Bridge Housing Mural

Photo credit: Keith Baker.

A 20 x 20 ft mural using reclaimed wood for the lobby of a new housing building, also named Mural, at McArthur Station, Oakland, built by the affordable housing non-profit Bridge Housing. Some of the wood comes from Oakland homes, you can see street names in among the foliage etc. I made the pieces in a studio space  Jan and Feb 2015, and installed it Nov 2015.

From an interview on The Studio Work, "Robert Stevenson at Bridge Housing talked a lot about their mission being about rebuilding and “re-knitting” a neighborhood that had been fractured by catastrophic development decisions, and by successive waves of social change. Also Jeff gave me a lot of historical background regarding the origins of the area and the transitions it has gone through. I spent time walking around, exploring further for myself, and photographing sights that I felt indicative of all these thoughts. I latched onto the images of all the mature trees that line the residential streets around Mosswood Park, and thought about how they’d witnessed and endured all the changes we’d been talking about. I saw them as being emblematic of both resilience and new growth, and so trees and foliage became the main image of the piece. I like the idea of creating this wild forest-garden feel in among the clean architectural lines of the urban apartment building".  Read the full interview here.

Here are some images of the piece taking shape in my temporary studio space at Moxy in Oakland. More at the blog post here.