"Alphabet City" Mural, part of the fences project

a Tri-Met/RACC Collaboration at the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon

1995, 160 feet

 

The Mary Josephson/Gregory Grenon team anticipated a diverse audience, and planned accordingly.  Utilizing bright, aggressive colors, they created a 160-foot-long alphabet that wrapped around the corner of the fence,  For each letter they assigned a correlating image.  Unexpected, funny, and often self-reflective, the painting generated conversations that usually began with viewers saying what image they would use if it were their own work.  on several occasions, children sang their ABC's upon their first sight of it.

 

Holding down the largest segment of the fence, Alphabet city  is a playful fusion of the artist's individual styles.  The pair intentionally resisted traditional canons of craftsmanship in order to reflect their enjoyment of painting for their audience.  Their images contain a mix of sensory and visual association and the changing scale adds to the humor and the charm of the piece.  The layout was freeform; they agreed to alternate letters (with periodic arguments over who got which), and not to reveal with images they had in mind.  "WE would be excited to get there and get to work, so we could see what each other were going to do," says Josephson.

 

Approaching it as a public mural, they included depictions of social conversations and concerns, celebrating individualism and the idiosyncrasies of a diverse community in rich, saturated colors and whimsical stories.  Running through the entire piece is a free-association, semi-abstract painted narrative that adds other meanings to each letter; created by Aurora Josephson, it expanded the team's collaborative approach to the alphabet.