My name is Melissa Gordon. Everybody calls me Mel. I am the artist that created Sitting Bull in Alley 5.5 in downtown Bismarck. Since our direction for the Art Alley was to do something that had to do with Bismarck or North Dakota, I thought it would be cool to do a portrait of somebody. I remember a story about Sitting Bull who used to sit down at the depot and sign autographs. I thought he was the original celebrity in this market, so why not do a big portrait of Sitting Bull? That’s where the inspiration and jumping off point came for me.

When I first got out of college years ago, my first job was a sign painter. So big-scale artwork doesn’t intimidate me. You just have to be able to take a step back and look at it from a distance. It’s difficult to work on it up close, but you just have to keep in mind the scale of the piece.

The greatest challenge in creating this piece is that I wasn’t able to get a projector in the alley, so I had to use the cinder blocks as a grid. I hand drew the entire thing out, cinder block by cinder block, which took me about a month and a half. It took me as long to draw it out as it did to paint it.

This was the first really big, splashy public art piece that was done in Bismarck, and it kind of made the community aware of what public art can do. It’s made this alley more accessible and more user friendly. It’s not as scary as it once was. You used to walk down this alley, and it was garbage bins and dirt and trash and everything. Now it’s vibrant and bright. People come down here and take pictures. It’s more of a public space as opposed to just an alleyway.

My advice to young artists is to not give up on being an artist. I know a lot of people that think it’s just a hobby. It’s not a hobby. It’s what drives you. Artists are creative beings, and in order to function well, we have to be making and creating things. Do your thing, keep pushing, don’t give up, and it’ll come eventually.