Kenmore Collaborative Mural
On September 1-2, 2017, the City of Akron hosted a Better Block celebration in the city’s historic Kenmore neighborhood. Art x Love’s @PLAY Akron team had already explored and mapped every street in the neighborhood, interviewing more than 300 residents to gain a better understanding of neighborhood challenges and opportunities. The Kenmore Better Block represented a great chance to reconnect with the community and test our learning. We particularly wanted to know more about what kind of public art the community wanted to see.
Tina Boyes, of the Kenmore Neighborhood Association (KNA), contacted us to see if we would be interested in contributing a collaborative mural to the occasion. We agreed, and developed a range of KENMORE letterform mural concepts which a series of neighborhood stakeholders reviewed, selecting the one final concept we produced for the event. That concept featured a range of geometric illusions combined with historic clocktower gears. Mac drew the mural on three 8ft. x 4 ft. modular mural panels, which were then transported to Kenmore Boulevard and erected using repurposed A-frames from our Amplify Akron event.
The Kenmore collaborative mural was a huge success. More than 300 residents made their mark on the mural, with many painting for 10 minutes or more. Every inch of the 96 sq.ft. mural surface was filled with creative community expressions of love and neighborhood pride. We left the mural as a step-and-repeat backdrop for day 2 of the Better Block, and came back to pick it up after the second night.
Over the next few weeks, the @PLAY Akron team completed the mural using a combination of gold and red paint, which neighborhood residents specifically requested in honor of their local sports team’s colors. The Kenmore collaborative mural was unveiled at the Kenmore Imagineer community celebration in February 2018. Over the next several months we worked with local leaders to install the mural in a key neighborhood corridor. The east-facing wall of Smith’s House of Carpet at 1215 Kenmore Blvd. was the Kenmore collaborative mural’s first home, but after the business closed the mural was loved to the east-facing wall of Just A Dad From Akron (JADFA) at 937 Kenmore Blvd.
30,000 vehicles pass the Kenmore collaborative mural every day, including thousands of pedestrians visiting the nearby school, library, and business corridor. Over the course of its life, the Kenmore collaborative mural has generated an estimated local media value of more than $300,000 for the city and neighborhood. The mural stands as a unique and powerful testament to the strength and resilience of creative and collaborative community.
