Driving up the road that winds into Sulphur Springs' Rowlett Park, it's hard to miss the giant mural looming over the racquetball courts. On one side of the 20-by-80-foot wall that divides the courts in half, a painting depicting nearby Sulphur Springs Theater's iconic marquee and a racquetball player is complete; on the opposite side, another image is taking shape.
This larger-than-life backdrop dwarfs a full court of kids practicing their soccer — not racquetball — moves on a Wednesday evening, but it's more than just a pretty picture: There's a subtle message, too. The image taking shape on the nearly finished side shows a row of women, one with a roundly pregnant belly, nurturing children. No men appear in the image, inspired by a community in which mothers, grandmothers and sisters head a lot of households.
The mural is the brainchild of Community Stepping Stones, a program founded three years ago by local artist and educator Ed Ross. He and his co-director, Michael Parker, lead high school students from Sulphur Springs in public art projects like the mural at Rowlett Park. The students are engaged in every aspect of the endeavor, from taking the snapshots that they collaged for the final image to painting the super-sized mural while perched on scaffolds. In just a few weeks, the yearlong process will come to an end.
The final product will look great, but for Ross the real art is in creating relationships, investing in the community and changing people's beliefs and behaviors. Less than a mile away from the house the group calls its headquarters, they've transformed a nearby, city-owned lot on the Hillsborough River into a park. Changing the neighborhood's perception of the lot, which used to serve as an informal dump, has been a challenge; they've gradually been able to get people to stop leaving trash. Little by little, people change their behavior when they come to value something and realize that it can make their life better, Ross says.
Ross and Parker take the same approach with the students, gradually changing their behavior through a program of public art-making projects that impart practical as well as artistic skills. Some students join the group occasionally, but there's a core of six kids. They passed an audition and entered into a contract obliging them to regularly attend classes three days a week with Parker and volunteers, among them older USF students who can fulfill an off-campus experience requirement by working with the group as well as serving as role models for the younger kids.
In return for committing to the program, the students gain job skills, from the basic — like being held responsible for showing up on time — to the concrete: Photoshop work that could give them a leg up on entering a field like graphic design. For the Rowlett Park project, students took six months worth of drawing, painting and Photoshop classes with Parker to prepare them for the job of painting the mural. During the process, they are paid an hourly wage.
The group's next project will take place in Perry Harvey Sr. Park near
the Central Park Village public housing project in downtown Tampa. The
housing project and the surrounding 143-acre Central Park Community
Redevelopment Area are scheduled to be redeveloped into market-rate
Condos and mixed-income rental housing next year. The park will also undergo an overhaul; of three conceptual plans for its redesign introduced at a recent public meeting, one does not include the concrete bowl that has made the park a destination for the city's skateboarders, Ross says. If the bowl survives, the group's plan is to create a mural near it and to fix other problems within the park, such as a lack of benches and trash cans.
He hopes the project will bring together students from Sulphur Springs and from Central Park to create a stronger bond between the two communities. As the area's low-income housing is vacated and demolished, Sulphur Springs will become one of the few refuges within the city where current Central Park residents might be able to afford to live, Ross says. He maintains that if kids from Central Park move to Sulphur Springs, they're going to need some social capital in the form of relationships with neighborhood youngsters.
That's an idea that the park's namesake, Perry Harvey Sr., would have gotten behind. As president of the International Longshoremen's Association #1402, he brought many jobs to local residents, says Charles "Fred" Hearns, director of Community Affairs for the city of Tampa. Harvey once told Florida congressman Sam Gibbons that inner city kids desperately needed a "head start" if they were to rise out of their current living conditions; Hearns says that the phrase stuck and became a name for the national preschool program that serves children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Hearns, an expert on the neighborhood's history, helped Ross and Parker kick off the new project two weeks ago by leading the Stepping Stones group around the area for a walking history tour. They traced the background of the district and its main drag, Central Avenue, which thrived as a mecca of black-owned business and culture from 1890 to the 1970s. During the '50s and '60s in particular, clubs on Central Avenue presented noted musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles, who recorded his first album while living in a house on the street, Hearns says. Following desegregation, activity on the street died and the park was eventually built on top of it.
Ross hopes that by exposing his students to the area's past, they'll not only have a better appreciation for Tampa's rapidly vanishing history but that they'll also repeat what they've achieved at Rowlett Park: the creation of a beautiful work of public art that says something about its community.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
