Year: 2024

Enjoy the view with local murals

By John Fladd and Zachary Lewis

On the exterior walls of buildings in Concord, Manchester and Nashua, you can find a wealth of murals, some commissioned by organizations or businesses, others semi-spontaneous expressions of artistic passion.

David Hady is one of the people behind some of Manchester’s murals. As Creative Director of the Orbit Group in Manchester he helps up-and-coming artists, including street artists, get a toe-hold in the notoriously difficult art field.

“Part of what Orbit Group wants to do is give back and contribute to the Manchester local arts community,” Hady said. “One of our arms does property development and another one of our arms is centered on the arts. We’re trying to find emerging artists who are looking for stepping stones to cross this bridge so that they can step toward their professional career.”

One of Orbit’s early projects was revitalizing Cat Alley in Manchester.

“Cat Alley was originally painted in 2011,” Hady said. “We did a local [artist] submission and we had around 60 people apply. We chose 18 artists and we cleaned up the alley, primed it all, then prepared the different spaces for each artist to come in and create their own version of cat artwork. We kind of gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted, as long as it was cat-centric. They created a bunch of different styles, colors and aesthetics, which is really nice.”

Another project is an Art Walk Scavenger Hunt Map, to help visitors to Manchester find murals and other outdoor art they might not be familiar with. It is a map of downtown Manchester, with 42 works of public art plotted on it.

“We’re trying to create multiple avenues of things for people to do downtown,” Hady said. “This just kind of layers into an afternoon. You have lunch, you go to a Fisher Cats game and then maybe you do this art tour and it’s all kind of centered within a one-and-a-half-mile radius. It’s got a bunch of great locations of sculptures and mural works.”

James Chase is an Associate Professor at New England College, and the founder of Art Builds Community, an organization with a mission to connect and empower the community through the Arts. Chase said that one of the organization’s strengths is its grass-roots nature.

“It’s led by artists and creators and community members through shared art experiences,” he said. “I think the art that is out in the public has been blossoming, especially over the last few years, as residents are comfortable lending their walls for voices to be heard.” Public acceptance of street art has been growing, he said.

“When I first started doing murals, it was a little, ‘Oh, it’s graffiti! I don’t want you to put a mark on our building and degrade it.’ And what I’ve noticed now is a lot more people are coming to the table to bring change and to make areas destinations, to have them be conversation pieces,” Chase said.

Chase sees public art as a form of dialogue that a community has with itself.

“I think it’s really important to have a [clear vision of] where you can bend [and] where you can’t. But everyone has been so accommodating. And even if people don’t get to physically sometimes pick up a paintbrush, they get to see their voice, their mark. And lots of times they’re actually painting too, which is even more amazing,” he said.

He cited two murals under traffic bridges along the Piscataquog Rail Trail on the West Side of Manchester.

“Once again, it was a collective group of people,” Chase said. “What I love about those types of projects is when people come together, something new is going to happen. Just from afar, I had helped, my students were going to do that project and just with the timing it didn’t work out.” Eventually, he said, a group of local artists and community members ended up painting the murals.

Amber Nicole Cannan was one of the organizers responsible for getting the murals completed. She sees them as another example of a community dialogue.

“We wanted to make sure we were including lots of community members,” she said, “[to make sure we included a] wide variety of opinions and perspectives, and we all worked together to get it done. We grabbed anyone who would walk by and asked them to participate, and a lot of people contributed to it.”

Cannan said that conditions were not ideal for painting a mural. “It was a unique challenge,” she said, “because obviously that spot is far from any electrical hookups or water or bathroom.” Eventually, she got permission to park at an apartment on the street above and used her car as a power station for the equipment the artists needed. Cannan said there was another unexpected complication. “We did run into a small snag. We were told the city would prime it for us. But they painted it with anti-graffiti paint.”

Despite technical challenges, and some backlash from some community members, for the most part the murals have been embraced by the community, including an unexpected part of it.

“It became really interesting,” Cannan said, “because while we were there, notes would get left on what we were working on, like the paint pens and Sharpies. It was mostly from the transitory population. And they just talked about how beautifying that space made them feel thought of. They said they saw themselves in it, and they just felt the love from it. And that was really important to us.”

