Art and Commerce
A public art installation along New Hampshire
Ave. between Piney Branch and Southampton Rds A couple of weeks ago as I left my apartment and headed off to work I encountered some of the physical plant people from my apartment complex using a high pressure spray washer to clean a concrete retaining wall near my place. It needed it. It was dirty and a bit of an eyesore. Still an odd occurrence considering normally it was the county that paid their indifferent attention to that particular spot. The next day nearly the entire crowd of employees from the complex were out at the same spot painting it into two shiny and very bright sections of color. [In the first picture above it is is in the blue section right where it bends around the curve where two years ago my bike slipped out on some wet leaves and crashed. I tore up my right shoulder rotator cuff - took a year for that to heal.]  A day later as I set out a small truck was parked across the street and some people were the laying out mystery objects on the grass. Sorting and organizing large flat brightly colored panels, under the direction of someone with an arts council air to them. Coming back up New Hampshire Ave. from the bike path nine hours later, and suspecting the weeks events now were not unrelated. I was able to see the installation for what it was. Free cut painted sheets of aluminum, dozens of them all different, like decorative street signs, nailed tightly to the formerly bland concrete retaining wall. Forming into an enormous integrated mural. It was very impressive. I kept an eye on the newspaper and tv news for a couple days to seeking any hint of what this was about, but nothing came (nor has anything, in the english language press at least). I began to wonder where it was that murals came from.  One day, about a week later, some men came by early one morning and set a large tent on the grass right outside my front door. They set up a PA system, rows of chairs, and soon the yard and tent were filled with a hundred or more impeccably dressed people listening to multiple speeches and clapping politely. This went on for more than an hour. After the speeches; tours were led down to the installation on a partially roped off New Hampshire ave. Some who appeared to be politicians circled the remaining crowd like sharks.  I felt vindicated that a real dedication had been planned for this embankment of public art. Which I now know was the two county turning point mural project. The art works name appears to simply be the Turning Points Mural, as nearly as I can tell. I see all this required $100,000 in fundraising to make it happen. A number of groups seem to have put this together: a program called CSAFE (Collaborative Supervision and Focused Engagement) togther with the Montgomery and Prince Georges Co. police departments. The mural was physically created by a group called Arts on the Block with the Maryland Multicultural Youth Centers and the P.G. Co. Arts Council:
Arts on the Block - Two County Turning Point Mural Project. With further assistance from Northwest Park Apts. and something called the Weed and Seed community program. In one of the pictures here the short women in the yellow shirt in the mid ground seems to have been a key person on the art end of things, the women in the black jacket and silver skirt in the foreground on the administrative end. You can see the window to my apartment in the building just behind them. It wasn't until I had worked my way around to the front of the tent that I saw they had free food. The world turns but once, I thought, and took up a free ice cold Mountain Dew.
Grand Opening of the Bestway Supermercado in the Riggs Road plaza.
Less heralded was the reopening of a grocery store about a mile in the other direction this last week at the Riggs rd. Plaza. It used to be a Safeway, it was where I shopped for many years. Until the day they emptied the place put a lock on the door and walked away. Eighteen months gone now. Into Safeway's abandoned space, the Bestway SuperMercado has come. It is as if a Mexico City grocery store had dropped neatly out of the air into Adelphi. Many products, are spanish, everything is labeled in spanish, and everyone there speaks spanish. Still I was able to find everything I need in all the few and spare catagories of groceries I trade in. My ham sandwiches are now made with bread that comes from a little white teddy bear named Bimbo.
 It's hard to say which of these two events is more critical. I still follow claims for the transformative aspect of art. The signs and signals of aesthetic effect. Calls for renewal in it's presence. Marching lightly along the watch path of cause and effect. [Here note I am just simply reciting the title of an old Mission of Burma Ep. Signals Calls and Marches for my own amusment.]. However as lemony-limey orange and grape-like as the mural is, it is an atmospheric nourishment. It will be an anchor of community morale, a point of enduring pride. The Bestway will have two-for-one sales on Honeydew melons available on my way home from work. It is also good to have local neighborhood grocery store again
10:32:16 PM  ;;
|
