avenue. (This April 2022 Google Street View photo shows an overview of the building, yard, and street.)

The photo came from the Victor Hernandez Mural page on his mural database at tucsonazmurals.com. (This is the fourth in a series of posts from the database.) He took the photo on August 31, 2021.

Roskruge repainted

Roskruge Bilingual Magnet K-8 School is bordered by two streets: 6th Street and 2nd Avenue. A mural used to stretch along 2nd Avenue just north of 6th, but the 6th Avenue side had only plain brown mountains and a blue sky. In 2022, the 2nd Avenue side got an updated mural and the 6th Avenue side a new mural. In a minute, we'll take a detailed look along both streets. First, an overview…

Second Avenue overview

Here's the west side of 2nd Avenue just north of 6th Street, taken on November 27, 2022. It shows an updated mural painted recently by Alley Cat Murals:

Just a bit north of that corner on January 11, 2010, there was an earlier version of the same mural shown in our post Scholars on Second Avenue:

Back in 2010, we often didn't show complete murals on the blog — only parts of them. I found a photo of the entire mural, from the same corner, on Google Maps Street View in April 2015:



(A link to open that view in a new window is: https://goo.gl/maps/DZbEeCF4ed8qPASR8.)

We'll see close-up photos of both the new mural and the original one in a minute.

Sixth Street overview

As I mentioned, the 6th Street side used to have only simple sky and mountains — a continuation of the left side of the previous Street View photo. When I was there on November 27, 2022, the 6th Street side had been repainted:

Sixth Street close-ups

The mural starts at the west end, along 6th Street, and continues until the north end along 2nd Avenue. Let's see close-ups, starting at the west end, on November 27, 2022:

The first section

The second section

Detail of second section

The third section

Detail of the third section

Detail of the third section

The fourth section

Detail of the fourth section

The fifth section

Detail of the fifth section

…Continuing along Second Avenue…

Let's start at the corner of 6th Street (to the left) and 2nd Avenue (at the right):

From the fifth section into the sixth

The sixth section

Detail of the sixth section

Sixth-seventh sections, May 2013

The seventh section

Detail of the seventh section

The eighth section

Detail of the eighth section

Around the eighth section, May 2013

The ninth section
(as always, you can click for a larger view)

Around the ninth section, May 2013

Right (north) end of the ninth section, May 2013

The other side of the wall

We've been looking at the wall from the streets outside the campus. Inside the east wall around campus (on the west side of that wall), there's another mural. We showed it in our November 3, 2011 post What the scholars see.

Here are a complete photo from then and the middle of the mural from November 27, 2022. As far as I can tell, the mural hadn't been repainted (yet?):

Love Block Partners

Thanks to BG Boyd Photography's mural database at tucsonazmurals.com. The photo came from the Love Block Partners page. (This is the third in a series of posts from his murals database.) Jessica Gonzales painted the mural on the side of the Rialto Theatre.

So what's Love Block Partners? The website loveblockpartners.com says only “Developing in the Heart of Tucson.” The Loveblock Partners Facebook page has a bit more information. Their @loveblockpartners Instagram page has lots of photos and a link to their Link Tree page — which has only two links.

If nothing else, the mural has the names of businesses that seem to be in the block.

---

Update (May 30, 2024): I (Jerry Peek) just found a photo of the mural that used to be here. I took it on February 20, 2010:

Mural map not always quite up to date

Blog co-editor David Aber maintains our amazing mural map. Here's the center:

I'm filling in for him for a while. I'm often swamped (so much art, so little time…), so there's a chance that a few of the latest murals won't be on the map sometimes. (You can go to the blog's front page [click on the filmstrip image at the top of any page] and scroll down… every post has a “Location:” that you can click to see a map location.)

The other side of Mike Haggerty Plaza, closer

Last time — June 2nd, 2023 — we showed an aerial view of the south wall of Mike Haggerty Plaza on 4th Avenue. Just after sunrise on Sunday, June 4th, I stopped by to see if I could get close-up photos with my zoom lens. It turned out to be easy because there wasn't as much stuff in front of the mural as there was on my last visit.

The mural has rich detail. (As always, you can click on a photo to see larger views of all the photos.) I zoomed in on different parts of the mural. Here are the photos, roughly from left to right. (The second photo is a cropped and enlarged version of the first photo.)

The other side of Mike Haggerty Plaza

BG Boyd Photography is building a searchable database of Tucson murals at TucsonAZMurals.com. I realized that there's no reason for me to take photos of a mural if he already has some. He agreed that I could share his photos to this blog when I don't have a photo of my own. That'll usualy happen on Fridays. In this series of posts, I'll add clickable links below the photos so you can find the original in his mural database at https://tucsonazmurals.com/murals/. Thanks, as always, for helping people find Tucson art!

Last time, May 30, we showed the north side of Mike Haggerty Plaza — which is not far north of the railroad underpass on 4th Avenue — in the post From Winsett Park to Mike Haggerty Plaza.

This little spot isn't easy to photograph because it's small and there are often things in the way. That's when the gate is open at all, which isn't often! Drone photographer BG Boyd has an answer: an aerial photo.

The original photo is in Together We Thrive on tucsonazmurals.com.

Here's the same photo cropped to the mural:

Cropped even more, to the credits:

This is the second in a series of phsts from BG Boyd's murals database.

Update (June 6, 2023): Today's post, The other side of Mike Haggerty Plaza, closer, has photos I took from the ground with a good zoom lens.