The Acknowledge Wall / Temporary interactive mural installation on Cherokee Street (Cinco de Mayo 2006)

It was a strange and wonderful spring.    I was learning to feel and discern the distinctions between intuition, vision, and paranoia.   I would go sit in the rubble of the Empire Sandwich Shop that had fallen and sing songs. I salvaged a stool from the wreckage. I was inspired to make a project that reflected all the peoples and shops I saw that called the street home, according to the caricatures that we communicate ourselves by. I got a bunch of foam and bought paint and walked around a whole bunch. I ate a lot of El Chico gingerbread pigs.  It was very learn-by-doing.  I don’t think I had ever heard the word alderman before that.

Here’s one version of the tale:  <RFT>.

Or, here it is in grantspeak: “In order to highlight the benefit of public art in an economically depressed and crime-ridden neighborhood, artist Lyndsey Scott pioneered and paid for an inclusive and interactive, temporary, site-specific community project during the Hispanic Business Association’s Cinco de Mayo festival. Groundwork was laid by open conversations with the street’s business owners who chose a ‘mascot’ from their store. These characters were blown up and transferred to foam cutouts and painted by neighborhood residents during the festival. They were then pasted to the raw wall from a recently, politically motivated demolition of the historic “Empire Sandwich Shop”. The resultant characters formed a hodgepodge family portrait that acted as the key to a visual treasure hunt of neighborhood icons.”

The whole weekend was lovely – great weather, they had just put hay down on the lot. I ended up getting liability insurance via the LRA through a guy there who went to church where I’d just finished the Living Tree.  They were amused that I brought the foam cut-out of the Indian to the LRA on a fieldtrip.  I’d called Shirley up to ask her how to do the installation legitimately and she told me I’d need million dollar liability insurance…. i think maybe to throw a kink in the plans but it just made it a time-oriented challenge that was fun to Check off the list.   Shannon Knox rocked the painting hard, we had fun! And Sarah P came out and painted gorgeous portraits of the kids.

My favorite moment maybe was the way the wall got named. Ms. Monica who I didn’t know then came by and offered to help, and was interestd in the hot wire we were using to cut the foam.  She wanted to make the words ACKNOWLEDGE HIM for her house — and ended up giving the title to the wall.  That was the start of our friendship, I see her and her daughter and grandbabies all the time and her smile always makes my day brighter.