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The theme of Key Detail’s mural is the confluence of the city's three rivers: the St. Joseph, the St. Marys, and the Maumee.
How do you attract and retain talent in a region? If you ask the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership and Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne, one way is by altering the physical environment.
As cities across Northeast Indiana see renewed investment in their downtowns, the first mural festival in the state of Indiana is taking that investment to the next level, transforming civic spaces into dynamic canvases for creative expression.
From Sept. 8-18, 2020, the Make It Your Own Mural Fest is inviting artists from the local area and around the nation to install 11 new, permanent murals in the cities of Fort Wayne, Columbia City, Warsaw, Garrett, Albion, Angola, LaGrange, Geneva, Bluffton, Huntington, and North Manchester.
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Tim Parsley works on a mural in downtown Warsaw.
The festival, which came out of a brainstorm session at the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, is part of the group’s 11-county Make It Your Own branding initiative to attract attention from creatives and innovators looking for their next place to launch a venture or build a life. It’s all about advancing the quality of place efforts started by the Regional Cities Initiative to garner pride and exposure for Northeast Indiana, and so far, the plan appears to be working. Earlier this month, the Make It Your Own Mural Festival was featured in Forbes Magazine as an out-of-the-box regional promotion strategy.
Jaclyn Goldsborough, Digital Marketing and Public Relations Manager for the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership says one goal of the festival is to share the spirit of hope residents feel growing in Northeast Indiana with creative thinkers everywhere.
“Those who live here know that Northeast Indiana is a community of makers, doers, creators, and innovators,” Goldsborough says. “We want the world to know this is a region where creators are wanted.”
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Muralists like Key Detail use spray paint for their designs.
This goal calls attention to another benefit of Make It Your Own Mural Fest, says Kate Virag, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Communications with the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership. Along with putting Northeast Indiana on the map as a creative hub, the festival is intended to benefit residents currently living in cities across the region with permanent placemaking enhancements.
Even after the 11-day mural festival is complete, its impact will continue to be felt across the region in new public art attractions. The Regional Partnership even plans to use the murals to create an 11-county mural trail, which will encourage residents to explore each other’s cities and take advantage of the local beauty here, Virag explains.
“This is all about creators and quality of life in Northeast Indiana,” she says.
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Shawn Dunwoody works on a mural in downtown Columbia City.
Extending the impact of public art to regional cities
For the past several years, street art has taken over downtown Fort Wayne, largely in the form of alleyway murals propagated by Art This Way.
Fort Wayne-based artist Alex Hall is the Founder and Organizer behind the program, which operates under the Fort Wayne Downtown Improvement District and has commissioned more than 20 murals in the downtown area since 2017.
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Alex Hall
Even so, Art This Way didn’t necessarily bring mural art to Fort Wayne, Hall explains, noting that creators like Julia Meek, Dan Swartz, Tobias Studios, Josef Zimmerman, and others were infusing the area with grand-scale public paintings long before her program began. Instead, Hall sees Art This Way’s work as fanning many sparks of creativity in Fort Wayne and getting the city to think outside of the box when it comes to which buildings can and should have murals as well as the role that murals can play in placemaking efforts.
“Before Art This Way, murals were often done on one building that was a privately-owned creative space,” Hall says. “Art This Way asks: What would it look like to put a mural on the side of a bank?”
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Artists assist Shawn Dunwoody with a mural in downtown Columbia City.
Along with infusing traditionally corporate or drab settings, like alleys, with creativity, Art This Way also strategically utilizes mural art to draw people into targeted areas of cities by creating a cohesive, saturated outdoor gallery experience. The program’s success drawing residents into downtown alleys has proven the power of public art as a placemaking asset, Hall says. She feels that it helped set the stage for the Make it Your Own Mural Fest in smaller cities across the region, too—particularly places like Garrett, which did not have any murals prior to Mural Fest.
