Painting the town: Alley Islands Street Festival to show public art by 35 muralists
Take a stroll down Lafayette Street, between Fourth Street and Grant Avenue, and you’ll notice that the area is looking a lot brighter these days.
The normally nondescript back and side walls of several buildings are splashed with dazzling hues from murals stretching down the alley as far as the eye can see and so high skyward, you have to crane your neck to take in all the intricate designs.
At once contrasting and compatible, the murals are the painstaking creations of 35 artists whose work is to be featured during the seventh Alley Islands Street Festival, which takes place from noon to 10 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is $10, payable online at alleyislands.com/tickets or in-person at the event.
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In the center of the color explosion sits a building with a gunmetal gray façade, one you might not give a second glance to until you turn the corner and see a happy cloud spewing a rainbow painted on the side. You've arrived at Blockfort Gallery and Studios.
Located at 162 N. Sixth St., Blockfort is a creative hub owned and curated by Adam Brouillette, creator of “Return to Sender,” the aforementioned rainbow-regurgitating cloud. He’s also the organizer of Alley Islands.
The block party-style festival is to offer 28 bands on two stages throughout the day, plus performances from poetry, comedy and storytelling to magicians and circus acts. Artists, crafters, small-business artisans, food trucks and local breweries are to line the streets and visitors are invited to tour Blockfort’s three galleries and various artist studios.
More than just a festival
Presented in partnership with the Discovery District Civic Association – of which Brouillette is president – Alley Islands is more than just a day of fun. It’s part of a larger effort to support public art.
The artwork that began at the festival in 2016 has blossomed into a full-blown mural-district plan, the Lafayette Mural Alley Project, an endeavor to create murals on all the buildings in the Discovery District.
Alley Islands itself is part of a larger initiative by two of its sponsors, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the city of Columbus, to create the first comprehensive public-art plan for the city and county.
“We’ve received a lot of support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and city council,” said Brouillette, a 2002 graduate of Columbus College of Art and Design, whose work has been shown in numerous galleries and businesses around the city.
The Greater Columbus public-art plan aims to guide local communities in short- and long-term public-art planning with emphasis on the equitable distribution of public art and diverse representation of both artists and the communities they serve.
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The plan, which is to serve as a blueprint to establish guidelines for public art for the next 5-10 years, is to be launched in June.
“We want to make the Discovery District a little less concrete, a little more color,” Brouillette said. “I hope to see the festival keep growing and have the murals stay.”
Besides several sponsors, the festival received support from other donors, including Behr and KOBRA, which donated paint, and a United Rentals, which loaned lifts so the artists could reach the higher spaces on the walls.
Conveying messages through murals
Almost half of the murals are on permanent display, like Luka Weinberger’s two-story figure of a person reclining with an expression of peaceful contentment. With its brilliant, spring-green background and matching leaves sprouting from the person’s body as a watering can nourishes them, the lifelike mural exudes an aura of rebirth and growth. It’s Weinberger’s first contribution to Alley Islands.
“I do a lot of representative figures in my mural work. I love incorporating local individuals in the city who I feel represent the message of my art,” they said, declining to identify the person in the mural for privacy reasons.
Upon close inspection, onlookers can spot two metallic-gold lines under the person’s pectoral muscles – scars from gender-affirming top surgery.
“The gold paint is representative of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of taking broken ceramics and putting them back together with gold,” said Weinberger, 35, who calls Columbus “the only place that’s felt like home” after living in several other cities.
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“My subjects are always queer or trans. I intertwine stories to create a universal message of self-care. It’s specifically a trans body, but all viewers will be able to receive the message so we can create a better dialogue to foster empathy.”
Weinberger said they titled the mural “We Don’t Wait for the Rain (No Body is Political)” to communicate that people in disenfranchised and marginalized communities don’t have to wait for affirmation from others; the subtitle rebuts remarks made to Weinberger that depicting a trans body was “political.”
“There’s nothing political about it. Trans people just want to live and love like everyone else,” they said.
