Art can serve a lot of purposes. At Cedar Park, art inspires — and protects.
On Monday afternoon, the University City District, Cedar Park Neighbors, and artist Lawren Alice all gathered at Cedar Park Pedestrian Plaza to debut Alice’s ground mural titled “Groove and Flow,” which will also serve to block vehicle traffic and shield park visitors and pedestrians.
The 24-by-30-foot mural, filled with bright, nature-inspired colors, is part of a lengthy process to permanently connect the eastern tip of Cedar Park to the rest of it. It’s the successor to the monarch butterfly sticker art that graced the park in 2019.
“This [area] used to be a slip lane that then you could take Catharine Street to go back west,” said Nate Hommel, the director of planning and design at UCD. Now it’s enclosed by large planters and foundation stones from the first skyscraper on 3rd and Chestnut streets.
Hommel said that community members called for help around eight years ago to close the gap on the east side, so people in the park or shopping nearby would not be vulnerable to turning cars.
The ground murals at Cedar Park are not the only creative endeavors to promote traffic safety in the city. In May, UCD added non-permanent sidewalks at an intersection near the Penn Alexander School. Design firm Tiny WPA also placed street barriers with bench attachments last year to create safer outdoor spaces for residents in Fishtown.
While the murals help ensure resident safety, they also have another purpose. President Cat Hofmann, of Cedar Park Neighbors, said that placing murals in the park’s gap is a way for residents to “visually reclaim this space.”
“We wanted to see how we can make the park and the neighborhood better by making more spaces for people,” Hofmann said, “and instead of something that looks like the regular asphalt in the street, how can we make it feel more cohesive as a park?”
Alice, the muralist, believes her previous work at Cherry Street Pier made her the right candidate for the project.
While Alice is used to painting from a geographic, central point, Cedar Park Neighbors requested that she make the painting visually appealing from every direction for the sake of people walking in different directions.
“This was the first time that I did radial symmetry, so I worked in the round,” Alice said. “It was a really new challenge for me, but I really like the way that it turned out.”
Cedar Park Neighbors also stressed the importance of reflecting the nature of the community through the painting. During the six-day process of creating the mural, Alice noticed a house on Catharine Street painted with bright colors, mainly blue, green, and yellow. It was an “oh my God” moment for the artist in the best way.
“It kind of felt kismet that [the mural] just matched the neighborhood naturally,” she said. The same goes for the title of the mural as a passerby approached Alice and told her it was “really groovy.”
The unveiling ceremony for “Groove and Flow” was mostly attended by UCD staff and members of Cedar Park Neighbors. Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier and the artist’s loved ones also showed up, but people in the area mostly peered over at the gathering from their cars and homes. A small child stopped to touch the mural during an afternoon stroll with her family.
“It’s already making kids think, ‘I can have fun here’ … and that’s a win,” Hommel said. “We don’t want this to be separated anymore. We eventually want this all to be Cedar Park.”
