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Mural to add color and history to downtown

Richard O Jones

Christina Glunt, a Lakota East High School student, works on a portion of the mural being painted in a building on Second Street in Hamilton. STAFF PHOTO BY RICHARD O JONES

Richard O Jones Christina Glunt, a Lakota East High School student, works on a portion of the mural being painted in a building on Second Street in Hamilton. STAFF PHOTO BY RICHARD O JONES

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer 10:02 PM Sunday, July 10, 2011

HAMILTON — The City of Sculpture is about to also become the City of Murals if the Vision 2020 Commission has its way.

The process is under way this summer on Second Street as a crew of artists busily turn a blank wall into a tribute to the Great Miami River and the rich history and culture of Hamilton.

The idea for a mural project had been kicking around the commission for a number of years, according to Jason Crank, co-chairman of the mural subcommittee along with Cathy Mayhugh, director of exhibitions at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts. The project shifted into high gear last summer, however, when the Fitton Center’s Executive Director Rick H. Jones suggested a partnership with the Cincinnati-based ArtWorks, a nonprofit arts organization that has been connecting artists with community partnerships and public art since 1996 with an emphasis on providing summer employment for student artists.

With ArtWorks on board, Mayhugh said, no one had to re-invent the wheel. By the end of this summer, when the Hamilton mural and 11 other mural projects are completed, ArtWorks will have facilitated the painting of 46 large-scale public paintings, mostly in Cincinnati with some in Northern Kentucky, according to program manager Allyson Knue. The Hamilton project is the first time ArtWorks has reached out into the northern suburbs.

“It seemed rational for us to work with an organization that has had experience creating murals,” Mayhugh said. “The commission really liked the idea of having young apprentices. Getting young people involved and thinking toward the future was a beautiful part of it.”

ArtWorks, Knue explained, takes care of all the nuts-and-bolts details of such a project, from hiring the lead artists and helping them come up with a suitable design to purchasing the supplies and managing the payroll for a lead artist, a teaching artist and a crew of student apprentices in a “fee for services” arrangement.

The only thing ArtWorks isn’t doing is raising the money for the project, which is being done locally.

ArtWorks hired Matthew Litteken, a member of the art faculty at Miami University, to be the lead artist and Hamilton artist Stephen Smith, who teaches at Winton Woods High School, to be the teaching artist.

“The apprentices are from all over, including three Hamilton area residents and a Miami University student, everyone living less than 20 miles from Hamilton,” Litteken said. “It’s a very competitive process that includes portfolio reviews. There were over 400 apprentice applicants and only 150 were hired for the various ArtWorks projects going up in the area.”

After he was hired to do the job, Litteken came up with a set of three designs based on what the committee wanted from the project.

“It’s a public art program,” Knue said, “but we want to make sure the artists can instill some individual style, but we work with the committee and the artist to work up the final drawings.”

“There were three things they wanted the mural to say about Hamilton,” Litteken said. “They wanted it to involve Hamilton history, the importance of the Great Miami River and the canal system both in the past and today as a recreational center, and Hamilton’s rich cultural life.”

The selected design, as yet without a title, focuses on the Great Miami River, which runs through the middle with three bridges in view. In a collage style, images of a canal boat, a flatboat and bridges from Hamilton’s history will be rendered in sepia tones, while modern images of waterskiers and a crew team will add splashes of color.

“I had so many images to draw on that I thought a collage would be the best way to embody those larger themes,” Litteken said. “I took a lot of historical images from the Cummins historical photo collection at the Lane Library and pulled etchings, like the one of the flatboat, from other historical documents that aren’t specific to the Great Miami River but represent the activity that was happening at one time.”

Crank said that finding the right site was one of the longest parts of the process.

“We started with 10 possibilities, and narrowed it down to three, then selected this site because it was reasonable in size and has a prominent from the courthouse and from High Street, right in the heart of downtown,” he said.

Mayhugh added, “The wall was also in really good shape and didn’t need a lot of repair to get it ready for painting.”

The size of the wall and its condition helped keep the budget for the project at a manageable $29,500, Crank said. Half of the funding has come from the Hamilton Community Foundation, the Downtown Special Improvement District and a grant from ArtsWave, the Cincinnati-based arts funding organization formerly known as the Fine Arts Fund.

“The other half of it has come and will come from individual donations,” Crank said.

“We want people to feel like they’re a part of it,” Mayhugh said. “The artists will be working here from 9 a.m. to around 3 p.m. every weekday until it’s done, and we invite people to stop by and talk to them, find out more about the work and offer their ideas.”

Litteken said the rain has caused some delays, but the project is still on schedule and should be finished by the end of July or early August, with a target date of July 23.

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Mural Night at Ryan’s Tavern

4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 14

241 High St., Hamilton

Visit with guest bartenders City Manager Joshua A. Smith, Project Manager/Lead Artist, Matthew Litteken, Teaching Artist, Stephen Smith and Mural Committee Co-Chair, Jason Crank. Meet and visit with Youth Apprentices who are painting the mural, try your luck in split the pot raffles, and tour the mural site a block away. Singer/songwriter Scarlett Minnie will perform.

Mural Weeks at Riverbank Cafe

6 to 10 p.m. Friday, July 22

102 Main St., Hamilton

Enjoy good food, laughter and try your luck in split the pot raffles.

Print the Facebook “Mural Weeks at Riverbank Cafe” page and present it to a server with your payment between now and July 22 and the Riverbank Cafe will donate up to 20 percent of the total to the mural project.

Contributions can be made to the Hamilton Community Foundation, 319 N. Third St., Hamilton OH 45011

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