Painting the Town Red (and Blue and Yellow and...)

Art major Urdilinya Smith spray-painted graffiti on the side of Mahoney Hall - and she got paid to do it. 

Then, over the next two weeks, she helped artist Sophy Tuttle cover up the graffiti with a mural depicting six plants and animals on the Massachusetts endangered species list. In the process, Smith learned how Tuttle uses a graffiti grid to scale up her mural designs, as well as how the artist adjusts paint colors on the fly. 

Smith was paid for two weeks of work as a site manager by Project LEARN, a city nonprofit that organizes ArtUp Lowell, a community coalition that sponsors mural projects around the city in partnership with Beyond Walls, an arts nonprofit in Lynn, Massachusetts. 

In August, ArtUp Lowell and Beyond Walls brought nine muralists to the city to work on eight new murals, including the two at UMass Lowell, as part of a four-month mural festival spanning five Massachusetts cities. The project was part of UML’s ongoing effort to bring more art to the campus. 

Tuttle’s mural faces Broadway and the South Campus quadrangle, while the internationally renowned Puerto Rican muralist “Bikismo” (Joshua Santos Rivera) painted a Caribbean hermit crab, or cobito, on the Pinanski building, facing VFW Highway. 

Tuttle, who once lived in Lowell, has painted murals around New England, from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, to Harvard University’s new campus in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. 

“I like the physicality of mural painting—being outside and the big movements—and I enjoy the interactions with people stopping by,” she says. “I like that it changes the space, and becomes a landmark that people recognize. And hopefully, it gets people to stop and think.”