Murals of Chapel Hill

Laying the Cornerstone of Old East.

In 1941, commercial artist Dean Cornwell painted the earliest public mural still currently visible in Chapel Hill.[4] It depicts William Richardson Davie laying the cornerstone of Old East, the first building constructed on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It can be seen on an interior wall of the Chapel Hill Post Office.

Although Cornwell's artwork proves that murals existed in Chapel Hill before Michael Brown began painting, the beginning of the town's outdoor mural tradition is attributed to him. In 1993, Brown painted a companion mural on another interior wall of the building, titled The Auctioning of the Lots. It was completed for the town's bicentennial[5] and follows the style of Cornwell's piece.

Michael's Brown's first mural in Chapel, the Blue Mural features a night-time cityscape of Chapel Hill and was completed in 1989. It can be viewed from a public parking lot on the corner of Rosemary Street and North Columbia Street and is based on Brown's memories of Franklin Street's appearance when he worked as a dishwasher at Ye Olde Waffle Shop.[2]

Brown had graduated from the art department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1977 [6] and was looking for work as an artist when the opportunity emerged to complete a project for the Downtown Commission in Chapel Hill. Although Brown had some experience painting houses and had worked on mural projects in his youth, Blue Mural turned out to be the project that established his reputation in Chapel Hill and led to subsequent requests for murals in the area at a rate of about one per year.[2]

Since the Downtown Commission and the Chapel Hill-Carborro School System co-sponsored the mural, Brown was required to work with young student volunteers on the project.[7] Brown has stated that he chose a pointillist style for the mural because he thought the technique might help unify the contributions of volunteers who had little experience painting.[8] Brown also typically starts his murals by painting the background color and a grid, then filling in the grid from a planned drawing,[9] a method that can make it easier to communicate his design to volunteers and to supervise the project. The annual collaboration quickly became a spring tradition in Chapel Hill, with the last mural, Paint by Numbers completed in 2003.[10]

Brown's second mural, Hands, was completed in 1990 with help from 20 local students, 50 passers-by and one UNC basketball player.[11] It features several large handprint shapes that have been filled in with the participants' actual handprints and adorns an exterior wall of the Chapel Hill Cleaner's building on Franklin Street. Since the mural was once again co-sponsored by the Downtown Commission and Chapel Hill-Carborro School System and involved local volunteers,[7] the handprinting technique became a clever solution for the problem of uniting their contributions into a single artwork.

According to Brown, the large Carolina blue handprints were inspired by a student tradition for celebrating basketball victories at UNC. "I was struggling for an idea when an old childhood memory came to me," Brown said. "I used to enjoy walking past Sloan's Drug Store because you could still see some faded Carolina blue hand prints put there by students after Carolina's 1957 National Championship win."[11]

The 14 by 50 foot mural is in poor shape and is a candidate for the Painted Walls Project.[11]

Sea Turtles, originally painted in 1993 and restored in 2011, was painted at the intersection of North Columbia Street and East Rosemary Street. on the side of a parking deck. Brown originally wanted to feature dinosaurs but the Chapel Hill Design Review Board rejected the idea. Instead of dinosaurs, Brown adorned the 30 by 70 foot mural with another prehistoric animal.[12]

"First, in my youth, I used to keep pet turtles, sometimes dozens at a time," Brown said. "Another reason was that one of my elementary school teachers back in 1963 told me that during the age of the dinosaurs we here in Chapel Hill were under water. As a kid I enjoyed walking around uptown and imagining dinosaurs swimming past the planetarium. Maybe one still lived, I thought, in the UNC steam tunnels." [12]

In order to restore the mural, a local artist painted Pets in 2011 to raise money.[13]

Brown originally wanted to paint a 100 foot long chameleon, but when Chapel Hill's Appearance Commission rejected the idea as too scary and inappropriate, he settled on a 140-foot pencil.[14]

"They thought it might frighten children," Brown said. "They also felt it was an undignified image to have so close to a church."[15]

The mural, painted on a wall on the side of Henderson Street in pop art style, features the words "is mightier than the sword" upside down to prevent it from being considered a billboard by the Appearance Commission. The mural was originally painted in 1991 and restored in 2007. Brown said the idea came to him by accident.[15]

"Irritated with (the Appearance Commission), I went back to the drawing board, but nothing seemed to be working," Brown said. "I threw down my pencil in disgust. It rolled across the table and stopped on the plans."[15]

Sometimes known as Pantana Bob's for the name of the restaurant on which this mural is located, Paint by Numbers is the last mural Brown painted as part of the annual Mural Project supported by the Downtown Commission. He envisioned the 2003 mural as an homage to those who had helped him over the course of his work.[10]

"These 'painted painters' are about halfway through their project, so the mural becomes a painting about making a painting," Brown said. "I think it is a nice tribute to all the school kids who have helped me each spring for 18 years." [10]

When the Downtown Commission reformed to become the Downtown Partnership, the yearly project stopped.[10]

"I must have somehow sensed that this might be the last mural," Brown said. "The painted painters will never finish their mural, and I didn't want my program to be finished either."[10]