Video: Midway Murals, on YouTube by City of St. Paul Communications Services. Photo: Braided, by Greta McLain at 512 Snelling Avenue via Midway Murals.

When the Midway Murals project launched a year ago in St. Paul, with the aim of transforming one of Minnesota’s busiest streets with four eye-catching murals, I had no doubt that our team of muralists would succeed wildly in that respect. Lori Greene, Yuya Negishi, BLASTER and Greta McLain are masters of their craft, their imagination brilliant and remarkable, their commitment to community building exceptional.

But the project was never simply about the art – and for good reason. The Twin Cities competes nationally as a leader in arts programming, bike friendliness, good food and other typical indicators of urban livability. Our educational system is regarded as top-notch and our unemployment remains low. It’s simply the perfect place to live, goes one narrative.

Except that it’s not. Our racial disparities and inequities are some of the worst in the nation. Despite our history as a welcoming place for immigrants, many newcomers to our area have not easily adapted. And so with this project I set out to chip away at some of the cultural, racial and ethnic divides staring us in the face every single day. With Arts Challenge funding, I paired each of the four muralists with a commercial building, its businesses and business owners, and together with input from neighbors, hope that stories would emerge. Murals would be crafted. Buildings and the neighborhood would be transformed. And if all went well, the business owners would feel increased pride and visibility, while their businesses would get the attention they deserved. Local residents would appreciate the murals’ beauty and would be drawn into new businesses they otherwise barely noticed. Such were the larger aims of the project, and while mistakes and misunderstandings certainly happened, in most cases we hit the mark.

Putting into action such a plan never works exactly as intended, of course, and Midway Murals was no exception. Multiple businesses changed hands after the project’s inception. Sadly, one of the building owners suddenly died shortly after agreeing to be a part of the project. And one business owner had to leave her space in the thick of the community engagement process. Strong relationships between artists and business owners developed at some sites, other relationships less so. Such is the nature of trying to build bridges where none existed previously, of learning processes and bold ideas and initiatives.

Yuya Negishi, Birth of a New Day, 689 Snelling Avenue. Via Midway Murals.

The greatest challenge was in the vastly different ways in which we had to engage with business owners, given that some were more hands-on than others. That engagement was naturally informed by the different levels of trust and friendship that I as the project leader had cultivated prior to and during our series of artist-led conversations, which would form the foundation of the mural design ideas. Trust, as always, is key to building bridges, and yet it never comes easily — certainly not in the course of six to nine months. But build we did, and it was a joy to watch.

Greta and Lori were paired with businesses at which the owners were keen on incorporating aspects of their East African heritage, and a great deal of individual feedback from these folks ensured final products that vividly and beautifully depicted elements of their cultures. BLASTER engaged more with customers at Snelling Cafe, where his mural is located, as the business owner, a friend of mine, took a more hands-off approach. The final product, a stunning intergalactic-inspired spray paint mural, symbolized his hope for intercultural peace and unity.

Finally, Yuya faced the complex challenge of collaborating with three different business owners at his location, each of whom provided varying amounts of input over the course of the project. His mural, which combined a colorful phoenix with a sunrise and intricately designed mandalas, drew on his Japanese aesthetic and wonderfully represented the theme of “starting anew” that lay at the heart of Midway Murals. Unfortunately his sunrise unintentionally evoked images of the Japanese Imperial military’s Rising Sun Flag, which brought about concerns among some people in the community who felt that the mural might be misconstrued as anti-Korean, especially since it was painted on the side of a Korean grocery store. Due to these concerns, we are in the process of changing the background to eliminate any signs of this potential misunderstanding and prevent any unnecessary pain and anguish.

Along the way, each muralist took part in three larger community listening sessions, because efforts to increase the pride and visibility of these immigrant communities had to necessarily involve those from non-immigrant communities as well. These discussions yielded countless contributions regarding the kind of place we in the Midway neighborhood aspire to be. Like St. Paul, the rest of Minnesota, and this complicated country of ours, our neighborhood remains a work in progress. But it now stands as one that is more united, more proud, and more beautiful than it was 12 months ago, in no small part thanks to the tireless efforts of our artists and the business owners who took a chance on this project. For all of that and more I am eternally grateful.