Graham Public Art Committee revitalizing city through wall murals

The Graham Public Art Committee is working on designs for murals around town to help brighten and beautify the walls left blank around the city. A collection of local artists and other community members make up the committee which chooses the location, designs and more associated with the murals.

The committee has looked at hiring artists outside the city, but Graham Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO Krisa De La Cruse said the group want to focus on highlighting local artists. She said so far the committee has not been disappointed going local after starting around three years prior.

“We got this started, the Graham Public Art Committee, I want to say probably three-ish years ago. It was after the mural Bailee (Green) did on Third Street, but before the mural Bailee did on the side of City Florist Wall. (...) Basically, we had a private citizen who mentioned that murals are a tourist attraction and doing some of the walls we have that are blank canvas essentially just to beautify Graham a little bit, attract people to the downtown square and at that same time really we saw (...) I am not big on Instagram, but they (murals) were popping up everywhere. And we didn’t want to do the same type of mural that every other town was doing. We wanted them to be very specific to Graham and with each mural we wanted it to be of course beautiful, attractive, but we also wanted it to have a tie back to Graham. Whether that is through history or something that we feel represents Graham, etcetera,” De La Cruz said. “So we founded the Graham Public Art Committee to help brainstorm that out, identify which walls make sense for painting and then look through designs, attract artists and so on and so forth.”

Local artist Bailee Green did the first two murals on the square on the side of the building at 600 Oak St. and on the side of the building at 707 Oak St. The most recent mural, which is being worked on by local artist Pecos McCool, is a directional signage mural for Fort Belknap which is on the side of 154 Elm St. by the Hwy. 380 and Loving Hwy. split.

For the rest of the story, see the Oct. 23 edition of The Graham Leader.