By: Tim Nail
Opelika’s Museum of East Alabama is getting a lot of new visitors lately, but not because it’s new to the railroad town. It’s been a staple on S. Ninth Street for years, but some are just now taking notice after two eye-catching murals now adorn walls of the building, paying tribute to the region’s agricultural, athletic, educational and industrial history.
“I would say we’ve probably got 10 times the amount of traffic (than before) coming through the museum,” said Glenn Buxton, the Museum of East Alabama’s executive director and curator for the past 16 years. “We’ve been here since 1989, and it says ‘museum’ on the front of the building, (people) just never recognized it.”
Passersby on Avenue A can observe a sepia-toned mural stretching the full length of the museum’s north wall. It proudly features a depiction of Yoholo Micco – the Native American chief of Eufaula – a large train that would have once carried blue-collar laborers to Opelika’s long-running Pepperell Mills fabric factory and a plane flown by the Tuskegee Airmen amid other imagery.
“It has really changed the downtown area, and I think that has probably helped to be able to get other murals done in our area,” Buxton said. “I think the city will tell you it has brought a lot of positive response.”
The mural was painted by Columbus, Georgia-based artist Chris Johnson, an art professor at Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia, who made the final brushstrokes on the piece in early March. He caught the attention of the Museum of East Alabama when he painted a postcard art mural on the Opelika Public Library’s new location that opened in October 2021.
“(Murals) I’m mostly known for are ‘Lady Columbus’ in downtown Columbus, an 8,500 square-foot mural … and I also have one that’s a 12-panel history of aviation in Warner Robbins, Georgia,” Johnson said.
“But one of the ones I’m most proud of is this one (at the museum). It took 21 days of painting and that was stretched out over about 35 days.”
Once the museum contacted Johnson and requested his talents, he drew up several design sketches for his vision. The idea of having a color palette of browns and tans to mimic old photographs was a plan Johnson thought of close to beginning the piece.
“The original design was a little bit more packed with objects and it had a dominant blue color scheme in the background; everything was painted in a realistic manner,” Johnson said. “As I was talking with Glenn, he kept talking about nostalgia and history and a lot of the pictures I referenced were in a sepia tone. It was kind of a way to unify all the different elements — all the people and objects and landscapes.”
Though he called it a “set of creative challenges,” Johnson said it was fulfilling trying a new technique. He added that trying to keep things as photorealistic as possible in murals can be demanding as with a portrait he included of William James Samford, who was a lawyer in Opelika before being elected Alabama’s 31st governor.
The work cost about $14,000 to complete and was subsidized by grants the Museum of East Alabama received from the state government, from the Alabama Humanities Alliance and from the Alabama Farmers Federation, according to Buxton.
“I think what having Chris has done here makes it a lot easier for other murals to come in (to Opelika),” Buxton said. “On May 12, we’re going to have an official ribbon cutting and dedication of the mural.”
Johnson said he’s looking forward to the commemoration from the City of Opelika.
Agriculture, academics and art
On the opposite exterior of the museum, another mural coats a wall under a canopy shade that can be spotted from South Ninth Street. Completed in late April, this one celebrates East Alabama’s rich contributions to farming. Its main feature is an outline of Old Nancy, a 1905 Case steam traction engine, with the real vehicle physically sitting in front of the art after it was donated to the museum recently.
But the agricultural mural wasn’t the brainchild of just one artist. A whole class of 13 Auburn University art students along with three hired assistant artists were behind it. They
pieced it together like a puzzle, with segments of the mural designed on panels known as “mural cloth” placed into the wall.
It all came together under direction of Wendy DesChene, a Canadian artist who joined Auburn’s Department of Art and Art History in 2006. She said this was by far the largest outdoor mural she’s ever personally worked on.
“There were 16 panels to this mural and so … sometimes the panel was here and then the panel that would go right beside it would be in another room. We’d use things like Instagram layout to try and make sure they all lined up,” DesChene said. “I would say 90% of the painting was done in Biggin Hall, … and it was really fun because you’d come up to the third floor where the painting was happening and there’d be these big random panels.”
