By the end of this year, the 10th Street floodwall in Portland will be covered in paint.
The Louisville Commission on Public Art chose local artist Laurie Blayney to complete the 6,000 square foot mural that will be as long as the Great Pyramid of Giza is tall.
Blayney’s art installation will cover a section of the floodwall’s north and south side along the expanded section of Waterfront Park.
LPM’s Giselle Rhoden spoke with Blayney and her daughter Hannah Jones about the massive project and how Kentuckiana residents can get help with the design.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What goes into doing something of this scale?
Hannah Jones: You can't just use a ladder to make this happen. You need big, large construction looking lifts.
Laurie Blayney: With the timeline that has been forced to change a couple of times because of floods, primarily. But for the most part, you're looking at the crew right here. I also have a sister who's going to volunteer to come down there when Hannah can't, And then I've had a lot of people volunteer. Mostly I've had feedback that people want to come down and picnic and watch, which I welcome. I'm not a shy painter. I think that would be wonderful for people to come down just so they can't get too close. I might drop paint.
What should we expect to see on this floodwall mural?
Blayney: The design that I created was to—and this was with help from input—I do a lot of landscapes of Kentucky. This part becomes an interactive part of the wall because on the bump out of the pump house, there's going to be a kind of a seek-and-find for kids. The way that the animals, birds, fishes are painted. It's not that they're hidden, but they're not standing out. They're part of the natural landscape the way that we actually do experience them.
There's going to be QR codes around the wall that link to sites about lost communities in Louisville. The few that I have centered on the indigenous population that was here before us that we don't have a lot of recorded history on, also the Walnut Street financial district. I wanted to highlight that in a way that more people can see. And in addition to that, we're going to have these audio boxes that have recorded oral histories on them. A few of them will be crank boxes, because kids love to do it that way. We're going to have a couple that are solar powered and just button pushed.
Jones: That’s sort of one of the ways we're infusing history throughout the mural, so that it's not just the painting. It's also all of these stories from Louisville's past. Flood stories is the other area that we're looking at, because there will be a graphic about sort of great floods in the history of Louisville, and we want to also highlight some of the flood stories.
Blayney: We're going to be, hopefully, doing some interviews with people who were around at that time. Recall the area. Shippingport is another one. It's no longer populated, but at one time, there was a community there. So things like that that we are highlighting.
How can the community get involved in the design process?
Blayney: There's a lot of history in the metalworkings in Louisville, so we wanted to paint them in a trompe-l'œil style, to make them look like they were made out of ornamental metal. In that, we are asking for input from the community on what kind of iconography they would like to see. So there might be a nod to the Belle of Louisville there with the smokestacks, there might be something a lot of people have said, horse racing, of course, because it is at the center, but there might be a horseshoe, something like that.
So if you just Google “Louisville flood wall pilot mural project,” you'll get it.
Jones: There's a form you can just respond with any animals that you might want to see, with any of the designs you might want to see included into the Ironworks, and also a place for you to indicate that you either have an oral history or have a connection to somebody that might and to see to just go ahead and make that connection with us, and we'll get right back to you….There are stipends, small stipends for people's participation. So we don't just want to siphon people's histories and not compensate them for at least their time and energy in retelling their story.
We have an interesting one where we have a community member who did their own oral history project with their grandparent before their grandparent passed away. Their grandparent had lived as an adolescent during the Great Flood of ‘37. So, they interviewed the grandparent and got the flood stories from them. And so we're going to include some of that oral history that they did, but then also ask them questions and interview them just about their experience there and kind of how that affected their family lineage.
Blayney: If we get 12 [oral histories], then we can actually change those out [of the audio boxes] over time, so they don't have to stay the same. It's a pretty interesting process and easily streamlined. We're going to be working with the Portland Museum using their recording studio, and they also have tons of oral histories already recorded. One in particular that I saw was that the man was in his 70s, and he was talking about growing up in Portland around the turn of the last century. So it's a very interesting interview.
It is about community. It's not about raising up one person like a statue does in the public square. It's much more about pointing out that the river belongs to us all, and the damage it does, does to it does it to us all, and the life that it brings, it brings to us all. So designing it to be about community was really the vibe from the very beginning.