The cicadas alighting on the body are analogous to young queer people who leave home at 17-18 – roughly the same time it takes a brood of cicadas to reappear. “Like cicadas, they experience a rebirth,” Weinberger said.
Jon Stommel is another first-time Alley-Islands muralist who has traveled extensively and painted in cities including Seattle, Denver, Cleveland and Atlanta. It was during a six-year stint in Columbus that he attended CCAD, where he and classmate Travis Czekalski began working together as Rather Severe, doing local commissioned projects, including the art inside New Albany’s Mellow Mushroom pizza restaurant.
Though Stommel and Czekalski now live in Indiana and Vermont, respectively, they continue to collaborate.
Alley Islands is a solo project for Stommel, 39, who traveled back and forth from Indianapolis for 10 days to work on “Imaginary Friends,” a collage of bright, spray-painted cartoon characters that sprang from his imagination.
“It’s kind of like a group photo or a crowd scene with people walking this way and that,” Stommel said, noting that he likes to bring characters from his sketchbooks into his murals.
The “leafy-green man” in his mural is a sentinel watching over the cartoon people. “He’s like a mythological character, like a positive spirit, a guardian,” Stommel said, describing the work as “a composition that’s part of a larger world that’s ever-expanding.”
Alley Islands also features longtime participants like 26-year-old Daniel Rona, who has painted for the festival since 2017 and interned at Blockfort when he was fresh out of high school.
His mural, “Consumed” shows iterations of a faceless character in a red-and-white striped shirt, seemingly being attacked by his thoughts, but in actuality, “the ideas are coming from within,” Rona clarified.
“It’s a vehicle for explanation. The character is being consumed by ideas. The character is me. My art is always a personal representation of my artistic journey, my struggles and wins, meant to be relatable.”
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Rona, who has had exhibits at the Sarah Gormley Gallery, was part of the jury that selected muralists from more than 132 applications. He said the process to narrow the artists down was “especially hard” because there were so many standouts.
“There was a monthlong open call for artists,” he said. “We even had submissions from Germany and Spain.”
The tiki-like faces peering out of “Polluted Utopia” reflect muralist Chris Cropper’s Hawaiian heritage, with elements of his experience as a street artist and graffiti-tagging younger days peppered here and there. He also cites Jean-Michel Basquiat and African art as influences.
Amid the weary, beleaguered expressions of Cropper’s characters is a lone smiling face. “The characters are members of the working class, then there’s this one smiling person. The message is that no matter how much life sucks and there’s gloom and doom, there’s also hope,” he explained.
In addition to being in his third year at Alley Islands, the 42-year-old Columbus native has done album art, designs for band merchandise and artwork for Mikey’s Late Night Slice, Old Familiar Barber Shop, Auntie V’s Corner of Kindness and other local clients. He’s also had solo shows in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and New York City.
Pointing to the work beneath his, a woman in shades of blue who appears to be floating in midair, Cropper noted that while some adjacent murals might seem incongruous, they’re complementary.
“It’s really phenomenal. The juxtaposition of this woman lying underneath these faces looking down fits perfectly,” he said.
This assessment falls in line with a question Brouillette considered when selecting artists. “We started with selecting art representing all kinds of styles: realism, cartoons, true street work, conceptual pieces,” he said.
“Then we started matching them with spaces and asking, ‘Can this mural play well with their neighbor?”
Brouillette said he wants festivalgoers to experience different feelings as they walk down the alley looking at the varying ways the artists express themselves.
“I want people to have this awkward sense of discovery. When people have experiences that they normally don’t, when you take people out of their normal environments, it creates a sense of magic,” he said.
Brouillette said he also wants visitors to experience culture in the form of art, music, food and small businesses, coming away with the knowledge that these things are essential to the community.
“These are cultural cornerstones. We have to support those things, build those things and bolster those things,” he said. “Otherwise, we have a vacuum.”
For more details about the Alley Islands Street Festival, visit alleyislands.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Alley Islands Street Festival set for May 4 in Discovery District
