I dreamt my paint was still wet in Lowell
Closure, Volume 1
When I first started drafting this recap, I began, “It has been a long and short three months since my mural season accelerated to a close in November.” It has now been a long and short FIVE months since my mural season accelerated to a close in November! The evidence suggests that I will not write about current events until I have finally caught up with you about “Let’s Dance, Lowell!,” my most beloved and ambitious undertaking from the prior year. Let’s address that.
I would have written sooner if I felt less precious about this project. But LDL is so important to me that I have remained very daunted by the idea of writing about it. Never before has a single project allowed me to meet and work closely with so many people whom I would never have encountered otherwise. This project gave me permission to approach and work with dozens of educators, artists, students, nonprofit workers, youth workers, afterschool programmers, culture-bearers, community organizers and public servants – the creme de la creme of a city filled with instinctive movers and shakers. Of course this process of immersion made me fall in love with Lowell.
It’s not that I haven’t had a single spare moment for writing – rather, I have been waiting for that perfect moment of readiness when I would finally find myself equipped to do justice to these people and our collaborations.
Oops! It turns out that moment of readiness is only ever “starting right now,” and I’m late. So let’s begin. I would like to tell you about the eight murals I facilitated and painted in Lowell last year: one in each neighborhood; sited based on months of community outreach; designed in collaboration with eight different community-nominated dance groups or choreographers; and translated with the help of partners at the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, Coalition for a Better Acre, the International Institute of New England, and Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers. It might take me eight separate installments to get through this, so no more delays. Vamos!
Here’s Chummeng from Angkor Dance telling me to turn the music up LOUDER during his demonstration of the ក្បាច់រាំវង់ (Rom Vong) on 11/9!
LEGENDARY
LEGENDARY is a new step developed by Tita and Jemima, two student leaders of the Lowell High School Step Team. Though I connected with the Steppers quite a while later than some of my other choreographers, the design for this mural was the first completed and the first painted. I credit Tita and Jemima’s professionalism and their club leader Bryanna’s steady hand in keeping them on schedule!
The LHS Step Team was first put on my radar by the One City, Many Cultures exhibit at the Lowell National Parks Service (amazing curation, highly recommend), and the team was further suggested to me in the course of my pre-design suggestions-gathering process in the community. I loved the idea of including a student group in this series, and spotlighting stepping in this series felt very important and right. I reached out to Bryanna, a teacher at LHS and the Step team’s faculty facilitator, and we connected easily. She thrilled to the idea and recommended Jemima and Tita as student choreographers to represent the team.
I had such a fun time working with these three. It was obvious that their teacher thought highly of them and held them to a high standard, and for good reason – they were consistently prepared and super mature. To my happy surprise, at our very first afterschool meeting, they showed up with a brand-new step already fully choreographed, which helped the mural design come together very quickly. At our second and third meetings, they reviewed my draft and gave me good feedback on how to make the diagram make more sense and better represent their motions. It could not have gone more smoothly.
Tita and Jemima also gave excellent and thoughtful feedback on color scheme and design: it was their idea to have the mural’s color scheme reference the Pan-African flag, and to invert the colors of my original draft so that the mural featured white text and outlines on a black background, not the other way around. I loved how this mural turned out, and the black background (which I don’t usually do) is so striking and cool. The aesthetic is thanks to their early feedback on color and design.
One of our design sessions in the Lowell National Historic Park.
There were a couple options for where this mural could be painted. The overall scheme for which of the eight dances got painted where was a bit of a puzzle – final decisions were made in collaboration with my partners at the City’s Office of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, as there was a mild amount of neighborhood politics involved.
The Step team’s mural ended up in the Highlands neighborhood, right by the Mulligan Park Splash Pad, off of Avenue C. Avenue C is a busy and friendly residential street in a cluster of public housing, and its park is very popular (especially when the splash pad is running on hot days). It’s a perfect spot for a playful mural.
This location was first suggested by Anthony, a teen involved in the Boys & Girls Club afterschool program (with whom I had several brainstorming meetings). He was introduced to me as a prodigious walker who’s explored much of Lowell on foot. Sure enough, he had a ton of good ideas of places that would be well-suited to sidewalk murals. His idea for a mural on Avenue C was later corroborated by some bigwig adults, and a community liaison for the public housing authority was enthusiastic as well.
I was especially grateful and proud when this site was confirmed. There is a lot of public housing in Lowell, and it felt important to secure at least one mural site near public housing in this series.
