"Sugar Hill"

Mural by Tucson Arts Brigade. Sponsored by the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church.  The Sugar Hill neighborhood was one of the few places in Tucson where a black professional could buy a home between WWII and the passage of civil-rights legislation in the '60s.  Eventually, Sugar Hill was absorbed by the Northwest and El Cortez Heights neighborhoods.  A movement has begun to restore the name to the original neighborhood.  However, there is a debate whether the name honors the area or denigrates it.

I took these photos on 12/11/2018. Captions list artists' names from left to right.

The mural is viewed from N. 6th Ave.

Left Side: Teresa Diane Altamirano, Annalisa Loevenguth, David Tineo, Slov (Sabrina Vincent), Tanya Alvarez

Where's a chainsaw when you need it?

Right Side: Delbert Antone, Xaivier Ringer, Jessa Hudgens, Julian Argote, Caressa Wittwer

Complete Mural

 Click on any photo for a slideshow of larger and sharper images.

You can see a larger, sharper and scrollable image of the complete mural here:  Sugar Hill

Update from Jerry Peek (January 29, 2024): I've read (on the Facebook group Tucson Murals and Street Art) that Michael B. Schwartz led this project.

Piñata

Photographed on 12/11/2018 at Rollies Mexican Patio.

Painted by Jonny Balesteros, aka Jonny Bubonik

Click on the photo for a larger and sharper image.

Update (November 8, 2020): The low wall to the left of the piñata has been painted with ¡Hecho en Tucson! (Made in Tucson!). The parking barriers and the sidewalk in front of the piñata are pink:

Murals being (un-)made, Part 30d

Remember that? It was the right end of the long-running mural — and, as it turns out, the long-running mural story that started back on November 9, 2015 with our blog entry Murals being made, part 30a.

Almost four years after I took the first photos showing artist Jason Cross, I drove along that familiar stretch of Alvernon and noticed that my right-side window seemed a lot less colorful. I went around the block and came back for a slower look. Yup, that was the same wall shape (with the unusual two-story-high right end), but it was a chocolate brown. So I came back another day to grab a photo from the median strip. (I walked across!)

I've met the homeowner before. I'm not sure there's a happy end to this story, but I'll try to go by sometime and ask. If it's printable :-/ you'll see an update below.

Hotel McCoy in progress: 9/12/18

I stopped by the hotel on September 12, 2018, as the murals were in progress. For months before then, I'd heard from artists that the murals would be happening. I stopped by to take photos and then, for months, I tried to sort out which of my photos David Aber had captured when he was there. An unfortunate glitch (the memory card fell out of my cell phone!) meant that I had to rely on Google's reduced-quality “cloud” backups instead of the much better photos on that card. So, about a week ago (mid-February 2019), I decided to just post what I had without my usual careful editing. David has posted a number of these — and with much better quality. So please be sure not to miss his blog posts from the past few months. But I hope this blur of photos — basically, first to last as I walked through, with editing just to remove empty space — to get a feel for what was happening on this amazing place almost six months ago.

Some of these are just outlines of murals to come. (I've changed the outlines to monochrome format from color to help bring out detail. The outlines were drawn on walls.) Those murals may have been more finished by the time that Dave got there.

These are from first to last as I wandered through. If I'd tried to coordinate my notes about each photo with the shots themselves, and with which ones Dave posted in ten separate entries, I'll never get these online! So, without the notes, here goes:

(We say anything that's “flat art on a wall” may be a mural. That's actually a door mat standing upside down against a wall — probably draining after being washed. Whatever. :)