The City of Gainesville through its murals

How can you feel connected to a place you barely live in? In the grand scheme of my life, my time spent in the city of Gainesville will barely make up five percent of it, and the time that I have spent living in the city will be even less than that. So many people pass through the University of Florida without knowing that they lived in this city, even though these two entities are reliant on one another. I could feel this divide as I walked down University Avenue at 8:00 a.m. from my parking spot downtown to the university campus; I walked through streets that didn’t know me and saw them for the first time.

At the end of my second-year spring semester, I made a promise to distance myself from the University of Florida and its campus culture, a promise to instead find a bridge across the seemingly endless cavern between me and the city of Gainesville, the city in which I lived. I quit student organizations and got a job as a policy research intern with the city. I joined the board of the bird-focused conservation group Alachua Audubon Society and started volunteering at Sweetwater Wetlands Park. I stopped going on campus as much, finding myself instead in parts of the city I barely knew existed. And on my daily walks from city hall in downtown Gainesville to the edge of UF’s campus, like drops of rain right before the downpour, fragments of this city revealed themselves to me. I learned the history of the streets, the stories of my neighbors, and the threads that connect the two.

It might have taken me 17, 50, or maybe just three times to see this mural and look into my own eyes instead of just hers. The colors aren’t pretty; they’re vibrant and alive, as real as the chains on her wrists, and as real as the determination in her eyes, my eyes. “Shackles” by Daniel Vélez-Climent at 200 NE First St. is a reflection of the way survival and struggle, especially for people of color and underrepresented groups, create strength and perseverance. I saw it as recognition, as a hand reaching out from the inside of a once-locked door and pulling me through. “Shackles” gave me eyes to see other Gainesville neighbors, their colors, their eyes, and the people who gave Gainesville its tenacity and ability to take steps forward in the face of a state government determined to drag them backwards. Her eyes have followed every injustice with rapt and resolute attention; her eyes gleam with the assurance of years past, a promise that we are not dead yet (Figure 1).

But where have we come from? And what do the whistling words of the past say about our future? In the most literal sense, the region we now call Gainesville came from a swamp, a sunken, boggy area teeming with greens and blues that could rival that of UF’s mascot. We came from wetlands, ecotones inundated regularly to the point of deoxygenation to allow for once-living organic material to accumulate and create hubs of life for countless flora and fauna. Then we came from imperialism, from genocide and slaughter. Then came systemic hatred touted as truth, and exclusion of people of color, people like the Florida Highwaymen. In a burgeoning hub of intellect and culture, the Florida Highwaymen, like many Black artists, found no welcome and no consideration. So, they made the roads of Florida their homes and places of creation, driving along the east coast of Florida making and selling landscapes of the palm-ridden, water-embodied nature of the state. More of a movement than a distinct group, there were inspired Highwaymen working separately and together across Florida. The style was eye-catching, a canvas set aflame in fluid movement and undeniable color. They worked quickly to sell as many paintings as possible and the novelty of a masterpiece made in less than an hour caught the attention of buyers throughout the state. Al Black, one of the last living Highwaymen, painted a mural in Gainesville this year in August at 602 N Main St. and what I found in this mural was the desire for the self-expression and understanding denied to artists like Al Black and found in the authenticity of the Florida landscape. The ghosts of our state’s past are hovering off the corner of Main Street, buried underneath the roads we drive on and the buildings we inhabit, and captured by someone who used to be a ghost to others himself. There are still areas of Gainesville that mirror the mural without even trying, and there are still people who wander these streets in isolation. A lone, cut-down tree sits on the left-hand side of the painting, and I saw the loss, the distance, the emptiness flowing through the brushstrokes of its bark. A memorial of what was and a reminder of what is (Figure 2).

The heart of downtown Gainesville holds pieces done by a handful of eclectic artists, making it difficult to find any underlying connection between them. And yet, one of Gainesville’s strengths lies in its pockets of connected diversity, a diversity driven both by the influx of students from various backgrounds and the diversity of thought present in the residents. People who have, as one of the various murals inside of the Downtown Parking Garage laments, “known rivers, ancient, dusky rivers.” Streams of consciousness connecting seemingly broken threads of unfinished stories with breaths we all breathe and depths we could sink to. Every mural in and on the parking garage is one sentence in a disjointed paragraph about the city of Gainesville, a city filled with words that do not always make sense together. But one of the first sentences you find within the garage is a warm balm to the chaos of every mural, “This was a Parking Lot, Now it’s a Peaceful Oasis,” a space to pause more than your vehicle (Figure 3). Right next door is a giant boy contemplating his toy cars; he looks pretty sits in the bottom corner, oblivious to the history of struggle and current fight against gentrification (Figure 5). Yet, two feminine figures, one older and one younger, face one another, related in color and size, separated by man-made doors and signage. The artist, Jenna Horner, is a muralist in Gainesville whose feminine and floral elements speak life to the walls they reside in. Both women have a bold strength mixed with a soft silence, choosing to look at the other and see all that lies within and without their own realities. I thought of the times I had the same kind of equal footing with another human being; I thought of the older, seemingly less relevant lives that had found me and chosen to see me as more than a young passerby. I saw the partnership in acknowledgment that could be between the students and the neighbors, to “grow deep like rivers” and meet each other in the multiplicity of the water. blue. What adolescent existentialism has made him so? Why can I see my own concerned wistfulness in his young eyes? Am I just a child, playing with smaller versions of adult follies in my miniature life with my miniscule job and tiny salary? Or are we all just entertaining ourselves with unimportant priorities of our own making, turning ourselves blue? A mural on one of the outside corners of the parking garage begs the question, “What are the Aesthetics of Reinvestment?” It questions the economic and social costs of community reinvestment, most often translated as gentrification. A Florida orange blossom and Seminole Chief Osceola are layered under the Union Station Condos and a jogger that now occupy what used to be their home (Figure 4). Jane Jacobs, a journalist and activist who argued that the renewal of urban spaces did not respect those who lived there, stands with A. Quinn Jones, a man who fought for equal education access for African Americans and helped create the second fully accredited African-American high school in the state of Florida. In between them lies Porters Community, a historically black community in Gainesville that has fought against gentrification many times and the Continuum, a graduate housing unit representing the way student housing threatens such communities. A bored coffee drinker

When I started to search for the murals myself instead of just noticing the ones I passed daily, I began to find small treasures in corners I would have never given a second glance. I stumbled upon a series of murals by the artist Nico right next to the local plant store Serpentine, larger-than-life sized paintings of the most beautiful, everyday faces, likely belonging to beautiful everyday people (Figure 6). “We need to invent a formula,” they said, “to repair this apathetic worldview because it has become an epidemic”.

One of the people’s eyes stared back at mine as I read those words, demanding empathy and recognition. Every mural in Gainesville breathing warmth into the walls of this city deserves rapt attention for the people who give it life and the history it holds. This city is so much more than just the backdrop to a college experience; it’s overflowing with substance and the opportunity to be in a community with those who can see it. Down the street, next to the studio of the local wildlife artist Jim Wilson stands “Hands Full of Dreams” by German artist Case Maclaim; two rich, inviting figs sit sliced open in weathered, yet gentle hands (Figure 7). I saw a hand outstretched in an offering, all I had to do was acknowledge and accept.