Mark Tribe returned to York this summer for a week of planning and painting with the Coleman Center for the Arts (CCA) and the Sumter community for his forthcoming collaborative project, “Painting York.” Tribe worked with a key group of volunteers to paint another experimental wall in the highly visible parking lot across the street from the Piggly Wiggly. Now two vibrant designs offer possibilities for thinking about the future of “Painting York.”
The palette for the new design was inspired by a student collage made in the CCA’s 21st Century summer enrichment program, sponsored by the Sumter County Board of Education. The collage was made in an exercise in which students responded to the internationally known quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. One student chose a bright blue background, intersected by a vibrant stripe of yellow and flanked with magazine cutout squares on either side. The abstract work served as a jumping off point for another experimental design wall in downtown York.
Tribe worked with participants to make decisions about design motif and layout. The group gathered with CCA staff and the artist early in the hot summer morning. In a short time the building had been painted bright blue. Two doors and two naturally occurring shapes that settled within the brickwork were outlined in tape and filled in with a spectrum of four shades of yellow. The final shapes are outlined in white, each one painted a progressively darker shade of yellow from the right to the left.
The blue and yellow wall stands adjacent to the previous color and design study that was painted in the same parking lot earlier this year. Rather than a proposed color scheme for the downtown, the newly painted wall continues a public conversation about color, design and possibility. The CCA will continue experimentation as plans for “Painting York” take shape in the coming months.
This work is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and ArtPlace America. For more information please contact the Coleman Center for the Arts at 205-392-2005.