During the ongoing process of transforming the former Hattiesburg American building on North Main Street into the Hattiesburg Community Arts Center, officials realized the necessity of making it easier for visitors to find their way around the 30,000-square-foot-building.
Enter the Yellow Brick Road project, a 30-foot-long mural painted by artist Ricardo Moody along the floorway to connect the back entrance of the arts center to the facility’s theater space. The mural was unveiled during a Friday ribbon-cutting ceremony which was attended by Mayor Toby Barker, Moody, and officials from the Hattiesburg Alliance for Public Art and VisitHATTIESBURG.
“When you inherit a building that’s 30,000 square feet … you’ve got a lot of open space, and there is not a lot of way-finding signage, and you really don’t know where you’re supposed to go for what event and what space,” Barker said. “So we decided, instead of investing in a lot of way-finding signage that you have to put on walls, that maybe we should just make a pathway from the door all the way to the theater space.
“And then as we got going on that, we said, ‘well, why don’t we make this an arts center built by artists?’”
As its name implies, the Yellow Brick Road mural is made up of a yellow path with splashes of blue, red and green making up visuals including birds and faces. The paint for the project was donated by Sherwin-Williams Paint Store in Hattiesburg, and the work was paid for by the 1-cent sales tax at restaurants, motels and hotels in the Hub City.
Nine submissions from artists around the southeast were accepted for the project before Moody was chosen for the job.
“My idea, especially with this being an artist-filled place, one thing I think about with artists is that we’re using our imaginations all the time,” Moody said. “I know there’s going to be a lot of different folks that come in here, whether it be kids or maybe people who don’t think they’re artists, but we all have imaginations that we can use.
“So I decided to do somebody’s face and their head, and the yellow that takes you down the pathway. It’s imagination kind of blossoming, so the birds kind of help represent that as well as it takes you into the arts center.”
The building, which was vacated in the summer of 2014 when Hattiesburg American staff moved to a new location on Mamie Street, was purchased by Dr. David McKellar. McKellar then donated the facility to the city of Hattiesburg to use as a community arts center under the direction of the Hattiesburg Arts Council.
In addition to the theater space, the building also features a “makers’ space,” where participants come in on the weekends to do woodworking, along with space used by the Hattiesburg Arts Council.
“Ricardo did an amazing job with the mural, of course,” said Marlo Dorsey, executive director of VisitHATTIESBURG. “I think this is just another testament to the talent that we have here in the Hattiesburg community, and one more reason why a community arts center like this really does celebrate the diversity and the artistry of our creative economy that’s here.”
