Murals Murals Everywhere: 2010 Travel Summary…so far…

Amanda Norbutus, Coremans Fellow, Preservation Studies Doctoral Program, University of Delaware

This has been a busy year of travel for me – I’ve seen murals in St. Louis, MO; Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA; Kingston, Ontario; Amsterdam and Maastricht, Netherlands; Paris and Lyon, France; Baltimore, MD, and the many cities in between that I drove though, flew over and rode the train past. The reason behind all of the travel was to learn more about mural programs in the world: what mural artists are using as materials, how mural programs are maintaining and conserving their murals, and how I should continue scientific research into the best paints and coatings for outdoor public murals.

I started my trip in St. Louis, where I was surprised to see a number of tromp-l’oeil murals in the downtown waterfront area. Every time I stopped to take a picture of a mural in St. Louis, a local would stop next to me and share a story of how he or she enjoyed seeing art in an area of St. Louis in desperate need of redevelopment and more public art installations.


Above: (Left) Renaissance hotel in St. Louis-Can you tell which architectural elements are built and which are painted? (Right) A ghost sign from the Riverfront area.

My next stop was Los Angeles, where I was a visiting scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute. While at the Getty, I worked with conservator Leslie Rainer and conservation scientists Tom Learner and Alan Phenix to investigate the applicability and efficacy of anti-graffiti coatings on two popular outdoor mural paint brands. The on-going project will look at several commercially-available anti-graffiti coatings, from waxes and polysaccharides to acrylics and polyurethanes. GCI will continue testing over the next year and will publish results once they have been analyzed.

While in LA, I took time to take part in a painting weekend for Portraits of Hope’s 2010 Lifeguard Tower project, helmed by artist Ed Massey. It was wonderful to see that Ed has been doing fading tests on the mural paints he uses and has started to explore the different anti-fading coatings that may prove useful for outdoor painted projects. I particularly like how he uses his car as a portable testing site!


Above: (Left) Working on one of the panels for the lifeguard towers. (Right) Massey’s car is painted with different pigments and paint brands, and where labels indicate the date is was painted and when a coating was added.

In California, I also took a weekend trip to San Francisco to see their wonderful murals. Meg Berkey, a University of Delaware third-year conservation student interested in the many different types of supports used for modern murals, gave me an amazing guided tour of SF’s murals. We walked all around San Francisco, visiting the murals at Coit Tower, the Precita Eyes murals in the Mission District, and the many other murals that decorate the streets of San Francisco.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley, San Francisco, CA.

In Paris, I visited three murals painted in 2009 by Philadelphia muralists Emelie Ledieu, David McShane, and Paul Santoleri, with the help of local artists and schoolchildren. The three muralists went to Paris to demonstrate the impact of mural art, as Paris is interested in creating their own public mural program. In the Bagnolet suburb of Paris, one resident said Santoleri’s Imago is a "colorful spot of joy in the world of grey" that is his neighborhood. I love that this gentleman incorporated a walk past this mural as part of his everyday life to "capture his joie de vivre."

After Paris, I took the train to Lyon to visit murals by the mural group Cite de la Creation and other Lyonnaise muralists. One of my favorite views in Lyon is below, which I spotted from the tram and had to backtrack, because it was not on my original list of murals to see! The three murals grouped together included images of the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Pisa, and a futuristic tower that is supported only by a lone pillar on the ground. Brueghel’s Tower of Babel is one of my favorite 17th-Century Netherlandish paintings and I appreciated seeing it recreated here!

Above: Three murals by Cite de la Creation.

Self-Guided Mural Tours

Down the street from these murals is the mural museum I planned to visit with that tram ride. The city of Lyon created an urban outdoor mural museum dedicated to Tony Garnier, the architect of the planned housing project in an area nicknamed “the United States,” because of the American servicemen stationed here during the Second World War. The museum curator placed sign postings opposite each mural, with a map indicating which way the self-guided tour should continue. This was a wonderful visual aide for my mural tour, and I wished that more mural communities had such signage!


Above: Cite de la Creation, The Turn of the Century: 1900. This was the third mural in the Tony Garnier Urban Museum, with signs in French, English, and Braille.

I left France wanting to create a geo-tracking map or Google map of the murals I had visited, since one problem that kept occurring during my trip was while I knew the general location of a mural on a street (some of which stretched for miles), I had no clue about cross streets or building numbers. This made for fun challenges for learning a new city, but it also would have been helpful to have locations laid out as nicely as the public art curators had done for the murals in the Tony Garnier Urban Museum.

When I got back to Delaware, I was excited to find that many public art programs have started to work on creating self-guided tours of their public art, which all seemed to be released at the start of this summer. For example, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program just posted their inaugural self-guided audio tour in June, called the Mural Mile. I’ll write again soon about how my Mural Mile tour went!

Coating Observations

Amanda uses GCI's mural test wall, using a colorimeter to measure the color change of the paint after one year of exposure.

My travel to so many amazing murals and mural programs this year led to the observation that any coating is helpful in protecting outdoor murals from damage caused by UV exposure, fluctuating humidity and temperatures, and the everyday wear-and-tear of being painted on the side of a building. Although it is best to include a UV blocker or light stabilizer in the coating, the addition of just a clear acrylic coat can help delay the fading process, simply because it will take longer for the UV rays to penetrate to the paint layer underneath.

However, be careful when putting on protective coatings--if the coating is applied too thickly or too quickly, bubbles may develop, visually detracting from the mural. If the amount of bubbling is severe enough, the bubbles may obscure a clear view of the mural. Also, be careful of overlapping on areas of the coating, especially if the first coat applied has not dried yet. This will lead to a whitish film remaining on the mural, because the initial layer under the final application layer will not be able to cure fully (to a clear film), leaving a haze in areas of overlap.