Paducah artists will soon have the opportunity to color the downtown floodwall using a quilt-like cloth. The city has announced plans for a series of murals to be commissioned on the 19 blank panels of the floodwall near the Convention Center.
The murals will be unveiled in parallel with the first fall Quilt Week next year. Dr. Jay Downs Siska is Project Administrator.
He says this project is unique because artists, rather than painting ‘on’ the walls, will be using a fiber medium known as pellon or “parachute” cloth, the same material used by quilters.
“In the city of Philadelphia, they have 3,800 murals and they are all done in parachute cloth. They’ve been doing them that way since the 80s. It allows them to do ‘gigunda’ murals – ten stories tall, a whole building wide. And the way they’re done is a piece at a time, in the artist’s studio,” Siska says.
Char Downs, Lead Artist on the project, says a mural can take an artist anywhere from 6 months to a year to complete so only 2-3 murals may be ready to unveil or in process by next September.
“But an artist that will get started maybe in the spring, summer or fall of next year they will work on that and then as they finished them, they will go up. But we’re hoping for two to three," she says.
Downs says a nominating committee will decide from a pool of applicants to receive a $20,000 commission. All commissions come from private funding and no taxpayer dollars will be used.
