Art Quilt Mural in the Dallas Arts District

I am so excited that my art quilt collage, Looking Up, was selected by the Catholic Foundation of Dallas for their annual Art of the Plaza contest. Now it’s a mural in the Dallas Arts District across from the Meyerson Symphony Center and will be on view until October of 2024!

The annual Art on the Plaza competition requires artists to submit an original piece of art measuring 9 2/3 inches tall by 28 inches wide. For the 2023 competition, they selected the theme HOPE. I knew I wanted to create a sort of landscape — or maybe skycap — that suggested wide open possibilities, blue sky, shining sun and a flock of birds flying together to whatever lies ahead.

Here’s an in-progress shot of the work on my ironing board. You can see I’d mostly settled on the background and I’d started cutting red birds, seen in a pile above the design.

Once the fabric design was finalized, I embellish with stitching — both machine free motion quilting and hand embroidery.

Here’s a shot of the backside where you can see all the messy stitching.

I like seeing this picture from my studio where you can get a sense of the scale of the piece — and see that I was working with images on my both my laptop and my iPad.

Here’s the finished piece. I titled it “Looking Up” and submitted it for consideration.

I was thrilled to get the call that my work was selected to be installed on the mural wall at the Catholic Foundation Plaza! I am also delighted to say that the selection came with a $5000 prize. I have so much respect and gratitude to the Catholic Foundation for supporting, recognizing, celebrating and paying artists as part of this project. As a professional artist, I think it’s important to share what our different income streams look like. The Catholic Foundation also acquired the original piece of art and permission to reproduce it, though I hold the original copyright and ongoing permission to share and use the image in my own way.

The Foundation works with a local firm to get a high resolution scan of the image and print it on sheets of vinyl that are then sealed to the wall. Here’s a cool time lapse of the installation.

On Tuesday, October 24, 2023 we had a wonderful dedication ceremony where I had the opportunity to share remarks about my work, the theme of hope and what it means for me to be a part of the wonderful public art in the Dallas Arts District. You can watch the dedication ceremony here.

I talked about the title during my remarks. “It’s titled “Looking Up” with the idea that this is an action and we do it together — it’s not a command or an exclamation. And it’s on going. We’re looking up. To be sure, hope is not always easy to harness. Sometimes looking up means peering through the fog, or the smoke, or the chaos. Honestly, sometimes we can’t look or see or imagine what’s beyond the distractions. But this piece captures a moment when the sky is clear. “

I concluded with some ideas about what people my think when they see the mural. “I hope they think about how it might represent their own story of hope, how hope can help us turn small things into large things, and that this hope reminds us to keep looking up.”