Mending Walls
You’re taking a stroll through downtown Great Falls and happen to glance into an alleyway and catch the following sight: a young man with tattoos and gauged earlobes rapidly filling a wall with paint from a spray can, a pile of other colored cans littered at his feet.
You might react in surprise or indignation—until you see what he’s creating. Though street art and graffiti have become recognized forms of art in their own right, they’re still often practiced illegally or without the consent of building owners. As such, urban wall art is often regarded as vandalism. But that’s not what’s happening here. In Great Falls, the city isn’t merely tolerating wall art; it’s actively cultivating it.
Mural credit: Woman, Mister Toledo
Since 2019, the Great Falls Business Improvement District has been hosting ArtsFest, a summertime collaboration between professional and amateur muralists who’ve been turning blank walls on downtown businesses into lively works of art. The man painting in that Great Falls alley, in fact, is Cameron Moberg, an internationally recognized street and mural artist. He’s been the creative spearhead behind ArtsFest, contributing original murals of his own design while conducting workshops with local artists to help them create murals of their own. And though Cameron and the other professional and local artists who’ve participated have access to better gear—they’re provided with scissor lifts, cherry pickers and scaffolding to reach every part of the walls they’re painting—most of the materials are those used by street artists everywhere: cans of spray paint, and lots of them.
Prior to ArtsFest, Great Falls already had a burgeoning wall art scene. Local artist Rachel Kaiser contributed a number of murals to the city, including several on the eastern pylons of the Central Avenue West rail bridge, and University of Providence art professor Julia Becker and her students created a large mural titled Everyone along the side of a former auto dealership in 2009. Its theme of inclusivity seems to embody the essence of all the murals—that this is public art, made for all, to be enjoyed with a wide variety of scales and subject matter.
Mural credit: Hands of God, Cameron Moberg
And though Great Falls has embraced mural art more deliberately than any other town in Montana, there’s plenty of it on display around the state. A notable example is the Montana Women’s Mural in Helena. Created in 1979 by Anne Appleby, Marilyn Sternberg and Delores Dinsmore, the mural includes contributions and experiences of Montana women throughout its history, depicting both femininity and strength—the brawny forearm of a frontier schoolteacher, the gentle, rawboned hands of a pioneer settler, a gray-haired Native mother in proud profile. Above the scene hovers the total solar eclipse of 1979, visible from Montana; it’s a symbol of older ways of life being eclipsed by newer ones and of the continuing cycle of rebirth across generations. Like the Everyone mural, it makes a deliberate statement about the people it depicts, providing meaning along with civic beauty.
Mural credit: Anne Appelby, Marylin Shernberg and Delores Dinsmore
Wall art that shows what’s important to people is nothing new here. Long before Europeans came, Indigenous peoples were applying pigment to rock walls throughout the region. Some of this art can be found in locations as ambitious as any railway bridge or high-rise that a graffiti artist might tag. Float the Smith River, for example, and you’ll see red pictographs on the steep cliffs lining the river, some 14 feet above the waterline. Many of the open caves above the river contain ancient pictographs as well. Perhaps Montana’s best-known site is Pictograph Cave, near Billings, whose drawings are perhaps 2,000 years old. Sites throughout the state depict animals, human figures, geometric designs and, perhaps the most personal art of all, handprints. While it’s impossible to know for certain what meaning these images held for their makers, their preoccupations with depictions of the hunt, with humans or spirit beings, and the mark of a hand perhaps to simply say “I was here” still seem relevant to today. Murals being painted now still wrestle with what’s important to us: people, the landscape, our identities.
Mural credits: Great Falls, Tana Murray; Charlie Russell, Jim DeSteffany; 406, Sheree Nelson
Public art performs other functions as well. One motivation behind Great Falls’ ArtsFest was the murals’ ability to place value on outdoor spaces in downtown. It’s had a positive effect on local pride in the community, been a boost for tourism and may even contribute to lessening crime. The murals have been a part of the city’s larger revitalization of its downtown, with new restaurants, performance venues and businesses anchoring renewed interest in the historic district. The businesses whose walls serve as canvases, in fact, actively participate in the project. While they don’t dictate the contents of the murals, businesses have input and contribute to the cost of creating and maintaining them; the clear sealants applied to protect the murals have to be reapplied every decade or so and help prevent graffiti of the unauthorized kind from being sprayed atop them.
Mural credits: Not Afraid, Cameron Moberg; Grizzly, Fasm; Clouds, Ricky Watts; Great Falls, Tana Murray
The idea for ArtsFest first came to the Business Improvement District’s Community Director Joan Redeen through her counterpart at Great Falls Tourism, Executive Director Rebecca Engum. Rebecca had attended the Beltline Urban Murals Project, or BUMP, in Calgary, Alberta, and encouraged Joan to pursue the idea. Although she was initially skeptical, Joan eventually decided to dip the town’s toes into mural art. And it’s a good thing she did; since the project launched in 2019, it’s taught more than 20 artists how to create murals, employed 14 artists to do so and has seen 24 murals added to the downtown landscape. And there’s no end in sight; Rebecca Engum estimates there are probably 20 years’ worth of walls left downtown to paint before the space is used up.
This year’s ArtsFest will be held Aug. 12-19 and is looking for sponsors, participants and spectators to join in. So, in the long tradition of Montanans enjoying the creative thrill of applying pigment to walls, the next person to pick up the brush just may be you.
Top image credit: Art by Pawn
To learn more about participating in or donating to ArtsFest, go to https://visitgreatfallsmontana.org/trip-ideas/artsfest-montana-2022/
Tags: mural, Great falls, Public Value Partnerships, Arts Education and Helena