On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in mid-September, the building that houses the administrative offices of Mary and Martha House — a Ruskin non-profit dedicated to the care of women and children in crisis — is a blindingly white beacon on pavement, bordered by irrepressible flora. The two-story structure's distinctive simplicity and curving walls (a dollop of Florida modern adjacent to a highway lined with strip malls) have earned it at least one colorful nickname: the Flintstones building.
With straw hat firmly in place, artist Josette Urso takes stock of a transformation in progress on the building's façade. Pencil drawings of organic forms — some highly abstract, others, like a giant owl's face, distinctly representational — cover the white walls. Nearby, Urso's sister, Yvette, lends a hand by making a to-do list for the squad of community volunteers who turn up to chip in on a daily basis: draw more on this wall, start painting on that one. Bit by bit, the local landmark gets a vibrant makeover in the form of an expansive mural under Urso's supervision.
For the second year in a row, Ruskin residents (and residents of greater Tampa Bay, for that matter) have been invited to participate in the creation of a community mural as part of Big Draw Ruskin. The month-long festival of drawing takes the form of classes and workshops, presentations by visiting artists, and community gatherings like the one slated to fete the Mary and Martha House mural on Oct. 10. Almost all of the events are free and open to the public; those that aren't free carry a minimal charge, like $4, to offset the cost of hiring a live model, for example. Last year's inaugural array of events inspired me to bestow a Best of the Bay award on the Big Draw for Best Workshop Series, and this year's lineup looks even better. (Saturday's talk by Mary GrandPré, the Sarasota-based illustrator of the Harry Potter books, is likely to be a particularly hot ticket.)
Within eyeshot of where Urso and her helpers work, the community mural produced in 2008 under artist Michael Parker's direction adorns the side of a shopping plaza. By comparison, last year's effort perhaps fits the standard mold of "mural" better; local residents, in collaboration with Parker, conceived a tableau of figures representative of Ruskin's past and present, then executed the painting on a broad, rectangular wall. Urso's undertaking — to the delight of the Big Draw's organizers, who are thrilled with both murals — is rather more organic both in terms of process and imagery.
Since August, the New York-based Tampa native has worked with roughly 60 community members, from children to retirees, in a series of public workshops designed to generate content for the project. Over the course of multiple hands-on exercises, participants first drew shapes by tracing found objects and sketching the landscape outdoors, then cut and reassembled their drawings into collages. An extensive photomontage of the participants' collages then became a "map" for the building's new skin. The resulting composition marries abstract forms and patches of color with immediately recognizable motifs like seedpods and flowers.
For anyone familiar with Urso's work — her landscape paintings and drawings were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in 2006 — the mural bears striking evidence of her influence at the same time that it is clearly a collective endeavor. Both the artist's work with landscape, largely in the abstract, and her practice in the medium of collage playfully explore the way viewers construct meaning by virtue of a pair of juxtaposed images or an evocative line or brushstroke. By tasking mural participants with de- and re-constructing what they've seen in the surrounding world, she has led them on a journey more exploratory and intuitive than is perhaps typically encountered in the context of community-based art. "I always find that I have to step off the path before things get interesting," Urso says.
This is setting the bar high for a collaborative mural. I suspect John Ruskin, the art critic and social theorist who serves as the town's namesake, would have approved; his conviction that drawing encouraged a holistic, empathetic appreciation of the world inspired organizers Bruce Marsh and Dolores Coe to create the annual event. To find out if he — and they — are right, take your place behind an easel (or, better yet, help Urso and her gang finish painting their mural) at one of the Big Draw Ruskin 2009 events this month.
For complete workshop and event listings, go to bigdrawschedule.blogspot.com.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2009.