Main St. Street Mural
Photos by Sarah Overbeck
Earlier this month the Town of Carbondale Board of Trustees approved a resolution which bundles together a series of Main Street closures and outdoor expansion opportunities for small businesses as a means to reinvigorate the economy due to the pandemic. The “expanded” block between 3rd and 4th will close entirely every Friday and Saturday night from 5-9pm for the foreseeable future.
The Carbondale Creative District will be decorating the Main Street expansion the coming weeks. We want to give a big shout out to the Town of Carbondale, Equus Wealth Management and DHM Landscape Architects for helping in this endeavor. Many communities around the country are trying this method of street closures, or one way streets, to keep businesses afloat.
From the left: Stanley Bell, Chris Erickson. Photos by Sarah Overbeck
Painting the Town….
As we are still living in the unknown, in terms of returning back to business as we knew it before the pandemic, we are working hard to make the most out of this situation. Implementing some tactical urbanism, we’ve enlisted the help of two of our well known and well loved local artists, Chris Erickson and Stanley Bell. They will each design and paint a side of Main Street on the expanded block between 3rd and 4th street, a collaboration we’re beyond delighted to see. As the mural is painted on the actual street it’s considered to be temporary, but we hope something like this can happen again in the future.
About the Artists
Chris Erickson is an artist recognized for his captivating use of color through contemporary works that blur the line between sculpture and painting. His work encourages the examination of color as expression and its relationship to human behavior. Currently a resident at SAW of Carbondale, Colorado, his recent bodies of work expose inspiration in graphic design, graffiti art, and fine art techniques. SuperULTRAmega is an interpretation of distilling the distracting noise of the modern technological world into a tenacious display of energy. His mole©ules are a series of character like icons that represent the magnification of various groups and beliefs, often speaking to systemic issues.Chris's imagery continues to be informed through skate culture iconography, translated through the mediums of spray paint, acrylic, canvas and panel.Erickson’s work is on display at KEEP contemporary of Santa Fe, and can be found at @chrisericksonart.
Stanley Bell’s work draws from a range of sources, including pop culture, graffiti, outsider art, illustration, and design. Drawing upon his urban upbringing and subsequent move to the mountains, Bell’s work intermixes hallucinatory fragments of the urban landscape with the surrounding atmosphere and environment. More recently, these paintings have taken the form of detailed, colorful, microscopic visions of the energy amidst clouds and buildings, attempting to describe energy physically, graphically, and symbolically.
Stanley Bell was born in 1977 in Dallas, Texas. His work has been exhibited publicly in the Dallas Museum of Art, the Aspen Art Museum, and collected privately throughout the country. He is a previous Arts Recognition Winner in the Visual Arts for the National Endowment for Advancement in the Arts. He currently resides in Carbondale, Colorado. Follow him at @stanleybellartist