Today we meet with Robert, William and Robert Jnr from Higher Art, an airbrush company in Gary whose work we first noticed at the MJ memorial, to discuss our plans for a mural on the side of ReMake Estate. After a very serious and lengthy discussion, many photographs of each other, and an exchange of a very official looking contract they agreed to paint us a mural. The business was run by Robert, but we were particularly impressed by his 14 year old son Robert Jnr who produced some pretty lushious looking pencil drawings as he proudly showed us in his portfolio. We then discovered that he was the mastermind behind the mock up for the MJ banner (that you could have your photo taken in front of at the memorial) and told him how impressed we were.
While much of Gary is in economic dire straights, airbrushing is a thriving economy, perhaps due to the high homicide rate. There are many R.I.P. t-shirts and banners being painted, probably some of the most common slogans they paint are along the lines of “Gone But Not Forgotten”, “Gone Too Soon” and “We Wont Forget You”. There was even a whole box of photographs of all the people who had passed away and friends or family members had gotten custom airbrush jobs done, but not yet picked up their photographs.
Our mural is going to be their first MJ mural in Gary, which they are quite excited about – as are we. We are bringing together the “un-poisoned soup” AND The Wiz by producing a design which incorporates “Gary’s favourite son” – MJ as the scarecrow, the Tin Man (of course – it’s a Steel town after all) and the Lion serving soup.
Work on the garden starts in earnest tomorrow with a pile of hay and soil arriving ready for us to lay out the garden beds. Today Bruce, a local contractor, put a gutter on the house and connected up a 50 gallon rain harvester – so next rain we will have something to water the plants with. On Sunday Gary local, Monica is helping us plant some edible plants.
Besides the work on site at ReMake Estate, we have a hectic schedule with 11 interviews lined up over the next week including; Kelechukwu – a local poet, activist and public speaker; Jonothan – from CDOP an amazing young local activist talent; the guys who lives across from MJ’s childhood home – who were selling the bootleg merch at the Memorial; Jim Nowacki – a seemingly very vocal activist and local character; Mr Barnett aka Sam’s dad – who was one of the 1000 white people to vote for the first black Mayor of a major American city; and Kim – from CDOP among others. And inspired by the Emerald City in The Wiz, we have some new props to work with in our film…