“What we’re seeing now is this acceptance of the impact and power of public art in cities,” Hall says. “We’ve reached a point in Fort Wayne where we have a regional economic development organization recognizing the quality of life component that mural art brings to a place.”
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Tim Parsley's buffalo mural in downtown Fort Wayne on The Landing.
As Hall began to see Art This Way’s visual and economic impact in downtown Fort Wayne, she founded her business, AH Public Spaces Consulting, LLC, in 2019 to help more cities tap into the transformative power of public art. As Art This Way continues to grow, it’s expanding murals into more public settings downtown and going “Off the Wall” with one of its latest projects, which will install a sculpture encouraging residents to explore an underutilized alley.
“Public art changes the way people perceive their communities,” Hall says. “It’s not just pride of place, but also tourism, quality of life, and outside perception.”
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Art This Way brings art to the alleyways of downtown Fort Wayne.
Along with advocating for art and artists, her business walks communities through the cumbersome, strategic process of determining which art and artists should enhance their public spaces.
For the Make It Your Own Mural Fest, Hall says each of the 11 counties of Northeast Indiana formed a steering committee to represent its community. These steering committees chose the location for their murals and built reference guides for artists based on their local culture. They also chose the winning art for their mural in a blind, bias-reducing selection process, reviewing the artist based solely on their work.
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Key Detail works on a mural in downtown Fort Wayne.
“At the end of the day, every place is different, so every place needs to be approached in a way that fits them and their community,” Hall says. “Our process was designed to allow for the best proposals to rise to the top.”
As the Make It Your Own Mural Fest takes shape across the region, its impact is already being felt in cities by artists and local leaders.
Paying homage to a Columbia City entrepreneur
Conveying quality of life through the creative process and the telling of history is what muralist Shawn Dunwoody is doing in downtown Columbia City. Dunwoody, from Rochester, New York, already has a mural in Northeast Indiana under his belt—the “Hello Fort Wayne” mural in the alley off Wayne Street between Harrison and Calhoun.
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Shawn Dunwoody works on a mural in downtown Columbia City.
His new mural in Columbia City for the Make It Your Own Mural Fest pays tribute to Shinzo Ohki, a Japanese immigrant who, after moving to Columbia City in the early 1900s, founded a local soy sauce business called the Shoyu Factory. It was one of the first fermented soy sauces produced in the United States.
Dunwoody’s mural, located across the street from the Whitley County Courthouse and near Ohki Alley (named for Shinzo Ohki) features Ohki, soy sauce, and cherry blossoms.
“It’s going to be large, big, and Instagrammable,” Dunwoody says. “It’s going to go to the top of the building.”
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Shawn Dunwoody's new mural in Columbia City for the Make It Your Own Mural Fest pays tribute to Shinzo Ohki a Japanese entrepreneur from the area.
Prior to Dunwoody’s work, Columbia City had eight murals and, according to Chip Hill, Community Development Director for Columbia City, the excitement surrounding the Mural Fest mural is palpable. Citing the recent opening of Pickles Café, a downtown eatery, as well as the prospect of future downtown restaurants, Hill envisions people saying, “Go to the mural,” when arranging to meet up with friends in Columbia City.
“I think this will bring in folks from Fort Wayne, Goshen, and Warsaw,” Hill says. “It even spurred another artist in town to do another mural.”
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Artists assist Shawn Dunwoody with a mural in downtown Columbia City.
As Dunwoody works in the Columbia City community during Mural Fest, he enjoys engaging with the locals who walk by. He takes interactions with community members so seriously that he will often change his design midstream if someone offers him a good suggestion. This is all part of his effort to forge connections with people who live in the communities where he makes art, he says.
Ultimately, he sees his murals as tools for uniting and peacemaking in cities.
“You have to have beauty during turmoil—beauty in times of unrest and distress,” he says.
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Artists assist Shawn Dunwoody with a mural in downtown Columbia City.
