By: Deborah Johnson Wood
A rain garden mural on the concrete piers supporting the US-131 expressway is bringing artistic interpretation to a dreary section of Turner NW at Fourth Street. The West Grand Neighborhood Organization commissioned the mural a year ago to accent two rain gardens that will be planted this fall.
Local artists Rebecca Kenny and Mary Wisnewski created a pictorial of the rain gardens filtering pollutants from the expressway's rainwater runoff and sending the purified water into the Grand River.
"The continuing image from one post to another is the flow of the water," Kenny said. "It will show all the different plants, and the root system and how it works."
The mural—a colorful display of flowers, butterflies, birds, water, and more—is ten feet tall and faces north toward the West Grand Neighborhood.
"If you laid all [the piers] in a row and flattened them out, they'd all make one picture," Wisnewski said.
The artists have spent some 200 hours creating the design, pressure washing the piers, priming them, and transferring the mural from paper. They expect to invest over 400 hours by the time the mural is completed at the end of June.
The women work together creating exhibits for the Grand Rapids Public Museum .
"We've done a lot of big projects together, and we wanted to do an outside mural," Wisnewski said. "The interesting thing is working on the large scale. You have to step back a lot, to 200 or 300 feet, to see the whole picture."
Source: Rebecca Kenny; Mary Wisnewski; Andrea Bardelmeier, West Grand Neighborhood Organization
Photograph by Brian Kelly
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Deborah Johnson Wood is Development News Editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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