42 shots at RI history: Mark Patinkin remembers McCoy Stadium murals headed to auction

Remember the murals at McCoy Stadium depicting Pawtucket greats who went up to the Bigs? Players like Roger Clemens, Carlton Fisk and Wade Boggs? And dozens of others?

There were 42 murals total, each 4 by 8 feet, and now you have a chance to buy one.

At noon on Monday, March 18, they’ll be up for bid online and at a Cranston auction gallery.

I was intrigued to learn they were painted by a non-sports fan, a prominent local artist named Carol Heuser, who goes by the nickname Tayo. She also sculpted the famous statue of former PawSox owner Ben Mondor that still stands at the ballpark.

We’ll get to her in a moment, but let’s start with Kevin Bruneau, an owner of the Cranston auction house, called Bruneau & Co, which is selling the murals.

They will join a legacy of intriguing items Kevin has auctioned there.

Remember those 6-foot fiberglass lobsters placed around Rocky Point amusement park? Bruneau came across one, and a bidder grabbed it for $7,000.

Kevin also sold one of the original first-edition Fantastic Four comic books, which debuted in 1961 for 10 cents. Kevin got $150,000 for it. And $125,000 for a Tiffany lamp, and $40,000 for a Revolutionary War canteen.

“I have my little Disneyland here,” Kevin said of his Cranston building at 63 4th Ave.

He’s often in a dozen homes a week looking at collections and estate sales.

“I get to see some cool things,” he said.

Once, a lady called about a 12-by-18-inch Chinese plaque showing two Asian figures. She’d put it up for bid online, and when it drew a ton of offers up to $1,000, it made her think there might be more value there. Kevin told her there was. He auctioned it for $96,250.

As for the 42 PawSox murals, they were first painted by Tayo Heuser in the late 1970s on McCoy’s concrete walls, then blasted off in 1999 when the park was refurbished. So she redid them, this time on 4-by-8-foot plywood panels framed behind plexiglass.

Those are the ones now being auctioned through Kevin for a collector named Gary Sullivan, who bought and held them as a set years ago.

Among the other murals: Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Oil Can Boyd, Nomar Garciaparra, Mark Fidrych, Mo Vaughn, Butch Hobson and manager Joe Morgan.

Although they will likely of course be bid up, they're starting at affordable prices – $1,000 for many and as low as $250 for some.

Their size is one reason, Kevin explained. Individuals will need a big household wall, though he expects museums, sports bars and businesses will be interested. Perhaps the WooSox and even the players themselves will want some.

Kevin’s favorite is the mural of Wade Boggs, one of his baseball heroes.

“Why don’t you grab it?” I asked.

“I can’t fall in love with too many things,” Kevin explained. “It’s someone else’s job to buy it, my job to sell it.”

Now, let’s get to the artist.

“Tayo” Heuser lives on Providence’s East Side, but I reached her at her Pawtucket studio. She’s an accomplished artist with pieces in museum collections, her style including geometric abstracts.

But man, did she ever love doing the murals.

“It was one of the most special experiences of my life,” said Tayo. “It was so different from anything I was used to.”

She grew up in Africa, the daughter of an American diplomat, and went to RISD in the late 1970s. Needing to pay bills as a student, she checked out freelance jobs at the school’s career office and was intrigued by one about murals of baseball players at McCoy.

Soon, she was sitting at the PawSox front office with team president Mike Tamburro and owner Ben Mondor.

Tayo got the job, and it wasn’t a small one. It began while she was in school and continued periodically for 15 years or so.

They gave her multiple photos of each player, and she’d pick and adjust the final image. One year, she was in the Fort Myers area on vacation, so she stopped at Red Sox spring training to take photos of her latest subjects herself.

Each mural took up to a month of on-and-off work from scaffoldings. She painted three or four a year until it got too cold outside, then resumed in spring. She would get new assignments as players were called up to the majors and shined there. She ended up doing more than 40.

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Then, in 1999, they were all sanded off the concrete walls during a big renovation and repainting of the ballpark.

I asked how she felt about that.

Surprisingly, Tayo was thrilled. She knew she could do them better the second time, and she liked that they’d be on more durable 4-by-8-foot framed plywood sheets to be completed in studio instead of outdoors.

“I didn’t have to go up and down a scaffold anymore,” Tayo said.

She did many in new poses – pitchers in their windup, batters in mid-swing, a catcher seated thoughtfully in the dugout.

She told me they paid her well, and Ben Mondor became a bit of a mentor.

“Working at McCoy was a bowl of laughter,” said Tayo. “Everyone was joking all the time. It was pure joy.”

How much did she know about baseball before she took the job?

“About zero.”

Mondor used to laugh because when she’d attend games with him, she’d comment on things like the beautiful sunset instead of the action.

Among her own favorites are Oil Can Boyd, Carlton Fisk and Joe Morgan.

“I never dreamt I would be painting baseball players,” said Tayo.

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And now – memo to Providence College – she likes the idea of one day painting basketball players, too.

After RISD, Tayo lived in Europe and New York City, where she met her Pawtucket-born husband, Jeff Shore, a piano player. They settled in Narragansett, raising two sons, one now an accomplished jazz pianist and the other in TikTok product development, though Tayo’s not exactly sure what that means.

“It’s complicated,” she said, “but it’s a major job. That’s all I know.”

Ten years ago, she and Jeff moved to Providence, where she does art and he plays piano at home for hours every day.

“A lot of Bach,” she told me.

Jeff is also an art dealer, working at times with Kevin at the auction house.

I asked Tayo how a painter like her also ended up doing the life-size bronze statue of Ben Mondor. She told me she works in all mediums and loves a new challenge, since that opens doors. For example, because of the PawSox murals, she now occasionally does big 4-by-8 geometric abstract paintings, too.

Interestingly, the murals will be part of a day-long auction with hundreds of other items, including illustrated band and hat boxes from the RISD Museum, and, of all things, a police collector’s set of historic handcuffs, clubs and other cop curios going back to the 1800s.

The auction starts at 10 a.m. Monday, with the murals likely to get onto the block around noon.

“You’re going to have 42 shots at owning a piece of Rhode Island history,” said Kevin.

Tayo will be at the auction herself, possibly as a buyer, hoping to get a mural for each of her sons.

As for the rest: “I hope they go to good homes.”

The auction will be poignant for her. The murals were a big part of her life.

She said she’ll cherish forever the memories of creating them.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: McCoy Stadium player murals auction planned by Bruneau & Co.