City Paint Phoenix 24 – Salt River Pima-Maricopa Woman
If you have been following the blog for some time, you might recognize the art/artist presented in this current installment of City Paint Phoenix.
The artist goes by the name of “El Mac” and he has painted murals all over the United States and across the globe.
I have shared images of his other works on at least six other occasions…which you can find by scrolling to the bottom of this page and clicking on the Category, “Street Art – Graffiti,” or by simply clicking on the highlighted link.
As you can read in this article in AZCentral.com, the image is based upon an actual person, a teenaged Native American girl who lives on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which is located just east of Scottsdale.
For those of you who live in, or are going to visit the Phoenix area, you can find the 45 foot tall mural on the southeast corner of the building at 111 W Monroe Street, just one block south of the better known Van Buren Street, and one block west of Central Avenue, in the heart of downtown Phoenix. There is metered parking on the north side of the building, but if you’re only going to be there for a few minutes, you could probably get away with parking in the alley on the south side, as I did. A security officer came out of the building to check on my truck parked in the alley, but he just smiled, said “Good morning,” and then walked away as he saw me with my camera admiring the mural.
El Mac painted the main feature of the mural and his friend and collaborator, Breeze, painted the decorative trim that we see in brighter colors surrounding the mural and extending around the building and down the walls.
And again…
After viewing the mural the first time and having taken multiple photographs with my phone, I purposed to return the next morning with my camera to make some “real” images, which I did.
I should also add that I left the scene that first morning with something of a lightness of spirit…like an inspiration or a feeling of calm…like it didn’t matter that I still had to go to work for eight hours and be stuck inside an office or talk to people with whom I really didn’t want to talk…it was okay. I was further touched each time I got out my camera during the day to look at the images again and again.
Maybe it was the serenity and hopefulness that I could see in the young woman’s expression…
…or maybe I was still awestruck from having been in the presence of a simple beauty that transcended even the need for words to describe it.
City Paint Phoenix 10 – Nuestra Senora del Desierto
Here is yet another of El Mac’s murals that one can find in Phoenix. You can see some of his other work in City Paint Phoenix 3, 6, 7, and City Paint 4 and 17 in Salt Lake City….and you can get to those other posts by scrolling to the bottom right corner of this page and clicking on Street Art – Graffiti under the Categories widget. This particular mural is located on the south and street-facing side of Love and Hate Tattoo and Piercing, located at 322 West McDowell Road. You can click on their highlighted name to be taken to their webpage…if you’re interested.
City Paint Phoenix 7 – Southwest Goddess
I’ve seen it referred to as “The Phoenix Goddess” in a few different locations, but the artist, El Mac, refers to it as Southwest Goddess on his website…click here if you’d like to check it out for yourself.
The directions I found on-line on how to find the mural states simply that it’s in an alley south of McDowell Road between 3rd and 5th Avenues…another set of directions indicate that it’s on an essentially hidden wall of the Laird Apartments at 317 West McDowell Road.
I happened to find it through the first directions, driving up and down alleyways…. There were two other murals close-by, one of which you can see in green paint on the left side of the first image above. I may feature them in a later post.
The fact that the mural is on the east-facing wall of the apartments might have something to do with it remaining in such good condition after being there for 10 years.
This is the fourth mural by El Mac that I’ve featured in the City Paint series…two others in Phoenix and one in Salt Lake City. I have already collected images of two of his other murals in the Phoenix area and know where a third one is, but haven’t gotten to it yet with my camera.
If you’ve enjoyed viewing this fine example of street art, spray-paint murals, building art, or whatever else you’d like to call it, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and click Street Art – Graffiti under the Categories widget to see more posts containing this genre of art from both Phoenix and Salt Lake City, Utah.
City Paint Phoenix 6 – Indigenous Woman
What could very likely be the newest mural in Phoenix was created by El Mac and his collaborators. You might remember that I featured some of his other work in an earlier post. I’d like to thank a fellow-blogger and Phoenician, Candace from Glenrosa Journeys, for telling me about the mural. She used to follow the local street-art scene, going from mural to mural, capturing images as they were constantly being painted and painted-over, but she now focuses her blogging and photography around “birds and other critters.”
Candace mentioned that the mural is located at Heavy Pedal…and when I Googled that name, I found that it’s located just down the road from my work-place, at 1309 East Van Buren Street. When I checked further to learn anything I could about the mural, I found this article in the Phoenix New Times.
I stopped by the shop on my way to work with the intention of capturing some images of the mural without any cars parked in front of it…but being on the east-facing side of the building, it was the recipient of the morning’s light from the rising sun…and the attendant shadows that ride along with it. So, the first two images (taken from outside of the gated and locked parking lot) show the shadows and glow of the sunrise, and the photographs in the following gallery show what it looked like about three and a half hours later. If you’d like to view the images in greater detail, just click on any photo in the gallery to be taken to a slide-show where they are displayed in a larger format. It’s crazy and wonderful what these guys can do with spray paint….
And…if you’d like to see earlier posts on street and building art in Phoenix and Salt Lake City, you can scroll to the bottom of the page, find the Categories widget, and click on Street Art – Graffiti to be taken to a continuous scroll of the posts.
City Paint Phoenix 3 – Flowers…with a Salt Lake City connection….
I’ve been traveling the streets of Phoenix for the past five months with a new eye that is open and welcoming of things that I had never noticed in my earlier years of living here. If you’ve been following this blog for at least a little while, you might know or recall that I’ve recently returned to this desert home after living in the Salt Lake City area for about four years…after having lived here in Phoenix for over 20 years…and you might remember, too, that I started a City Paint series in Phoenix that was similar to a series that I had going in Salt Lake for a couple of years. Well…this is the third post in my collection of graffiti and street art displays that I’ve discovered while driving about my new/old home.
This flower shop is located on the south-east corner of 5th Street and Roosevelt Street, just south of the center of town in an area that has become something of an art district over the last several years. From all appearances, the flower shop has closed its doors for business…the rooms were empty as I looked in from the street…and as you can tell by looking at this second image, the plaster is cracking on the wall and the paint is beginning to peel…which is understandable, given that the mural is on the west-facing wall of the building and in near constant exposure to the desert sun.
When I did a Google search of the artists (as provided by the names under the “E” in the first photo), I found that El Mac had created another image that I had seen in the past…which I had shared in another blog post almost three years ago. I featured the below photograph in In the Heart of the City and in City Paint 4 – Tucked-Away Alley-Way, and provided a third glimpse of it in the first image from City Paint 17 – Gallenson’s Gun-shop Elk Mural.
You can find these murals on El Mac’s web site at Ave Maria and Kofie and Mac…pages five and eight if you want to visit from going to his home-page. After you get to his home-page, click on the “Spraypaint” subheading…and be prepared to be amazed at what you’ll find. If you’d like to view more posts on the street art, building murals, and related graffiti that I’ve discovered in both the Salt Lake and Phoenix areas, you can scroll to the bottom of this page and click on Street Art – Graffiti under the Categories widget to see the earlier other posts.
Scott's Place...Images and Words 