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stories create place
A single place can have a richly
complex convergence of stories
of people in relationship with land throughout time
When stories are uncovered and set free,
we unlock an understanding of who we've been...
...and who we might become
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welcome to
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So that we shape a future where we all thrive together
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concept
The People's Mural Project is a Creative Placemaking strategy for Mammoth Lakes, CA in connection with our surrounding communties. It is a social and environmental advocacy design that utilizes the power of public arts and community organizing.
The project is a series of 5 large murals with audio storytelling that brings people and perspectives together to strengthen our community that might otherwise remain siloed and silenced. The project amplifies the profound interconnection of peoples and narratives that influence the quality of our greater wellbeing.
The murals focus on our undertold cultural, historical and environmental narratives, that invites local and visiting communities into participation and caring for our local initiatives that advocate for greater social and environmental regeneration and justice.
The project centers the power of storytelling and art-as-activism, as a way to weave our collective belonging, healing, and understanding of people + place, remembering that we catalyze change when we come together and consider future generations in thriving diversity and equality.
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5
mammoth sized murals
with audio
storytelling directly from
the people
engaging in our local narratives, as a larger regeneration of global
narratives
inviting our
local & visiting community into greater belonging & activism
as a marketed mural tour & accessible art walk
project
design
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power of
murals
The high visibility of murals brings the significance of narratives to the forefront of viewers' lives. Murals render it nearly impossible to hide these stories, while allowing our community to see a reflection of themselves represented in the spaces around them.
Here are some of our muses and inspiring examples:
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our five
undertold
narratives
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the process to become
murals
1. the people gather
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3. audio narration
As we finalize each written story, we will creatively record these narratives into compelling audio storytelling with chosen narrators and pertinent sound engineering. Storytelling will be accessed through QR code with each mural, offering an audio-visual experience that educates our local and visiting communities.
Proposed timeline: Winter 2024-Spring 2025
2. call-to-artists
Once the stories are deliberated over by the people, we will define significant elements that will need to be incorporated into the visual storytelling of the mural. We will send out a call-to-artists, far and wide, receiving submissions, prioritize innovation, locality, and relativity to the narratives. We will integrate the option to collage "paste up" murals with traditional "paint-on" murals, that includes historical and landscape photographs. This also opens a broader field of applying artists. We will source artists for our Indigenous and Latin Heritage murals from those communities, and will together decide which artworks to choose for each mural!
Proposed timeline: Winter 2024-Spring 2025
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Through extensive community organizing pertaining to each narrative, we will gather as a community to discuss how to to shape these narratives. We will collaboratively create a written story, aimed to bridge under-told history with our contemporary time, while considering how to develop visitor solidarity for more local social and environmental advocacy + wellbeing for future generations. We want to hear from and include as many voices and perspectives in this stage, and will enact regenerative conflict and holding contradiction in our community facilitation.
Proposed timeline: Spring-Winter 2024
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4. bridge to activism
We are partnering with Mammoth Lakes Tourism and, tentatively,
Visit California and Visit Native California.
Unlike other mural projects that often get categorized as ornamental and periphery, partnering with the tourism industry, will carry this project, its endeavors for social and environmental justice, amplifying culture and heritage, and overall visions for interconnected community change-making, to an even greater effective sphere of visibility and public engagement.
Through a QR code, each mural will invite access to associated local initiatives and organizations that are advocating for:
-Indigenous upliftment + regeneration
-Latin community social justice
-Water sovereignty + reclamation
-Environmental protection
-Community centering + sustainability
We intend each mural to engage 2.5 million visitors with our underrepresented stories.
Proposed project completion: Summer/Fall 2025
5. marketed mural tour & art walk
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ways to
show support!
For folks of all kinds to offer feedback and a way to show support for the project.
For folks that are integral to one or more of the mural stories and want to contribute to narrative development that influences the mural designs.
Ya know, that monthly keep-in-the-loop newsletter thing.
For folks to donate and show support "from the people" for any amount.
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who we
are
how we
work
We are a group of multicultural community organizers, mothers, aunties, grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, tribal leaders, political leaders, social activists, environmental advocates, local historians, ski founding family members, community stakeholders and visionaries, local business folks, and artists, on unceded ancestral and contemporary homelands of Nüümü, Newe, and Kutzadika'a, guided by the future generations that we keep close in our considerations.
We center relationship building at the core of our change-making endeavors, knowing that the more we create understanding across sectors and identities, we build context of how we relate with each other, the natural world, and future generations, that directly influences our capacity to create new community projects, systems, and effect policy change for more shared wellbeing. We also look to organizers that have been doing this work for a while and are the cutting edge of nuance, like folks at Emergent Strategy.
what we
believe
what we
do
Through extensive community engagement, conflict resolution, and participatory design, we amplify under-represented social and environmental narratives through the high visibility platform of public arts and public visitor marketing. We utilize the power of storytelling as change-making to bring more understanding, inclusivity, diversity, and equity to communities needing social, environmental, and economic justice-right now, specifically Mammoth Lakes, CA, as our home area. We listen, learn, inquire, show up to the table, speak, not speak, heal, discern, create, hold space, and dream together a new world into being.
We believe that each of us (beyond our team) is a powerful piece to the community puzzle in solving our shared problems; that when we address inequity in one area, it is connected to the wellbeing of a greater whole. We also believe that change happens right now, in this moment, and how we are and what we do together, today, directly influences our communities in the future. We remind ourselves that our personal and local narratives are a part of a larger global narrative undoing past harm, healing, and unlocking a greater potential for generating a more interconnected and just world.
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connect with us
To contact us, please email: peoplesmuralproject@gmail.com
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