New Public Art Mural Wild City Connects Community and Park City Culture
Last September, the China Bridge parking structure became a canvas for a four-wall mural entitled Wild City.
Emily Herr, from Richmond, Virginia, was awarded the project after submitting a proposed schedule, budget, concept design and mockup. “Putting together an application for a project of this scale is pretty involved, requiring research about the context for the piece (environmental, social, historical, etc) as well as logistics research.” She knew very little about Park City's ecosystem, so she learned about the local flora and fauna, focusing in on the local native wildflowers. “It was important to me, even as a visiting artist, this piece should be deeply relevant to the community.”
A unique aspect of Emily's project was to incorporate community volunteers. “I set up a limited color palette and invited volunteers to paint anything they wanted. Multiple groups layered their marks across each wall and built on top of others' work creating interesting visual dynamics and random poetry. It emulated true community interaction - overlapping goals, multiple concurrent ideas, a group collaboration.”
Using this community work as a base layer, Emily painted a second layer of shapes on top. These shapes molded the community layer into silhouettes of wildflowers. “I had curatorial power to edit the final product, but I truly didn't need to censor anything. Participants would be surprised to see how little is covered by that second layer - mostly blank areas, or just edges of their drawings and words, like a frame.”
Emily was delighted with the finished product, which took exactly one month. The wall themes include winter sport, town history, arts and culture, and the natural environment.
“Each wall has its own outstanding qualities. The town history colors are the most fun, the process of painting the natural environment was very relaxed since we had the process down, the winter sports has my favorite flowers, the arts & culture has some of the most interesting community work.”
Stop by the China Bridge parking structure in the heart of historic Park City to witness the beautiful new public art murals that tell the story of our community. Emily Herr's website is: www.herrsuite.com