UT Arts Diplomacy class to help develop collaborative community mural

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Students in the Arts Diplomacy class at The University of Toledo will work with members of the community to create a public mural under the direction of artist David Loewenstein.

The mural will be placed at the entrance to the Frederick Douglass Community Association’s James B. Simmons Jr. Neighborhood Facilities Building, located at 1001 Indiana Ave. in Toledo.

Painting is scheduled to take place from Friday to Tuesday, Oct. 2-6, during daylight hours, weather permitting. The public is invited to watch and even pick up a paintbrush and help.

The subject of the mural will be determined through a collaborative process involving UT students and Frederick Douglass Community Association members and stakeholders.

The free, public panel discussion will take place Monday, Sept. 28, at 5:30 p.m. in the UT Center for the Visual Arts Haigh Auditorium on UT’s Toledo Museum of Art Campus.

UT Assistant Professor of Art History Thor J. Mednick, who teaches the Arts Diplomacy course, will moderate the panel discussion featuring Loewenstein, community artist and founder of the Mid-America Mural Project; Dr. Brian Kennedy, director of the Toledo Museum of Art and director and eminent professor at the University; and Rachel Richardson, director and mural coordinator for Art Corner Toledo.

The panel will discuss the arts as a mode of economic, political and cultural intervention in the Toledo community. The underlying question to be discussed is what form such intervention could take and how it could be marshaled to create change, development and empowerment in and for the community.

Loewenstein is a muralist, writer and printmaker based in Lawrence, Kan. In addition to his more than 20 public works in Kansas, examples of his dynamic and richly colored community-based murals can be found across the United States in Chicago, New Orleans and New York City, as well as in Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, Texas, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Iowa, as well as in Northern Ireland and South Korea. Loewenstein’s prints, which focus on current social and political issues, are exhibited nationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. See more about him here.

The project is funded by the UT offices of Debra Davis, dean of the College of Communication and the Arts, and Interim Provost John Barrett.