MURAL
There’s something safe about resisting self-identification. It was easy for me to let other people define me, but if I defined myself, I had to admit that something mattered to me. And admitting that something as personal as art mattered to me was frightening. The stories I began to tell as I figured out what mattered to me tested the boundaries of my vulnerability, but that was okay, because I only shared them with close friends or near strangers in my art classes. No one was going to be too critical of my art. I liked it that way, the privacy felt safe.
But the time to share it with the world came sooner than I had expected. By the end of my junior year, I felt like the privacy was stunting my growth, so I took the next step in pushing myself. June of 2022, I applied to Paint Memphis, an annual mural festival that takes place in October over a three-day weekend. When wall placements were announced, I had an eight and a half by thirteen- foot wall to tell my story. A whole mural felt intimidating. I was still figuring out what mattered to me. Instead of telling my stories on small pieces of paper that I showed to my friends and art classmates, this would be permanent, and I wouldn’t have control over who saw it.
The story I decided to portray on my wall was about a cottage in Carmel that my family frequented during my childhood. Everything about the house conjured happy memories in my mind of the times my extended family would gather there. My parents made the tough decision to sell the house at the beginning of 2020, and since then, I longed for a place that felt the same where laughter from family members filled every room and the smell of my grandma’s cooking wafted from the kitchen. I spent the months leading up to Paint Memphis preparing, making sure that my sketches were right and that I had contingency plans in case something went wrong.
This was the first time I was publicly sharing a story that mattered to me in the medium that mattered to me. I thought that if I could complete the mural, I would be able to give myself permission to identify as an artist. Painting the mural was the ultimate leap of faith. I’d never painted anything on that scale, and I hadn’t showed my art to strangers before. Emails from the organizers were always addressed “Dear Artists,” or “Dear Muralists.” Every time I opened one of them, my skin crawled as if my body had learned to reject the title too. I felt like an imposter waiting to be discovered. My mural had to be perfect, I had to prove that I deserved to be there, that I deserved to be addressed in those emails.
When the weekend finally arrived, I was prepared. I had five Wooster brushes tucked into my school bag as I boarded my flight to Memphis. A few hours later, I picked up my buckets of paint and headed to my wall, where I would spend sixteen hours a day from October 8 - 10. I learned a lot that weekend: stop working when you get too tired because you’ll only make more mistakes, apply sunscreen often, ask for help, and most importantly that I can do what I set my mind to.
On the last day, I sat on top of my mural to take pictures and I teared up. The mural I was looking down at had done my story justice. I was proud that strangers walking through the intersection nearby or waiting for the bus on the corner of the street might see it. My name is painted across the top of the wall. As long as it is there, that image and story will be associated with me. My labor of love had paid off, and my vulnerability was appreciated. I could finally call myself an artist.