Honouring the hardscrabble history of Belle Glade, two murals - one historical and one contemporary - that depict detailed scenes within this essential agricultural town in the muck on the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee. The murals are a lush wild collage of workers with their faces wrapped in kerchiefs, overflowing baskets with corn and celery and crops, laborers cutting cane, kids reading at a community center, flying crop dusters, factories belching smoke and even Seminole Indians – the original inhabitants – in full costume navigating a canoe full of produce.
Installed in 2012 for Palm Beach County Art Commission.
“I found some amazing thing out in Belle Glade. A lot of NFL football players come from there which is unreal as it is such a small rural place. It’s a big farming community, during season there are lots of immigrants that pass through to do the work, they even pay to sleep under residents mobile homes.
There’s an enormous energy, sadness and beauty out there. This was a long project, as I got the job a good three years before the construction on the library even started, so I had to work alongside the architects and designers and got to see the new structures and plans as it was being built.
Any proposal I make will be changed along the way, it’s a process at every step. I need to tell a story about the past and the future. I went around asking the people there what do you like most about this place? They said the beauty and simplicity. What do you like least? The ash in the smoke from the cane fields. The answers surprised me.”
The stories I tell in the murals are narrative but they are beyond reality. I want to change some of the history I learn about to create an optimistic view of society, though I’m not out to create a revisionist theory. It has to be a positive spin on negative history."
