After working to present other projects including the “Mural at the Mill” at the HD Flour Mill, the Salina Canvas Project wants to continue bringing art to downtown Salina with the Boom! The Street Art and Mural Festival comes to town in October.
The festival brings together artists in Salina starting Oct. 6 to paint murals on five walls in downtown Salina to celebrate and enhance the city’s visual landscape.
Eric Montoy, one of the co-founders of the Kanvas Project, said the idea behind the project and the festival is to bring people from all over into downtown Salina.
“It’s privately funded by generous donors, and the property owners (of the walls) have this collective consciousness that they want to foster a creative culture in downtown Salina,” Montoy said. “(We) really want to encourage tourism and bring foot traffic to this downtown.”
Montoy said the festival aims to attract world-class artists. This year’s featured artists will be making their way to Salina from both the East and West Coasts and Europe, with a variety of styles and themes represented.
“The goal is to bring vibrancy and bring large-scale murals downtown,” Montoy said.
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Who are the artists coming to Salina?
A total of five artists or artistic duos come to paint walls located in the city center. Locations include around Campbell Plaza, behind Prickly Pear, in the parking lot at the northwest corner of Santa Fe Avenue and Ash Street, an elevator shaft near UMB Bank, and a wall of the American Legion building on Seventh Street, now owned by the Ashby House.
The five artists include:
- Tony Söman from New York, who has roots in Scandinavia, where he draws inspiration from.
- From the Netherlands, TelmoMiel consists of Telmo Pieper and Miel Krutzmann. They use different styles to create individual sketches that combine into a single, unique work.
- Mona Caron, who was born in Switzerland and is now based in San Francisco, who is best known for multi-story murals that show the resilience of weeds.
- Yuri Cancel, known as Mantra, uses naturalism to his advantage as he paints murals that often depict moths and butterflies.
- Logan Hicks and Joe Yurato, who both work in stencil art, with Yurato dabbling in other disciplines as well, including aeorzole.
In addition to those five artists, Montoy said Martha Cooper, a noted documentary photographer, will also be in Salina throughout the month.
“A lot of the artists in the graffiti and mural movements credit … that whole scene back to her,” Montoy said. “She was a photographer in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, when hip-hop and graffiti were growing, and she documented everything.”
Montoy said artists thank Cooper for laying the groundwork for much of what is known about the graffiti scene.
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In addition to Cooper being in Salina working on and documenting the festival, the Salina Center for the Arts will present an exhibit of Cooper’s work and the Art Cinema will screen a documentary she created.
“It’s a huge addition and I think it’s a huge draw for other muralists who know her and want to come check (the festival) out,” Montoy said.
More boom! in the coming years
Montoy said while this is the first Boom! festival, Kanvas Project doesn’t expect it to be the last. In the coming years, the organization hopes to bring more street artists, not just muralists, to work in downtown Salina.
“There are so many different expressions of this (street art) genre,” Montoy said. “Whether it’s painting gas gauges to look like flamingos or stuff… It doesn’t always have to be 2D.”
As previously mentioned, artists are due to arrive on October 6th and will be painting throughout the month, ending around October 16th. Montoy said the Kanvas project hopes to have some sort of final public event around Oct. 15 or 16, but hopes people walking or driving downtown during the month will stop and look while these works of art takes shape.