That beauty can even come, in Dunwoody’s words, by seeing a “young child’s smile when they stroll by.”
Celebrating lake life in Warsaw
In Warsaw, Tim Parsley, a muralist and professor of art at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, is adorning the Dennie Building downtown with a mural that celebrates the city’s lake culture.
Located at 212 S. Buffalo St. (home of the Glam Boutique), the new mural draws attention to Warsaw’s nature, recreation, landscape, and wildlife that make it a regional attraction. As the county seat of Kosciusko County, Warsaw is known for being situated around three lakes: Center Lake, Pine Lake, and Hidden Lake. These water features, along with their adjacent beaches and parks, set the tone for the area’s culture, built on lakeside dining, paddle boarding, fishing, ski shows, swimming, and kayaking.
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Parsley's mural features lake life and wildlife native to the Warsaw area.
Like the benefit of having lakes in a community, murals offer cities the opportunity to create points of interest for themselves that will ultimately make them even more attractive to residents, says Warsaw Mayor Joseph Thallemer.
He believes the Make It Your Own Mural Fest is doing just that in Warsaw.
“Art improves the walkability of a community and is interesting, beautiful, and pleasurable to look at,” Thallemer says. “The appeal that a community has is what brings people to that community.”
As a muralist, Parsley started his career in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has done about 12 murals. He also has a broad repertoire of work, spanning six murals in Fort Wayne, one in New York City, and one in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Tim Parsley works on a mural in downtown Warsaw.
He, too, sees art as being part of the kaleidoscope of ideas that form a community and define a place. Ultimately, he gauges the success of art by the impact it has on people to shake up their routine ways of thinking, living, and operating.
“The best public art is art that interrupts our routine,” Parsley says. “It makes you stop in your tracks…. When we associate public art with a place we’ve been, it can be a powerful anchor to where we’re from and the communities that we live in.”
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Tim Parsley works on a mural in downtown Warsaw.
Energizing and engaging the community in Fort Wayne
Key Detail, a New York City-based and Belarusian-native husband-and-wife team consisting of Andrei Krautsau and Julia Yu-Baba, are making a mural at 201 W. Wayne St. in downtown Fort Wayne, across from the Grand Wayne Center.
The duo has already created art in Indiana, but never in the Northeast region of the state. The theme of Key Detail’s mural is the confluence of the city's three rivers: the St. Joseph, the St. Marys, and the Maumee. The mural shows three women who symbolize the three rivers, and elements of water are used as a background.
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The theme of Key Detail’s mural is the confluence of the city's three rivers: the St. Joseph, the St. Marys, and the Maumee.
Like other Mural Fest artists, Andrei and Julia appreciate the power and influence art can exercise in a community.
“We think it’s important that the city get a unique and beautiful mural at such a challenging time,” says Andrei. “This project creates an opportunity to educate, energize, and engage the community.”
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Key Detail is a New York City-based and Belarusian-native husband-and-wife team consisting of Andrei Krautsau (pictured) and Julia Yu-Baba.
The “canvas” that Key Detail is using is the largest of the 11 other buildings in Mural Fest, which excites Andrei, too.
“The wall is large and has a lot of windows,” he says. “It will add character and dynamics to our mural. We can’t wait to see the finished mural.”
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Key Detail works on a mural in downtown Fort Wayne.
Dan Baisden, an Urban Planner with the City of Fort Wayne, sees Mural Fest as an important part of Fort Wayne’s growing public art culture.
He says more murals will be coming to the city soon as part of the Faces of the Fort project, modeled after Off the Wall in Atlanta, Georgia. Faces of the Fort will extend the power of murals beyond downtown into the city’s neighborhoods, expressing their diverse culture with art that features the faces and stories of actual residents who live there.
“We want people to experience community and culture, and we want to invest in the community and in local businesses,” Baisden says. “This will only add to that.”
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Urban Planner Dan Baisden is helping bring more public art to the city.