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V. Kim Martinez faced two big challenges when she decided to teach mural painting to students at the University of Utah.
The first was nailing down class details with U. administration. The second was persuading property owners to donate wall space to art, not advertising.
Today, some six years after she launched her special topics class in murals, Martinez can look back with pride, even if moving forward means she and her students can't slow down.
"Now I get calls from people who want us to paint on their buildings -- about five calls per year," said Martinez, associate professor of painting and drawing for the U.'s department of art and art history. "I'm trying to create an artistic lineage with the community of Salt Lake City. If you come by one of these projects, I'd hand you a paintbrush."
When it comes to creating a public mural, painting is the easy part. Funds must be secured. Municipal regulations must be cleared. Perhaps most significant, the proposed mural must pass muster and approval with the community where it will live.
Given all that planning and work, not to mention the time constraints placed on students given just one semester to complete the project, the pace has been blistering.
First up was a series of murals along TRAX's main corridor between 2100 and 3900 South, using grant money from UTA and the city of South Salt Lake. Next was the employee lunch room of the Salt Lake County Building at 2100 South and State Street. Then it was on to South Salt Lake Columbus Center at 2531 S. 400 East, where Martinez and a crew of nine students painted the 8-by-45-foot "Harvesting Stories" mural inside the building's youth center, completed in May.
"We kicked it out pretty fast," said Cori Francom, a junior art student at the U. " It was pretty amazing for nine students to do that much work. We really wanted to give the community a gift. When you sell your own work, it's an expression of yourself. This is different."
Martinez knows that difference well. Under a fellowship at the University of California in Los Angeles, she studied mural painting with Judy Baca, renowned artist and founder of the Social and Public Art Resource Center. A pioneer of community muralism, Baca, in turn, learned from David Siqueiros, one of Mexico's most famous mural artists.
In contrast to the solitary pursuit of a personal vision, mural art is a place where aesthetics and democracy intersect. A large part of mural art, then, is the art of uncovering a community's history, heritage and unique stories.
For the Columbus Center mural, Martinez said her students interviewed South Salt Lake residents and read old municipal archives,
Troy Bennett, recreation supervisor for South Salt Lake, said other murals Martinez's class completed in and around the neighborhood, such as murals at Bonwood Bowl and the H.E. Boyes building, have fortified civic pride. "There's been a lot less graffiti generally," he said.
One of the students, Francom, was so taken with the process, she decided to pursue mural work professionally. Placing your personal artistic style aside for a moment is compensated for, and more, by the chance to share a creative process with others, she said.
Not all students respond in kind, though, Martinez said. One reason she founded the class was to give students at the commuter school a community experience that was more than theoretical. The give and take between personal artistic preference and communal taste offers a learning curve, and an important one.
"With art, there's always a point where you're making something truly original, or a point where you don't know what you're doing," Martinez said. "That's a good thing, because then you're problem solving and heading into the unexpected. If you paint only what you know, you wouldn't be exploring any further."
