 projects have different steps and the first one for me starts with an invitation. Somebody in the community invites you in and that happened for me several months ago when neighbors started talking to me after my last project and said hey could we do something like this in this neighborhood. Second step is contact. So that's when you reach out to everybody you want to work with and introduce yourself and explain what you're doing and everybody says I love this idea or who the heck are you why are you here and so and then the next step is research. So we're right in between contact and research. So research is learning about the place, learning what people value, asking questions about their ideas. For the research that we're doing here the thing that I'm really interested right now is where can the mural go. We have a really large neighborhood there's probably about a thousand residences in this neighborhood. It includes students and seniors and families. It includes assisted living and people living independently. It includes affordable housing and single-family homes and we share these pedestrian pathways as well as our streets. So the question is where would people like a mural and and if we're gonna make public art together where should it go where is it welcome and some people in the neighborhood welcome it and some people don't. So where do those people live and why did they feel the way they do. So those are some of the research questions I'm asking. What would the mural at this site do? What stories do you have about this place? Who would be the mural's audience and what concerns do we have at this site? So that's there too but just conceptually that's what interested me about that spot. This is such a neat way to bring people together with the art and different ages. What's special about the people in this neighborhood? What makes you feel welcome in your neighborhood? All the love your neighbor signs. Neighborhood watch, we protect each other. What friends a smile to your face? What would they like to do in the mural? What did they like to do in the neighborhood? Some people love to forage in the green belt and how did they want to feel when they visited the mural? They wanted to feel friendly and a love of nature. They wanted to feel happy there and some of the other people they saw in the neighborhood were seniors and people playing Pokemon Go. So those were some of the ideas that came last time and then what we did was we sorted those ideas right picked up all the papers and moved them around into themes and themes started to develop. Some of those things were all these ideas about neighbors and celebrating each other's cultures. Interestingly I don't see a lot of drawings about that so this is an idea that people could really develop with some drawings today and that would be wonderful. Like the idea of having elements in the mural that are intergenerational so that we are really inclusive and so that over the years children who are growing up with this mural can be a part of creating it and then looking back on it you know many many years later. When were the saleboats? Because saleboats won't go well. But then it goes into the hacienda and it becomes a tree so there's your trunk of the tree and the branches are spiraling out but in the black you'll see it's also allowed. For us today and I have three designs that are all based on your beautiful drawings. Each one has a different story. They come with similar ideas that came from the neighborhood. Concepts like loving your neighbors, spirals, the power of water, the power of love, some of the drawings that individual people made or concepts that came from them. Each one of them has a theme that became the main theme and other themes that became minor themes within each one and so I'll take a little while to take you into each one of the worlds and then we'll divide up in groups and chat and then vote. There is the option for people to go absentee this time so we're definitely going to eliminate one by the end of today so we'll be down to two. The pieces I've done in the past some people remember the story and it's important to them and what's especially the most important to them though is the story of the people whose drawings they remember right? Like that's in a way more important than the story of whether it's about elements or whether it's about love or whether it's about the river is that when we walk through it we remember the drawings and the relationships that we built both when we designed it and when we paint it. It incorporates a lot of different cultural symbols different ideas just from around people in the neighborhood. So this whole project has kind of been an amazing way for this community to get together and kind of just join and work on something collaboratively so yeah it's been pretty awesome. It's one of the great things about the project is that it was so everyone was so welcoming and they really brought out the best in everyone and let us all participate no matter what our artistic talents are. Yeah I've got two kids here they were also involved right from the beginning so they were cutting out the stencils and now and the pride they get as they see the bits they say I did that bit I did that bit that's kind of a and it'll be here for 10 years they'll see they'll be she'll be going to college and she'll still see art out here and that's quite cool. Happy that I got to be a part of this and I hope that maybe we do something like this in my neighborhood one day. All the different ages of people coming from all different streets and just coming out to participate in something that will be of benefit to everybody. It's been the most exciting thing is that it's it was such a community effort. Danielle was especially impressive because she gathered everybody around and huddled up and seemed pretty calm and you talk about a leader where she just said yeah this is easy we got this and she wanted to make sure everybody was emotionally okay and if there were any frustrations or fears to voice them and that made all the difference and I think it's showing.