A group of high school artists began working last week to design a 36-foot-tall mural they hope will hang on the tower of the Ralph Pill building, prominently visible at first glance of Concord’s downtown from Loudon Road and Interstate 93.
The teenagers huddled around a table Thursday at the Kimball Jenkins Estate School of Art for their first weekly session. Their brainstorming will eventually coalesce into a quarter-scale painting of a mural, hopefully by the end of May.
Then their painting will be printed on a “building wrap” that art school operations manager Ryan Linehan said will cover the entire front face of the brick building’s central tower, about 36 feet tall and 24 feet wide.
“They’re going to come up with the design, they’re going to create a smaller version, and then it’s going to be printed and installed with a crane,” Linehan said.
Linehan said the design will be subject to approval from the city and the owners of the Ralph Pill building, which according to a Concord Historical Society text was built in 1884 to attract a shoe company, “and it did; the Howard L. Porter Company made 2,500 shoes a day.” The building’s owner has supported the idea, Linehan said.
The first mural produced like this was installed on the side of the CVS on Main Street last summer. It was partly inspired by the life of Haley Rae Martin, a 19-year-old artist from Northwood who died in 2012, and was produced using money from the scholarship fund created in her honor.
Linehan said the fund received so many donations after the last mural was installed that he quickly began thinking about a new location for its successor.
The dozen students working on this year’s mural, who come from Concord High School and TEAMS Charter School in Penacook, broke off into groups last week to bring forth initial ideas for what might be included in their design.
They discussed including some aspects of Martin’s love for photography or featuring a streetscape paying homage to the new-look Main Street completed last year. They floated themes that contemplate diversity, transformation and perspective.
Josie Nadeau, one of the students who was documenting the ideas, asked: “What are old people really proud of?”
The answer, apparently, was a moose – the iconic, if struggling, representative of the Granite State wilderness. Maybe it’ll make an appearance waltzing down the center of their colorful streetscape.
But the process is just beginning. It’ll continue each week, and the students were asked to develop their own ideas and bring them back next Thursday. The planning part “usually takes more time than they think,” Linehan said.
“They have to come to a consensus of what the mural’s going to be, and then start making sketches. They end up moving things around, and then they have to go through an approval process,” he said. “We treat this like it’s a real art job.”
Linehan cautioned the students that, whatever they come up with, it has to be understandable immediately from a distance. Passers-by on the highway will catch no more than a three-second glimpse, he said.
Linehan said he’s hoping to continue expanding the presence of public art in Concord to show highway drivers that the city is home to music and exhibits and all kinds of art. That might not come through, he said, when all drivers can see is the backside of Main Street.
“There’s so much arts stuff in Concord and people drive right by,” he said. “This’ll be a big way for them to see that we’re not all lawyers and politicians.”
A neighborhood meeting is set for Tuesday to discuss the construction schedule for the upcoming roundabout near I-93’s Exit 16, Mountain Road and Shawmut Street.
The meeting will begin at 6 p.m. in the cafeteria of Broken Ground School on South Curtisville Road.
The conversion of that awkward intersection into a roundabout has been a topic of discussion for more than a decade. It was originally supposed to be completed last year, but the project was delayed when required utility work was bumped by the Main Street Project.
City officials estimated last fall that construction should take about 12 weeks.
Deadlines are upcoming for property tax credits and exemptions and dog licenses.
New applications for veteran credits, elderly exemptions and blind exemptions are due April 15, according a city newsletter. More information is available at the assessing office or its website.
Dog licenses expire April 30 and can be renewed with the city clerk through the mail or online at eb2gov.com/scripts/eb2gov.dll/TownLaunch?towncode=1717.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)