Other elements of the artwork include historic figures Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, agriculture professors at the-then Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University. The two colleagues were known for seeking alternative crops to cotton as well as techniques like drip irrigation. DesChene noted Washington was perhaps most famed for starting community supported agriculture programs, while Carver is internationally remembered for his work with peanuts and promotion of peanut butter.
“That’s why there’s peanuts (in the mural),” she said with a laugh. “Everything’s up there for a reason, except for maybe the cow … and the chicken, they kind of represent all cute farm animals.”
The students and other artists including DesChene began the mural in January at the start of the spring semester and have just completed it in late April. Myra Stephenson, a 2021 Auburn University art graduate with a concentration in painting, was among the contributing artists who worked with the class. DesChene brought her on having previously served as one of her instructors.
“It’s been really fun working with other people and seeing them grow as artists,” Stephenson said of her involvement in the project. “A lot of these people have never even painted before … so seeing them paint for the first time and (seeing them) being able to make things with their hands is fun to watch.”
She said her favorite elements of the mural are a dress she painted donning a Black rural woman farmer on one side of the canvas as well as a peacock outline in a vintage “peafowl sale” advertisement, one of several things artists referenced for the mural on display in the museum itself.
“It’s fun to think that something you’ve touched or worked on is going to be there for who knows how long and how many people are going to see it,” Stephenson said.
Auburn’s Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities led funding for the artistic effort, budgeting the project at a total $20,000 for the 35-foot long, 14-foot tall mural on the condition it would be completed in one semester.
“Our center has been honored to support this project with Professor DesChene and her students,” said Mark Wilson, director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center. “For them to be able to pull this off especially within a semester is pretty noteworthy I think.”
Buxton said the agriculture mural was a long time coming and that the final product strayed from initial plans for the project which were set back because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally, the art was to occupy the wall where Johnson’s sepia mural now spans, painted by an Auburn art class led by visiting New York artist Esteban del Valle, whose murals can be seen in cities like Miami, Florida; Brooklyn, New York; and Austin, Texas.
“They had come in and did the finishing of the wall, put the grid up, already had the paints here and had their power lifts up there to do the painting,” Buxton said. “And when they got ready to start, COVID hit and the university shut everything down.”
The opportunity rearose in fall 2021 for the university’s art students to contribute their work when Buxton was informed the university still had the money necessary to finance a mural for the museum. In turn, he informed the Department of Art and Art History that a small pavilion had been constructed for Old Nancy, the steam traction engine, and thus the concept behind the second mural was born.
“I said it’d be ideal to make that into an agricultural exhibit and it would be nice to have a mural on that wall,” Buxton said. “Wendy came with her class, and I took them through the museum and told them things I envisioned (being in the mural), but it was up to them to design how it looked.”
DesChene said the final design was focused on being commensurate with the colors of Old Nancy, which arrived not long after the class began painting.
“Our color scheme is based on making Old Nancy look the best it can, so there’s a lot of black, there’s accents of red and there’s green,” DesChene said. “Old Nancy was used as a generator for a sawmill for a long time, … and of course, lumber is also very important to this area as well. So everything in the mural has some kind of connection to (East Alabama).”
On a surface level, the mural may have been a medium for students to improve their painting abilities with public art, but those involved in the project say its aim was also about forging interaction between Auburn students and local public resources.
“We always want to have as many projects (as possible) where students and community members can benefit from each other,” Wilson said. “There’s no better way to do that than to give students a real-world opportunity to make sure that they get their own vision for what public art and community art can be.”
Stephenson concurred, saying the project was a great way for her and current students to all donate a gift they collaborated to create while learning about history in the process.
“It’s fun to think that something you’ve touched or worked on is going to be there for who knows how long and (who) knows how many people are going to see it,” she said. “It was really cool to see it all together because you really don’t think about how agricultural everything is while you’re here (for school) because Auburn’s (become) so business-like with apartments.”
DesChene’s class mural is also set to be commemorated during the City of Opelika’s event on May 12, with the general public invited to attend and enjoy free food and beverages.
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