'Phrases like “NOTHING TO DO IS EVERYTHING WITH YOU,” and, “I PAID THE LIGHT BILL JUST TO SEE YOUR FACE” are now painted on the surfaces of three formerly rusty, forgettable train bridges. Powers created these messages through conversations he had as his crew went door to door and attended community meetings to ask people about the city, all in conjunction with Syracuse University Chancellor and President Nancy Cantor’s visionary projects, the Near Westside Initiative and COLAB. The goal is to use public art as part of a plan to revitalize a city neighborhood — and in the process reexamine the traditional relationship between university campuses and their surrounding neighborhoods.
Powers’ hand-painted signs draw on years of his own work as a painter and graffiti artist, but also on a long
tradition of making, advertising, and handcrafting. Coming to Syracuse, a city that exemplifies the model
mid-size, post-industrial rustbelt city under reinvention, is part of a national movement of change, a
Rustbelt Renaissance, driven by a creative economy.
“The goal of the project is to ultimately bridge the Near Westside community to downtown, which will give access to new markets and resources for residents in the neighborhood,” says Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near Westside Initiative. “When conceiving this project, we knew we had to commission an artist who could bring both the talent and social consciousness needed to make the intersection a celebrated space that no longer acts as a barrier, but instead bonds neighborhoods and people together.” '
Steve Powers
http://www.firstandfifteenth.net/
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