Writing on the wall

You’re headed south on Greenville Avenue, and you pop a right at Sears, the street adjacent to Trader Joe’s that takes you to The Truck Yard. To your left you can’t miss the four black boards along the wall with the words “Before I die …” painted in bold white letters at the top.

Death might seem like a morbid topic to consider during a night on the town, but think of the boards as a celebration of life — a public bucket list, of sorts. Beside the boards are small metal buckets that hold several sticks of chalk, inviting passersby to take one out and write an item on the giant wish list.

Already neighbors have marked up the “Before I die ...” boards from top to bottom with sentiments such as “travel to Europe,” “be a grandma,” and “matter.”

It’s a simple enough concept, but this particular project is part of a nationwide movement created by artist Candy Chang in New Orleans in 2011. Since then more than 550 cities have adopted it in dozens of languages across the globe.

The company Distinctive Life, which, perhaps fittingly, is a funeral home and cremation service, brought the movement to Dallas. Distinctive Life considered several other locations in Dallas as well, but it chose Lowest Greenville as the prime location for a couple reasons.

For starters, Lowest Greenville is organized. At this point you’ve probably heard of the Lowest Greenville Collective, the business association that oversees the area. That was one of the first groups Mark Brinkerhoff, a spokesman for Distinctive Life, reached out to. Then Brinkerhoff and Lowest Greenville Collective’s founder Jessica Burnham worked together to request authorization from the “Before I Die …” organization, the City of Dallas, the landlord and the building’s occupant.

Secondly, business owners on Lowest Greenville have been eager to have more art in the area — similar to what’s available in Deep Ellum. (Speaking of Deep Ellum, there’s a chance the project will move there later this fall before eventually hopscotching to other parts of the city.)

So visit Lowest Greenville while you can to make your mark and let the world know: What do you want to do before you die?

—Brittany Nunn

See people participating in “Before I Die …” art exhibit on Lowest Greeville at lakewood.advocatemag.com.

Coffee connections

While researching for an art project, a question popped into Lakewood artist Shannon Kincaid’s head one day and quickly became an obsession: What is the cultural significance of Starbucks?

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Kincaid recalls. “It was a bug in my brain, so I started paying attention.”

About two years ago, Kincaid began frequenting the Starbucks at Mockingbird and Abrams to observe the crowd.

“For the price of a cup of coffee, you can rent office space and you can stay here as long as you want,” Kincaid explains. “It’s kind of the great equalizer. You see homeless people, people hosting Bible studies, business meetings, a lone woman knitting, dads with kids in pajamas.”

Then she learned Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz might be influencing all those good vibes.

“It’s the ‘third place’ idea,” she explains. “First place is home, second place is at work and then Howard Schultz wants third place to be Starbucks. I would argue that for some people, Starbucks competes for first place.”

These observations inevitably turned into their own art project, which Kincaid is calling Project Starbucks. One afternoon, Kincaid took several photos of some of the familiar faces she was used to seeing. She painted at least a dozen people doing things she felt represented life at Starbucks — reading the paper, falling asleep while studying, chatting with friends.

“It’s an artist’s job to sort of hold up a mirror and tell people who we are,” Kincaid says, and in her opinion, we are living in a world where Starbucks is the “communal living room.”

Kincaid’s paintings hang in the Mockingbird-Abrams Starbucks, and she has even made lasting friendships with some of the subjects who recognized themselves in her paintings.

—Brittany