At the start of the summer, the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board announced a new campaign to mitigate vandalism in Minneapolis parks. The aim was to select nine sites in parks across the city that are frequently tagged and assign a different artist to each one with a prompt that aligned with each of the nine goals outlined in the Parks for All plan. The Windom Park warming house was among the sites picked for the project, with renowned mural artist Rock “Cyfi” Martinez assigned to redecorate all four sides of the warming house there. He was given the prompt “cultivating a thriving workforce.”
Martinez comes from Arizona, where the seasons aren’t as distinct as they are here. Upon moving to Minnesota, he said he was struck by the beauty of the four seasons and how life continues to carry on in spite of the harsh and drastic changes between them. When he was tapped to contribute to the Parks for All project, he knew he wanted to do an homage to Minnesota’s seasons and how our wildlife adapts to them throughout the year.
The murals on each side of the building are designed to mesh seamlessly, tied together (pun intentional) by the blue string motif that winds its way through all four sides. The narrative is that a child has tied a key to the end of a string and thrown it as far as they could, getting the string all tangled up in bushes and brambles along the way. Various animals on each side of the building have found the string and used it for their own devices, working it into their respective environments alongside other found human-made objects; pieces from disparate communities have come together to make a new whole.
Martinez comes from a background in graffiti art and strives to treat each building he works on as a found object that incorporates itself into the design of the art itself, a theme that shines through in his work on the warming house. In painting, he said, one contributes to the object on which one’s painting. For this project, he left the bare brick of the building’s walls showing through the background of the mural and worked the windows and crevices of the building into the design.
The mural itself was still in the works at the time of writing; Martinez said he hoped to finish it up within a couple of weeks of the grand unveiling on Nov. 12. There isn’t much left to do except fill in some details and add one more bird on the side of the building facing the hockey rinks, so he was optimistic that he’d be able to finish it before the weather turned really cold. The key at the end of the blue string also still needed to be added; see if you can spot it the next time you’re at the park!
The MPRB’s operational costs, as well as donations from neighborhood groups funded the murals. Windom Park Citizens in Action was contacted by MPRB to help fund the Windom Park project. It was originally only supposed to cover one wall of the warming house, but after WPCiA helped to contribute $25,000 to the project, it was expanded to cover all four sides, according to WPCiA Community Outreach Coordinator Thomas Ebert. Once the mural is finished, MPRB will adopt the responsibility for maintenance of the artwork for its expected 10-year lifespan.
Further information about the Parks for All mural project, the other eight sites it encompasses and other potential future sites, can all be found online at https://bit.ly/WindomMuralProject.
Artist Rock “Cyfi” Martinez talked about his murals on the Windom Park warming house exterior during the Nov. 12 grand unveiling. The murals depict Minnesota’s four seasons. (Alex Schlee)
Two girls traced the blue string that ties the murals together. (Alex Schlee)
