Kyle Kellams: Fayetteville South Yard development is busy these days. New businesses have opened recently, newer ones are in construction mode. Not too far from where this concrete cutting is happening is another new addition. This, a new mural. Bryan Alexis is a professor of graphic design at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, and he's completed nearly 50 murals across a couple of states. Recently, he unveiled his latest on Specialized Real Estate's headquarters in South Yard.
Ozarks At Large’s Jack Travis met with him at the mural to speak with Alexis and to learn more about the art. Alexis says the painting, which features a woman twisting toward a star with the words “echo kindness”, is a take on the specialized “Love Your Neighbor” series of murals.
Bryan Alexis: And so this was just a continuation of that theme that just kind of like an artistic theme around those words.
Jack Travis: Yeah. All right, let’s stand up and take a look at it. So echo kindness
Alexis: Right.
Travis: Tell me about that. What does that mean?
Alexis: So with the theme of Love Your Neighbor, I wanted to really kind of think about what that meant as an action. When I was given that as a theme, typically my process just involves reading and researching and thinking about what the client might want or what the space might need, what the environment might inspire. And this being so direct with, hey, we want this theme around love your neighbor. I was really kind of trying to think about what does that look like as an action? What is the action of love your neighbor like? How do you do that? Right?
And I thought back to this story I'd saved from a thread about hitchhiking of all things, and just this random person out there in the world had posted this story about how they were having a bad time. You know, bad year or whatever. And they had borrowed somebody's Jeep and had a flat tire on the side of the road. And they sat out on the side of the road with signs on the windows. Please, I need a jack, because he had borrowed the Jeep and it didn't have a jack. And so he had this flat tire and no jack and had a sign. Please, I need to borrow a jack. He was going to offer money, you know, just anything. And nobody would stop. Tow trucks were going by and just people were just flying by. Nobody would help him out. And just as he was about to just kind of give up and start walking, this van pulls up with an immigrant family from Mexico with a mom, dad and four kids. Right? A family of six pulls over, didn't speak a word of English, and they hop out and start helping. And the guy brings his jack out, brings the jack lever. And in the midst of all this, he says that he broke the guy's jack handle. And so not to be deterred, the wife of this guy grabs the jack handle, turns around, drives back to town like 20 minutes away, and then drives back with a new jack and bought a new jack handle, gets the tire changed. She brings out like a gallon of water and they wash their hands.
And all the while, they didn't speak any English, but the little girl, one of the daughters did. And so she was kind of translating and he was like, where are you guys from? He wanted to send him something for all their help. And she said, well, we're from Mexico. We're just here to pick peaches and we're going to go and pick cherries, and then we're going to go back home. And he was just overcome with gratitude. And so he was trying to pay, you know, like he had a 20 dollar bill and he's trying to give it to the guy. And the guy was like, no, no, no, he was just refusing the money. And so he snuck the 20 dollar bill to the wife just kind of like on the sly, and the little girl said, mom wants to know if you're hungry. And he goes, yeah, I'm actually kind of starving. And so they gave him some of their food, like gave him some tamales and he's like, the best tamales ever, right? And so he goes and sits in his Jeep and he unwraps the tamale. And there's the 20 dollar bill sitting in the wrapping. And so he gets it and he runs back out to the van before they pull away. And he said, all I could think of was por favor. Por favor. Por favor. And he's trying to give it, and the guy was waving them away. And he has the window down. He looks at him and he said, and he and he struggled this out, but he said in English, today, you tomorrow me.
And that story every time I think about it. That story. I was like, man, what a wonderful way to just put those words into action. You know, it's like, who's your neighbor? It's whoever's sitting across from you. Jack right now, you're my neighbor, you know? And how can we serve one another? And how can we make one another's lives just a little bit better, a little bit easier. And it's that act of kindness, right? It's that action that is the expression of love your neighbor. And so with this mural, I kind of thought about that when, when I was trying to come up with an idea for this mural. And I was like, man, if I can kind of express that in some kind of way. And so I put that story into the artist statement. And just talked about how in this mural, I tried to show kind of like the spirit of, of kindness. And kindness is like a spark. And it's not this big flaming thing. It's small. But it's bright. And you can pick it up and you can fan the flames and you can give it to somebody else. And in the mural, you have all of these circles that radiate out from this kind of figure that's scooping up this spark, right? And these circles that radiate out is how we connect with one another. It's very kind of like karma, you know, the idea of you give kindness to somebody and then they give kindness to somebody else, and that circles back and it circles back and it finally comes back to you. And so your kindness can eventually come back to you, even if you don't have that expectation, it will come back.
Travis: Tell me about the choice to emphasize the color blue. It's very, very blue. There's a woman in the center of it. She's kind of twisting and sort of flowing through it, reaching for this little spark. Tell me about the design of it.
Alexis: Right. So I mean, there's, there's a psychology of color, of course, but I wanted something very calming. And it's one of those things where you start kind of experimenting with palettes. And that's kind of the thing that emerged, the woman kind of represents this spirit of kindness that's kind of passing this spark along. Done in a way that doesn't express one skin color necessarily, but it's just a figure that anybody can kind of see themselves in, I think is important. And it's something that I do in my work quite often, it's like I just kind of like keep skin tones in a way that you can project yourself on to that figure and it's very cosmic. So we have all these stars, but all the stars are done with finger paints. And so again, it's the human touch. It's not a brush, but it's a finger dipped into paint and touching that wall over and over thousands of times. Every small star in that mural is a point of human contact, which I think nobody will ever get that necessarily from just standing there and looking at it. But nevertheless, it's there, you know, nevertheless.
And it's interesting because it wasn't just my finger, I let the people from Specialized come out and let them put their finger fingerprints on there. And then my collaborator Patrick Walrod, it's also his finger that put all the stars on there. And so that kind of cosmic idea of reaching out and having a kind of a human touch. I think it's important to the mural and important to the design. When you're drawing this, you're drawing it small, right? And so some of those things kind of emerge as you kind of figure out how am I going to do this at a large scale? And so when I'm drawing that, it may just be like a stippling or a scattering of ink drops or a digital scatter brush or something like that. And then after you finish with it, you're like, oh, that's cool. But then how am I going to do this? How am I going to put like literally thousands of little pinprick stars? That takes a few seconds when you're doing it small, but how am I going to do this when it's 30 feet wide, nine feet tall? And we thought we're just going to take this a section at a time and have a jar of paint and just dip, touch, dip, touch, dip, touch. And, you know, it took us a few hours, but with four or five people on the wall doing that, it was manageable. And so that's kind of the process becomes meaning, in that that's important. One of the viewers came by, just a little girl came by and I was like, hey, you want to, you want to put a star in there? And so she dipped her finger and she thought about it for a little bit. And she's like, where do I want to put my star? And then she put it there. And the other day it was really cool because that little girl showed back up at the little unveiling party that we had. And she saw her star. And it was important to her that she had made that connection, and that made me happy that the community was involved and they were kind of getting the theme of the thing.
Travis: Yeah. They were getting to take ownership of it.
Alexis: Exactly.
Kellams: Artist Bryan Alexis, speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis about his new mural, “Echo Kindness”. You can find it at the South Yard in Fayetteville.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
