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Date: 4/11/2023
MONSON — The new mural project to celebrate the town and provide public space improvement is seeing progress, as an artist team has been chosen, a listening session scheduled for public input and a community paint day also scheduled.
The mural will take up the northwest facing wall of Adams Hometown Market on 115 Main St., a location chosen for it’s “good visible location, and good viewpoints toward downtown,” according to Michelle Moon, project manager of Civic Space Collaborative, the firm the town has been working with to plan and complete the project.
“A celebration of Monson: past, present and future” is the theme of the mural, as decided by a selection committee that has worked on developing the call for art, along with the firm. The selection committee is hosting a listening session for public input on what residents would like to see highlighted and shared in the mural, such as important town events and historically significant happenings.
The listening session will be from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, April 15, at the library.
Out of 11 artist applications, the selection committee chose a team of two artists to create the mural — one of the reasons for their choice being that the artists requested a listening session, as public involvement is crucial to their decisions for mural content.
Melissa Stratton-Pandina of Easthampton and Shara Osgood of Fitchburg are the artists chosen to carry out this project, and according to their proposal, they have created many large-scale community projects, and work closely with community groups. One of the main components of their proposal was that they feel the work should represent the community and offer them some kind of ownership of the mural, not only being observers of the process.
The artist team presented a draft of their ideas for the mural in their proposal. They provided a potential image, saying, “Monson is a beautiful town, filled with water ways and some of the best hiking in the area. That led us to use one of the dams and the flowing, stylized water in the mural to connect all the elements together. In the foreground you see the abstracted stream moving and bits of ferns. In the background you see the mountains that surround Monson. There are also some animals including a great blue heron, butterflies, fox, and bears. The smaller circles are filled with black and white images of historical figures.”
Once the design is approved by the selection committee and the Select Board, the artists said they organize a community paint party, where the mural is divided into a “paint by number” allowing all skill levels and ages to participate in.
Funded by a grant through the Regional Economic Development Organization, the purpose of which is to encourage public space improvement. The town was also awarded grants for 10 different events aside from the mural, which have not been announced yet. The mural is tentatively scheduled to be installed at the end of May.
To learn more, contact the town at 413-267-4115.