EVANSVILLE - Photography played instrumental parts in historic murals and fresh wall art up and going up from New Harmony to Evansville.
Sara's Harmony Way in New Harmony recently put up four photo reproductions on canvas taken from panels of the Indiana cycle Thomas Hart Benton created for Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress World Exposition.
And teams of artists have used photo projections to draw in the outlines for new murals going up on Main Street and Franklin Street.
Benton’s reflections
Serendipity struck resoundingly when Sara and David Brown, owners of Sara’s Harmony Way, set out to find posters of sections from Benton’s 1933 Century of Progress Indiana mural.
They’d never seen the original mural, and didn’t even know what had become of it. They picked out a couple of favorite panels from the black-and-white reproductions in an old pamphlet David had purchased, however, and asked their friend Rita Davis, an area artist, to help them hunt for posters.
Davis tracked the mural to Indiana University, where the original 22 panels had been restored and rehung. Sixteen of them line the walls of IU Auditorium, four hang in the IU Cinema and two reside in Woodburn Hall.
When she talked with IU’s art curator, she got a shock. It turned out that one of the panels the Browns wanted depicted New Harmony and a couple of its principal historic figures.
The lanky figure of a young Abraham Lincoln looms largest in the composition, but it also frames a bearded New Harmony founder George Rapp and early Harmonists in the right rear. The biblical angel Gabriel flutters above and New Harmony’s granary and a dormitory stand in the background as Rapp points to the angel’s footprint in a limestone slab he reported discovering in 1819.
Below, in the lower right, the bespectacled figure of Robert Owen, the Welsh industrialist and philanthropist who helped lead New Harmony’s second utopian community, kneels. A table beside him displays books, shells, a compass and a sand hourglass, representing the educational, scientific and exploratory pursuits of his community.
When the curator noted the New Harmony elements in the panel, Davis offered a two-word response: “Excuse me?”
“It was pure serendipity,” said Sara Brown. Under an extraordinary agreement, Davis was able to get permission for the Browns to use digital images of IU’s panels to have poster-sized reproductions of the panels made.
An Evansville company reproduced the images on stretched canvas. The panels went up in the coffee shop and wine and beer bar in time for the Capstone Week schedule in New Harmony’s Bicentennial celebration.
The Browns say they’re considering getting more panels to put up after they remodel the coffee shop area.
Gateway patterns
In the meantime, artists have used nighttime photographic projections to sketch in the lines, letters and contours of two new murals going up in Evansville.
Artur Silva, the Brazilian-born, Indianapolis artist selected to design the Jacobsville North Main Street Gateway Mural, projected the lines, panels and colors for the mural community members began painting this week at 10 West Indiana St., just off North Main Street.
Silva drew the colorful floral pattern from textiles brought in by members of the community.
Franklin Street scenes
On Franklin Street, a group of five artists led by Melissa Erwin set up a projector after dark and sketched in the outline of her design for a mural to cover the east wall of the Lamasco Bar, at 1331 W. Franklin St.
The painting, which they’ll brush in over the next couple weeks, features West Franklin landmarks and a guitar-strumming image of Amy Word, the bar’s owner and president of the Franklin Street Events Association.
Word didn’t plan for her mural to go up at the same time as the North Main project, she said. They are “happening coincidentally at the same time.”
Moving pictures
Projections of a more moving kind are scheduled to go up Sunday in the Franklin Street Events Association’s monthly Moving Pictures and Picnic in the Park series.
“The Princess Bride,” the 1987 feature starring Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Peter Falk, Billy Crystal and others will play on an inflatable screen at dusk on the lawn of the West Branch Library.
Picnickers will begin arriving at 6 p.m., setting up blankets, lawn chairs and coolers for a pre-screening supper. The Franklin Street Events Association will sell hamburgers, hot dogs and treats for children, and the Gerst House will provide free popcorn.
Back Porch Cinema provides the inflatable screen and projection for the season’s outdoor movies, which will conclude Sept. 21 with “Ghostbusters.”