Duluth mural source of controversy

Posted at 3:29 PM on August 4, 2011 by Marianne Combs (5 Comments)
Filed under: Arts around the state, Public Art

Evidently one man's art is another man's "inner city crap."

Bob King / rking@duluthnews.com

Christa Lawler of the Duluth News Tribune reports work has been stalled on a mural in Cascade Park titled "Unity in Community" because, well, the community doesn't think it's very pretty.

"It's the same kind of things that they arrest people for," said Dan Williams, who owns rental property across the street from Cascade Park where work on the mural began last week. "It's graffiti. It's not a craft. It's not art. If it was a mural of quality I wouldn't say anything about it."

"It's going to affect my property value," Williams goes on to say later in the article. "It's going to look like inner-city crap."

According to Lawler's story, the mural - painted mostly by children - is based on a similar technique employed by St. Paul artist Ta-Coumba Aiken, who painted a mural in the student union at the College of St. Scholastica this winter.

The mayor has called a meeting with folks on both sides of the debate to determine whether the project should move forward, or be painted over.

My colleague Bob Collins is taking votes on whether or not the unfinished mural is art. What do you think?

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Comments (5)

Art can be an eyesore. Art has a fairly loose definition, but just because people don't like it, doesn't mean it's not art, and just because it's art, doesn't mean it should be preserved.

Posted by Dan | August 4, 2011 4:13 PM

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Let me guess: They used children because they didn't want to get a real artist because then the Great Angry Taxpayer would get all bent out of shape if he found out his Success Dollars were being socialized to a gay or a Muslim or something. Because art ends at art education, and even that should be an after-school activity, and, besides, my kid could paint half that stuff that's up in the museum. So, let's just have children do it, it'll be cute and inoffensive and, really, the coal and textile industries were really onto something with the market-readiness of child labor. Go! Except, of course, that of course it's ugly, because it was made by children, and, no, your tow-headed little brat can't do it as well as someone who's hanging in a museum, and maybe you get what you pay for, and maybe the public good is worth paying for. It's horrid and the unimaginative clods who insist on infantilized public art got what they wanted.

Posted by Matthew | August 5, 2011 2:53 AM

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Taking on the task of leading the creation of a public, community mural is a risky endeavor. There are many people to please. Children's art is exactly that. A child's art. Endearing yes. A masterpiece or something of exceptional quality is a long shot. That is, again something you hire professional artists for. With children's art or an open mural with little guidance beyond paint what you want is going to yield a mixture of unassociated themes and forms. Done in this manner it becomes an expression and a window into/of the minds and personalities of the community who created it. What exactly is disliked about the piece.

Posted by karen | August 5, 2011 5:07 PM

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What a downer for those kids!
If they'd restricted their color palette a little bit and given them some guidelines, this could have been avoided, and been a point of pride for the little guys.
If they think this is Aiken's technique, they are fools.
That cat up there is pretty rad, though.

Posted by Sarah Prentice | August 7, 2011 2:54 PM

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What's up with the big "666"? I don't think children painted any of this.

Posted by Ray | August 10, 2011 10:42 PM

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