1151 - U of M Rochester Campus Mural by Greta McLain

Hi, my name is Greta McLean and I am the lead artist and owner of Good Space Murals. We are located out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We do murals, kind of wherever community art and mural making can be used as a tool to organize and lift our stories onto the walls. I am today honored to be sharing about the mural that we made on the University of Minnesota Rochester Campus in 2022. Share a little bit about the experience and the process and then speak to what the mural was intended to do and some of the visuals that you will find when you come into the hallway, into the campus, onto the campus, and see this kind of bright, beautiful, handmade mural that seeks to bring that humanness, that texture, that color that connects the space to the humans, to the students, to the health care that this campus really revolves around.

In 2022, we came on campus and did a number of listening sessions. We got to meet the president and staff of the college as well as a lot of students and really felt that this campus was so unique, so special in its singular focus, the fact that there is a campus dedicated to healthcare and in all of its forms, and that it is not only dedicated to that, but it also is in partnership with Mayo Clinic, this internationally famous, world renowned hospital that we have in Minnesota. So that partnership was just so beautiful and incredible to see and experience firsthand. And it was such like an incredible challenge and honor to think through how we could show this in a mural and add something that would bring kind of this human texture to the campus.

So after a series of listening sessions, we put together a design and I'm going to read a little bit about what the design was meant to showcase. The main ideas of this design are flow, synchronicity and alignment. So from our conversations on campus with students, staff and facility, our faculty, we heard and saw like this incredible alignment between support systems, student focus and staff innovation and dedication. So with this mural, we really sought to align with a strong focus that already exists on campus. Taking that piece, we wanted to add a splash of color, of flow and beauty that would affirm and support the feel of the student body. With this mural, we hope to introduce a hand painted, handmade element to the campus that communicates a message of welcome. In this mural you will see kind of basic medical images, DNA strands, molecular models, a periodic table that visually showcase the singular medical focus of UMR.

Thank you so much for listening to our segment of Talking Trails. Please check us out at GoodSpace Murals and www.goodspacemurals.com and it is our total honor and privilege to be able to make public art in the world and be part of this series. Thank you. Thank you. Amori. Color, Love and color to you.