History From Below @ Sidewall

For a couple weeks in November, I hammered out a four by eight foot version of my "Teach History From Below" print (from Justseeds' Liberating Learning Portfolio) for the Sidewall project here in Pittsburgh. Sidewall is basically a giant frame on the side of a residence in the Bloomfield neighborhood, right on a high-traffic street. Artists paint "murals" on stock 4x8' sheets of plywood, and the paintings switch anew every month. It's a great use of private housing space for public art, and you can find out more about the project here.

I used an opaque projector, an elegant little piece of old engineering, to throw the original image as big as I could on the plywood. Exterior grade housepaint from a hardware store was mixed to approximate the original colors of ink from the Risograph prints. Almost the entire image was painted with a 1" angled paintbrush and an old fan brush. Detail was kept in the abstract - I don't claim to be much of a painter!

Here's a little write-up about this piece on the Sidewall site (where you can also see past murals). It'll be up until the first week of January. Meanwhile, you can see more in-process images of the mural on the Justseeds blog here, and you can buy a copy of this image as a smaller, Risograph print here. It's not nearly as large as this thing, so you probably won't have trouble finding a spot for it in your house.