Blaze Your Own Trail is the first project of Stamford Murals. I painted a mural at Stamford Hospital’s Bennett Cancer Center during the covid shutdown. So many people stopped to talk to me while I worked, sharing how the art inspired them, lifting them out of the moment and recalling happy moments connected to art and nature. It became clear to me that public art could provide uplift and also push back against some of the structural injustice baked into our society by making art part of the public realm. I reached out to 2 former students to see if they wanted to create a mural with me. They were attending school remotely, and we agreed to meet over zoom to learn about public art and mural making, and to design our own mural. Blaze Your Own Trail was a callback to the school where we met, Trailblazers Academy, now closed due to lack of funding. Our project was funded by an Artists Respond grant I received from the state of Connecticut, as well as crowd sourced funding and a matching grant from Sustainable CT. A local developer offered to house our mural on their East Main Street Building. We successfully installed our mural with help from Anabel Siegal and Studio162 Design, and threw a block party for the neighborhood to celebrate. This block party became an annual event, culminating in Stamford’s first ever mural festival, a free event for the public in partnership with the Mill River Collaborative. Although the building housing the mural has been torn down, our mural stood as a bright spot appreciated by neighborhood residents and passers-by, as well as kicking off the creation of Stamford Murals, a public art and youth mentoring non-profit.
