Page 6 - Downtown Newark

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Catherine Czerwinski started the Newark Beautification Project in 2015.
The City as Canvas
Idol hands make memorable work through lively murals.
In Newark, Czerwinski is responsible for the salute to Delaware’s music scene on the side of Wonderland Records, as well as murals on the side of the Panera Bread building and on Home Grown Café.
“Downtown Newark is looking a little brighter these days,” says Sasha Aber, the owner of Home Grown Café. “Catherine turned a dark and dingy alley into a nice, inviting walk from one of the many city parking lots to the front of our restaurant. Beautiful painted flowers and bees line the walls, and lights hang from a trellis.”
Bringing art to unconventional canvases is not a new idea. The more than 30-year- old Mural Arts Philadelphia is the nation’s largest public art program. In Newark, murals began appearing in the early 2000s, most noticeably on the railroad bridge and abutment that links Kirkwood Highway with Main Street (Del. 273).
ake a stroll down Main Street, and you’ll spot the features that define a small town, including
Initiated by the Newark Arts Alliance, the welcoming artwork depicts life in the city. Images include skateboarders and the classic cars that have cruised Main Street for generations.
Artist Dragonfly Leathrum and her colleagues, Trish Kuhlman and Debbie Hegedus, have memorialized old landmarks, including the State Theater and the Malt Shoppe, on existing buildings. Leathrum also painted a lively jungle scene in Traders alley.
Now it’s Czerwinski’s turn to leave an imprint. Although she loved art as a young student, the St. Marks High School graduate studied marketing at Clemson University. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she worked in a hotel in Costa Rica, where she developed a cottage business painting signs. “It wasn’t until I was living in a foreign country that I felt I had the opportunity to pursue that work,” she says.
shop awnings, church steeples, alfresco dining and an abundance of brick buildings with ornate rooflines. But if you look carefully, you’ll spot the unexpected: blue herons, wildflowers, ancient sycamores and Clifford Brown, a Wilmington jazz musician who died in 1956 at the age of 25.
The unanticipated images appear on
a series of murals sprinkled throughout downtown Newark, and if artist Catherine Czerwinski has her way, there will be more of them.
Czerwinski is spearheading the Newark Beautification Project, which she started in 2015 to bring public art to her hometown. Her website, idolhands.org, details projects not only in Delaware but also in Costa Rica, where she first devoted herself to art.
N6 I www.DelawareToday.com I MAY 2017