I painted this mural in mid-July. I brought an assistant, TJ, for my first day; in addition to speeding me up and it being nice to have company, being onsite with a partner helps me get past the “nobody knows why I’m out here, everyone thinks I’m weird” self-consciousness of painting outside in a new place.
Nearly all of the painting process was smooth sailing. The sidewalk was new and in good condition; I used paper stencils for my recurring shapes (stars, feet) and texture rollers for the edges of the red and green curtains; I placed the hands and the feet through a combo of gridding, and just doing the moves myself until they were spaced right and tracing around my own footsteps.
But doing the text was wild. You may notice that this mural’s title, credits, and instructions are in Spanish and Khmer as well as English, thanks to gracious and wonderful translation assistance from Cecilia at the CBA and Sreang at the CMAA.
For a couple of months in the run-up to painting season, I had puzzled over how to have non-Roman letters show up on the mural. Khmer is very widely spoken in Lowell, so it would have been arbitrary to include major non-English languages like Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole but not Khmer. But how? I certainly wouldn’t attempt to paint the letters myself, not being familiar with the alphabet.
After a lot of googling and brainstorming with Travis, I pulled the trigger on a Cricut machine, the 21st-century at-home silhouetting marvel best known for bachelorette-related tumbler customization projects.
My process was to turn my translated text into a flat image file, grab the text as an image layer, and have the Cricut cut the outlines into adhesive vinyl. I then “weeded” out the letters, leaving just the negative space around the words to create a stencil of the text that I could apply with spray paint. On site, I stuck these stencils into position, then liberally surrounded them with a halo of painters’ tape with drop-cloths on top to protect the background paint from spray paint mist.
I eventually – over the course of months – got to the point of executing this process reliably. But on the LEGENDARY mural, I was mere days into my relationship with my Cricut. The first time I tried to use it, I completely misjudged the area available for text between the various symbol/design parts of the dance diagram, and printed my stencils way too big; they were useless. I do not find math intuitive, and getting the sizing right remained a challenge for me throughout the series. It got better over time, but not before a fair number of late-night meltdowns.
In addition, this mural is where I trial-and-errored what kind of vinyl worked best (no huge difference between permanent and removable, but I used removable); if it is better to use brushed paint or spray paint (spray); if it is worth it to use transfer tape (a resounding no); and where I learned that unless your sidewalk is very, very smooth, you will spend a not-insignificant amount of time going back in with your background color and a small paintbrush to clean up the shaggy edge on most of your letters. Vinyl doesn’t adhere that well to sidewalk – shockingly – so spray paint finds its way under the edges of the stencil.
Have I made this technique sound like a total pain in the ass? Correct. The stencils broke my heart a hundred times, but they leveled up my game. They are unbelievably time-consuming, and they helped me make this series pentalingual and reflect all of the major languages spoken in Lowell. I think they look polished and enticing compared to my handwriting, and I really like that effect for these murals – they deserve it! For consistency’s sake, I ended up also using them for a lot of Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, and English text throughout the series.
I had some excellent helpers on this mural. The Boys & Girls Club came onsite for one of the afternoons and helped lay in dozens of stars around the border. (They also introduced me to Chappell Roan.)
This mural got on the ground in 4 days – two fairly breezy (the ones I spent with TJ and the afternoon I spent with the Boys & Girls Club) and two pretty frustrating (the ones I spent feeling defeated by stencils and like I was already falling behind on my tight painting schedule). But even the frustrating days weren’t so bad, because this neighborhood was so nice and so friendly to me. Neighbors offered me water bottles and restroom access, little kids kept me company when they got bored of the playground, and there was usually somebody blasting music. Good deal.
News flash: Working on fresh black paint in July is a terrifically hot affair. Photos of me and the steppers were taken by the wonderful Henry Marte, Lowell’s distinguished photographer-about-town. Thank you to the City of Lowell for arranging for professional documentation of each mural site!
Big gratitude to the Jemima, Tita, Bryanna and the whole LHS Step Team for getting this series off to such an incredible start.
Me and Chummeng bravely demonstrating the step during our “Let’s Dance” art walk/bus tour on November 9th!
NEXT TIME
In my next installment of this closure-seeking exercise, I will recap the Salsa On 1 mural, choreographed by Franswa and Dawn of Salsa in Lowell, and painted in the Centralville neighborhood with the wonderful assistance of Community Connections.
Franswa and Dawn performing the Salsa on 1 at our unveiling and art walk on November 9th.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding to a friend and/or making a donation to one of the groups involved in this project.
Don’t be a stranger!
–Kit