Local Color: The Eureka Street Art Festival

This week, the Eureka Street Art Festival has painters in place at fifteen localities around town, working on new murals. We spent the afternoon driving around town looking at most of the murals indicated on the map for the event.

Painters have through the weekend to complete their work, and as a result, there were people at work on most of the sites we visited, and the murals were well along toward completion.

https://www.eurekastreetartfestival.com/about

We started at the furthest outlier in terms of location, Lima’s Pharmacy, where a mini festival celebrating the mural was underway. Balloons, a bouncy castle, food and drink, and free pens, all made it a fun stop. The mural depicts medicinal plants in keeping with the pharmacy theme. Every mural has a marker naming the artist and providing a short bio.

Our next stop was a bit harder to find, since our map was schematic, without most street names. We found it on a section of wall curving down S Street beside a middle school. Jose Moreno and his team were busy painting.

The Journey of Quetzalcoatl (El Viaje de Quetzalcoatl)

We headed back into Eureka and stopped at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium, where Melitta Jackson was finishing up for the day. Her mural depicts animals that are coming back into this area, the otter and the condor. The title, “Chpaana’r,” means “Stay a Long Time,” in Yurok. Her sponsor is a suicide prevention group.

Our next stop was the Alder Grove Charter School, where a block-long wall was being turned into, “The Lost Pages.” We couldn’t find it, despite driving around the block and up and down neighboring streets. The school isn’t indicated on Google Maps. The schematic map of the mural sites was good, but in the end we moved on. The next morning, on our way to the Farmer’s Market, we drove right by it, a block long and brightly colored, with a painter working from a cherry-picker. It would have been hard to miss. It was nice to see it in the end.

Several more murals were being painted in the downtown area.

The Decodance mural on the Eureka Theater was fun to examine, as we tried to identify the people and the artwork depicted in each panel. The mural of Billie Holiday on the Opera Alley Bistro was a beautiful piece.

The mural at the far end of Opera Alley was still underway, but I went by two days later and saw the finished version.

Some of the other murals were much smaller. The Clark Historical Museum mural, The Condor Returns, took us a minute to find because we’d just stopped at a few murals that took up the side of a building, and it was painted on a door. The museum is made of stone, and doesn’t have a surface for a mural other than the door.

The Humboldt Aquatic Center had three mural panels painted that show rowing, the principal activity at the center. These were attractive, but gated off from visitors and more difficult to see than the others we visited during the afternoon.

While we were looking for this year’s murals we came across a few impressive works from previous years. Many are marked with the year they were created and ESAF, Eureka Street Art Festival.

The goal of the festival has been to do something creative and uplifting for the city of Eureka. I’d say they succeeded.