The streets of Fort Collins are once again being adorned with colorful and expressive murals.
This year marks the 10th annual Fort Collins Mural Project and the first year the project rallied around a theme, which was selected as mental health.
“The Fort Collins mural project is a way to bring in Colorado artists that are emerging or underrepresented, not only in community but in artwork styles or forms,” said Jess Bean, executive director of the FCMP. “Basically we’re trying to get more artwork styles onto our walls here in Fort Collins.”
FCPM focuses on showcasing underrepresented art styles, particularly those created by artists of color and LGBTQIA+ artists.
“It’s kind of amazing,” Bean said. “One of our artists came back, and she had painted with us in 2019, during our first-ever festival. Now she is the executive director of Denver Walls. She had to paint early so she could paint a mural out in France. Just in the matter of six years, we’ve watched someone go from having their first mural to becoming an absolute prolific muralist.”
FCPM partnered with the Alliance for Suicide Prevention of Larimer County to decide the thematic year. They expected four out of 13 artists to follow the theme, but a total of 10 artists chose to create murals aligned with mental health.
“We’ve already seen the impact; it’s been amazing,” Bean said. “We’ve had people sharing stories and finding community by sharing those stories. It’s been really beautiful.”
One FCPM artist, Paula Camacho, was inspired to create her mural incorporating elements of Daoism, yin and yang, and shamanic experiences.
“I’m really inspired by nature and just, like, the mysticism that I sense out in nature,” Camacho said. “That’s why a lot of my work is a lot of landscapes, a lot of outdoors, a lot of natural elements with a slightly surreal touch to all of them. I see these correlations in different worldviews that have made an impression on me, so I try to incorporate that into my work, as it’s very fascinating to me.”
Camacho’s assigned wall belonged to a couple who had experienced the death of a friend due to suicide. Inspired by his story, she decided to shape her mural around it.
“One of his passions was hunting down rattlesnakes, so they wanted me to put a rattlesnake in the composition,” Camacho said. “I was already going to put a snake in the composition anyway because my mural was about change, and if you go up to the mural and look at the snake closely, you’ll see it’s shedding. A lot of my work is an expression of change. It’s got changes and shifts and transformation.”
For Camacho, she said she hopes her art continues to unite neighborhoods and create visual intrigue.
“I feel like, particularly this year, since the theme was mental health, I felt like a lot of people could rally behind that cause of making art to speak on that,” Camacho said. “Adding art to a neighborhood really just livens it up and makes it more of an interesting place. It really affects the community on a psychological level and also on a spiritual level.”
Another local artist, Carl Debose, who goes by Bakemono0504, creates calligraphy murals.
“With this year being the year of mental health, I think me wanting to really push a mural that showed a lot of mental health things, it really drew us together and I believe they saw what I wanted to do,” Debose said.
For Debose, who has experienced struggles with mental health, calligraphy is an outlet and a voice to express his experiences.
“I feel like me speaking doesn’t really give me the voice that I need, doesn’t quite express what I really want to say, so I think words help 10 times more,” Debose said. “Using words and expressing it through art does a lot for me.”
All artists emphasized the importance of public art to create community and beautify common spaces.
“The same way a business advertising can draw people in, I think (street art) can do that,” Debose said. “Humans are very observant people, especially out in public, and I think it creates a conversation around whatever is being shown. You can see with places that are dull, and there’s not much color or art; the environment isn’t really what a human would prefer, and you can tell how it affects people. It’s different in places that are colorful and more vibrant with art, and I think it just reels people in, and tells a story.”
Reach Allie Seibel at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @allie_seibel_.
