Let's win

My haters are livid to discover that I am happy and fulfilled personally and creatively

I originally intended for this post to cover all of the significant projects I’ve worked on since mid-October, but two things happened: First, I couldn’t get through it, and second, I remembered that no one likes long emails. So who cares about comprehensiveness? Let’s roll the highlights and get you guys on to the part where I talk about eggs.

First things first

You may recall me mentioning, one or two gabillion times, my campaign for re-election to Medford City Council. I have great news: Campaign season is over! Also of note, I won.

In all seriousness, the outcome of the election was truly wonderful because 10 out of the 11 candidates I ran with* won seats. This means we will have a progressive majority on the School Committee next term and a six to one majority on the City Council. While power for power’s sake is not meaningful (debate me, cowards), this is a rare example of progressive candidates gaining a real opportunity not to just get their stances on the record, but to actually advance policy. I’m excited for what we’ll do in Medford over the next two years, and I’m excited that we could be an example for other communities on just how much communities can get done when we elect teams of progress-minded candidates on the local level.

*What does “running with” mean? The other members of this group and I are all endorsed by the local grassroots political group, Our Revolution Medford; we have committed to pursuing the goals and policies of the Medford People’s Platform while in office (a condition for endorsement); and we shared many campaign activities and resources, which made running a winning campaign more accessible and affordable for all of us.

I bring this up not just because it’s an update central to my life, but also because during this campaign I had the opportunity to overlap my art work and my political work much more literally than usual.

In October, I donated many many hours of drawing time to this mail piece for the collective campaign of myself and my teammates. The concept for mailer was to illustrate the Medford People’s Platform – the collaboratively-created document that articulates the goals and vision for the community we work to build and evolve together. It was so meaningful to get a chance to communicate these values through illustration – a welcome contrast to talking about these concepts in buttoned-up City Hall vocabulary. I tried to let my love come through in this; I know a lot of love for the community went into the source document, and the policies that come out of it.

We mailed an 8"x10" version of this artwork to 12K Medford households to urge folks to get out the vote, and then we decided to offer them as 16”x20” commemorative posters to raise money for the collective campaign and settle up our remaining campaign expenses (literature, software, staff and more). We are going to retire the purchase link soon; if you’re interested, you can get one here.

Enough of that – time for mural glory

Mid-October brought Troy Art Block. I was invited to be one of 28 muralists live-painting over a single weekend in Mural Alley in downtown Troy. It was simply the most fun thing ever. Here’s how my assigned mural location looked when I arrived from Boston on Friday afternoon:

(That’s my mural neighbor, the fantastic Marisa, on the right.) Here’s how it looked when I packed up the car and drove away on Sunday:

I had to go into the weekend ready to improv and make it work, because I had a very busy week leading up to it – I was splitting my time between doing repairs on my Kerouac Park Container mural (originally painted 2019-2020; got tagged) and helping finish up the Pemberton Mural Project. When drafting my mural design, I challenged myself to design something I was sure I could finish in two days – prioritizing large shapes, blocks of color, adding interest through textured rollers. I compared my designed palette to the colors I already had in storage and prepped my paint shopping list, loaded up the car with every tool and color I thought I might need, and hit the Pike.

I have a lot of praise for this event, but for brevity, I’ll focus on that the organizers Belinda and Judie were extremely supportive and accommodating – they really “got” the needs of muralists in a way I don’t see a lot. I loved meeting the other muralists, all of whom were extremely cool, friendly, talented, and people I would like to be friends with. And, I got to use a scissor lift for the first time, and I loved it!

Photo is by Steve Alvarez.

Getting lift experience was a specific goal of mine for this/next year. Due to some mural applications this summer, it began to dawn on me that having no lift experience might soon start to limit me in what murals I’d be eligible for – understandably, clients for big walls want folks who know what they’re doing up there. So I’m really grateful to have gotten some time on a scissor before the close of this mural season, especially because it was unexpected. Boom lifts, on the other hand, operate pretty differently – but I’ll get there eventually and this is a good step forward.

Now here’s the really exciting part: Troy Art Block was nominated for a USA TODAY Award for Best New Festival. What??

This shot is by Steve Alvarez features murals by Rae Frasier and Pyramid Guy.

You can help Troy Art Block win by voting daily at this link – voting is open until December 25. Please vote! A win would surely spell more funding and support for public art in Troy, and even more murals (and opportunities for muralists) in Mural Alley.

To balance out the aggressively positive tone in the rest of this dispatch, I’ll finish this project description with some real talk. What was hard about this mural was getting the straight and curved lines to work on that uneven garage door surface. I have worked on surfaces like this before (including the Kerouac Park Container, actually), so I went in knowing it’s impossible to freehand lines over stepped surfaces and have them look right. In the past I’ve used painter’s tape to guide my lines over uneven surfaces. In this case I used string – sometimes as a straightedge, and sometimes like a big compass. It really is a pain in the ass, but it gets the job done.

And, though I covered a lot of ground in essentially two days, I painted slower than I wanted to. The photo above may have been from around the time on Saturday I realized I wasn’t going to finish before it got dark – do I look stressed? Luckily, I was able to return with some other muralists on Sunday even though the festival was technically over, and add the details and finesse that left me feeling happy with the finished product. I didn’t make it back to Medford that day in time for canvassing, but that turned out okay.

I may never reprint this zine, but I am back in my egg era

Something long-awaited happened this week: I finally sold the last copy of my zine “A Few Weird Recipes, Volume 2,” which had been languishing on my Etsy for many months. I’m looking forward to refreshing and repopulating my Etsy store with products I actually like (eventually?), so getting old listings cleared out is a happy occasion.

It made me reminisce about the launch party I had for this zine back in 2019, when I was still doing events/showing work at SpaceUs (then at its Lechmere location). I served food: From the new zine, I made squishy pumpkin bread, and from Volume 1, my famous (prove me wrong) garlic shortbread cookies. I was also working on my scallion-horseradish biscotti recipe at the time, which I never finalized, but are delicious and I will return to one day. I displayed the original hand-carved stamps that I made for illustrating the zine, and many of them left with new owners. What a time.

In honor of this trip down memory lane, I thought I would share with you a digital copy of the egg sandwich recipe from Volume 2. Every year I go through a phase where I have to eat an egg sandwich – this egg sandwich – every single day, for homeostasis. Serendipitously, I find myself back in this phase lately. Join me!

If you have any complaints, please direct them to my past self because I am not that person anymore. (Font-related only – the egg method stands.)

Thanks for reading!

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Until next time,

Kit