Photo by Erin Bloodgood
The City of West Allis has begun its search for three artists to bring the streets alive in its Commercial Corridor by adding color and an artistic voice to the walls. The City Artscape Committee is sponsoring the project and has enlisted the help of Stacey Williams-Ng a muralist and the founder of Wallpapered City , an organization dedicated to linking communities and businesses with muralists since 2016.
The West Allis effort is multifaceted it focuses on empowering its citizens as well as giving them something beautiful to look forward to.
“What they are really looking to do is use public art in a way that will revitalize and beautify West Allis, but beyond that they want to create unity and engagement with their citizens,” Williams-Ng says.
The murals are just as much about engaging disenfranchised people in their community as it is on beautification, displaying the power of public art.
“West Allis is really thinking about, ‘how do we make people who live feel engaged with our community, because they are finding that many people feel left out.’ They actually have a very diverse community they have a lot of African American and Latinx residents, but they are finding that those residents, people of color, don’t necessarily engage with the community or feel like they are a part of the community right now... public art can really bring people together in such a beautiful way,” Williams-Ng says.
They were planning to create an event surrounding the installations within the community but due to the COVID-19 pandemic are shifting their plans and staggering the installations across the rest of the summer. Williams-Ng hopes that the murals offer a moment of reprieve and an alternative to some of the events that are being canceled due to COVID-19, such as State Fair. The process of putting up the murals has been going on for years due to the commitment of the Mayor.
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“Under his leadership [Mayor Dan Devine] there has been a lot of desire to bring art to West Allis...West Allis is really excited to be doing this,” Williams-Ng says.
Ng has extended an invitation for one of the four murals to a muralist from Denver Thomas Evans. He will be coming to the Milwaukee area for the first time in order to paint his mural. His design is still in the process of being approved. In a broad context, Evans is focusing on highlighting the sort of people that appear in the communities he paints and bringing a little color into their lives.
“A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing right now has been about everyday people...It’s more about putting the common person in those large-scale walls and places, and adding as much color as possible,” says Evans.
To Evans, the architectural world is a little dim and he hopes to add a little color to it himself.
“You just see muted colors, browns, tans and khaki colors on everything so when you add a huge pop of color that what makes it stand out. That’s what I am trying to do to make this mural stand out.”
Submissions are due by June 30 and the first mural is set to go up the first in July.
