John and I went downtown to catch a few of the latest murals created by a cadre of international artists in downtown Richmond. I will be sharing them this week in one of my albums.
This particular offering was created in January 2013, I learned when researching it online. Here is the background, according to the local paper:
"Richmond muralist Ed Trask and Brazilian artist Nadya Niehues Becker will be working on a mural this week — the paint is scheduled to start going on today on the side of a building on 18th Street in Shockoe Bottom — that will depict the deadly 1925 collapse of the Church Hill Tunnel. A locomotive and at least two railroad laborers remain entombed in the hill.
It is a story, sad and tragic and in some ways mysterious, that almost a century later still captures the interest and imagination of Richmonders.
It now will have a link 5,000 miles to our south in Virginia's Brazilian sister state, Santa Catarina.
Who knew we had a sister state in Brazil?
The mural is a project of the Virginia Partners of the Americas, the state chapter of a grass-roots international organization that fosters social and economic development in the Americas by sending volunteers back and forth in a wide range of disciplines. Partners was founded in 1964 as the people-to-people component of the Alliance for Progress and eventually became a private organization.
Its mission is to establish lasting partnerships and impressions that "improve the lives of people in the Americas," said J. Dewey Brown, executive director of the Virginia Partners for the Americas. Exchanges have involved medicine, agriculture, social work, music and art, and more.
For almost 50 years, Virginia has been connected to Santa Catarina, a state in southern Brazil that is much like Virginia in terms of size and topography, and the fact that it is heavily influenced by the large numbers of European immigrants, principally German, who arrived there in the 1800s. On a visit to Santa Catarina last year, Trask said the inland, agricultural parts of the state reminded him of the Shenandoah Valley.
Trask believes public art has the potential to do that. He said Richmond has come a long way in embracing public art since he created his first mural in the city — illegally — in 1990. This past spring, he spearheaded the RVA Street Art Festival that brought in more than a dozen national street artists to create an outdoor gallery along the James River Power Plant Building and the floodwall.
He always enjoys the reaction of those who pause as they pass by his work to consider what he's done — even if their reaction is critical.
"For me, that's always been one of my driving goals in doing public art," he said. "When you take somebody out of their everyday life and let them see a little spark of creativity … it's going to make for a better day for them."
He wants the Shockoe Bottom mural to do the same for motorists stopped at the traffic light at Broad and 18th streets as they look north toward the Victor Products Co. building, barely a block from the sealed-off eastern end of the tunnel where the collapse occurred. He and Becker want to hit them, in those few seconds, with an image that captures not only the history of the train and the tunnel but also the aftermath of how the city pulled together to try to rescue those who ultimately were lost.
"The idea," Trask said, "is to have something that shows an uplifting, powerful feeling in that we can all learn something from this major disaster."
