Omaha By Design: Omaha, Only Better

by Ken Mayer

Meg Saligman’s 22,000 square foot “Fertile Ground,” dedicated last month, is the largest privately funded outdoor public mural in the country. Commissioned by the Peter Kiewit Foundation, the project is intended to foster a sense of pride in our public places.

The gargantuan size, while impressive, isn’t as important as the mural’s rich content. Saligman spent more than a year researching and planning the project, digging into the archives at the Durham Museum, the Douglas County Historical Society and the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center and taking thousands of photos of today’s Omahans.

This magnum opus got me thinking about walls. Walls are something of a problem in Omaha, particularly downtown. In almost every Omaha by Design Place Game workshop in the district, participants talk about the walls.

Mostly because so many are blank.

They are blank because we have created a kind of checkerboard streetscape that alternates retail and office buildings with parking lots. Our love affair with the automobile and need to store them when we aren’t driving has created a crazy urban quilt.

So what can we do with all those blank walls?

Certainly murals are one answer. But we have way too many blank walls to commission works by professional artists. Maybe we ought to encourage the citizen artists among us to get busy on those walls.

Schools and community groups could take on the task of expressing themselves on a blank wall or two in the neighborhood. You may be screaming that I’m proposing a sort of officially sanctioned graffiti, and you would be right.

Why not have a couple of city sponsored graffiti walls?

Several cities worldwide issue artists permits and invite them to express themselves by painting on walls. Typically, a governing body oversees the process, and painting is allowed only during daylight hours on weekends and holidays.

Now, I don’t think for a minute this is going to reduce tagging or other vandalism, but I do think the graffiti of hip hop culture is becoming a legitimate art form. Witness the work of expatriate Jon One from New York whose spray can street art now commands high prices in Parisian galleries.

Mutual’s wall filling projection
If that’s still not to your taste, how about something a little less permanent? Take, for example, the technique used at the Mutual of Omaha home office. It’s hardly art, more like turning the building into a giant billboard, but the use of modern and powerful projection to fill a wall is worth a look.
Professor Ali Momeni, who teaches in the Department of Art and the Collaborative Arts Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, is using the technique for Minneapolis Art on Wheels (MAW). He founded the organization “to diffuse art, engage with community and claim/explore urban public space for artists, students and residents with the use of bike-mobilized media disseminators.”

His crews project their creations in real time on large surfaces using laptop computers and projectors mounted on bikes. You can see a video of MAW in action by clicking here.

Maybe with a little organization and willpower, Omaha can eliminate its blank walls, if only for an evening.