Yazamine Safarzadeh sees a growing and surprising amount of support for street art. She is the Special Projects Coordinator forPositive Street Art, a group based in Nashua dedicated to bringing under-represented voices to public spaces.

“We have a very good relationship with the city of Nashua,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a copacetic relationship between the city and an arts organization which, in turn, benefits the city. We can’t do what we do without the support of the community.”

Safarzadeh said Positive Street Art has spent the past few years building a relationship with people who rarely see themselves in the art around them.

“We’ve had multiple-year relationships with nonprofits who trust us and let us come into this space with the demographics that are highly, highly vulnerable because we too are from those demographics. So that’s a really unique thing about this organization is you’re, you know, we’re serving the community, but we’re also of the community’s working class,” she said.

Local mural artists have seen more and more support in recent years from the business community, as well.

815 Cocktails & Provisions is a plush bar in downtown Manchester. There are comfortable chairs and sofas, the lighting and the music is soft and the drinks innovative, like the Smoked Lemon Drop or the Moxie Mule. And then there are the murals. Roughly two thirds of the bar’s wallspace is covered with floor-to-ceiling murals.

They were painted by Nashua artist Jason McDonald, who goes by the name JayMac and paints under the name @The_Backstah. He has been an artist for 30 years.

“I started off as a graffiti artist in Boston as a young kid,” McDonald said. “I actually got in a bunch of trouble when I was younger for graffiti, and then as I grew older and got more into artwork, I turned it more, honed it more professionally and positive and turned it into a career.” After years of work, he has developed a following and is becoming a known name in the art world.

“I do everything from custom canvases all the way to big murals to my own clothing as well,” McDonald said. “I have all kinds of projects, anything from cartoon to realism to flowers to lettering. I’ve done custom cars. I’ve done projects for Porsche and Acura. The most recent big wall I did was for UMass Memorial for their mental health building. They have an outside fresh air space, and I redid the basketball area. We did a positive hopscotch and a mural going over the whole side of the building.”

JayMac sees Manny Ramirez from Positive Street Art as a guiding force in local art. “His stuff is fantastic,” he said. “Manny’s probably, as far as this area, the only other artist that I’ve really seen who has an in with the city where he’s been able to get some really prime locations for his murals.”

James Chase summed up the burgeoning local mural scene: “I see all these pieces of the puzzles really fostering connections,” he said, “and then giving more platforms for things that we don’t even know about yet.”

New murals

Arts Builds Community held its second Community Canvas Mural Festival in August, resulting in new public murals in Manchester.
At the Boys & Girls Club of Manchester at 555 Union St. you can see the work of Sophy Tuttle (560 Union St.); Jason Naylor (161 Lowell St.); and Alex Ferror (163 Lowell St.), according to ABC.

At 77 Amherst St., behind the Palace Theatre, there’s the work of Liz Pieroni, Nick Alexander, Jozimar Matimano and Ambar Ruiz. (All photos below by Zachary Lewis.)

Cat Alley, Manchester

Cat Alley is located on the west side of Elm Street in downtown Manchester, next to Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester, 836-6600, bookerymht.com). It was originally painted with cat-themed murals in 2011. The Orbit Group commissioned independent artists to paint new murals in 2022. For more information on this project, visit orbitgroup.com/cat-alley-revival. Photos by John Fladd.

Arms Park pillars, Manchester

The traffic pillars in Arms Park (10 Arms St., Manchester) that support the Notre Dame Bridge were painted by a collaboration of artists and Art Builds Community. Photos by John Fladd.

Manny Ramirez

Manny Ramirez (@phelany) is the co-founder and Creative Director of Positive Street Art (48 Bridge St., Nashua, positivestreetart.org). He is one of the leading muralists in the business. Photos by Chris Boncoddo.

Jyl Dittbenner

Jyl Dittbenner is a prolific local artist and muralist. She posts her work online at JylDrawsEveryDay.wordpress.com. Here are some of her notable murals. Photos by John Fladd.

Union Street, Manchester

Union Street is a great place to see surprising murals.
There is a pair of excellent murals on the rear wall of the Seven Days Market (360 Union St., Manchester, 622-4331). Photos by John Fladd.