Words + Pictures re: Murals

And a schedule reminder...

Nov 07, 2024

All photography © Imagimark! Productions

Herewith a dispatch primarily devoted to a little bit of For Your Information: Toucan will be closed from Thursday (11/7) to Tuesday (11/12) for a glorified long weekend away from Billings, away from Montana, actually. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.

The Machine Shop, North Wall, Kaitlin Ziesmer & John Van Horn

In the meantime, I’ve been wanting to comment on, in a minor way, more so to document the creation of, the murals that materialized in the neighborhood of Toucan—New Toucan, as we and others seem to be sometimes calling it—as part of the Wild West Walls mural festival this past September.

Every iteration of human civilization has created murals, cave paintings themselves easily categorized as such as far back as the Ice Age, between 40,000 and 14,000 years ago. The beginning of the Modern mural movement is often tagged to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the mural program was directed by noted American painter, sculptor, and writer, Francis Davis Millet, who was, among other things, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; was a founder of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and was involved with the American Academy in Rome (and who was, in fact, travelling to New York City on Academy business when he was reportedly last seen helping women and children into lifeboats before he died aboard the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912).

This Modern mural movement extends from that celebration in Chicago of what can only be called exceptionalism and, well, progress, to Billings, Montana, today, when, in the course of its own extended and fitful development, murals have become evermore present and affecting in our shared built environment. The mural represents artwork that is essentially public in its essence, even if it is often executed on the facade of privately owned buildings. The scale and visual accessibility of a mural presents art in a way that most institutions dedicated to it never could. Art behind walls, whether those walls be literal or figurative, is easily usurped by the art on the other side of them, at least in terms of accessibility, exterior rather than interior, visible up there, over there, on foot, driving by, present, if not transformational, in our everyday, if not unrelenting, existence.

These large exterior works of art, with their long and evolving history, their myriad manifestations—public, private, public/private, illegal—and certain what? Je ne sais quoi? Ultimately, they portray the very aspirations of a community.

If you want to experience the scattering of some seeds of hope in a place like Billings, this place that is Billings, check out these images of artists making really big art in the East Billings Urban Renewal District. And the next time you’re in Toucan’s neighborhood, if you haven’t already, look around a little to discover their work in person.

The murals in the making captured here are nearest to Toucan and are located at: