Latasia Dhami
Lead artist Jenie Gao painted in the church basement with members of local youth and community groups.
In early July, Madison artist Jenie Gao scaled scaffolding to install a bright mural on the parking-lot side of Trinity Lutheran Church between Winnebago and Atwood Streets. One morning, a couple walked by and struck up a conversation. Gao explained that the nonprofit she works with, Dane Arts Mural Arts (DAMA), had helped the church community conceptualize and create the colorful four-panel mural.
“At the end of the conversation, this guy goes, “I never understood why anyone would like to cover up such a nice stucco wall, but you made a believer of me,” says Gao, lead artist on the project. “So we had a conversion on public art and murals.”
The mural, “Journey to a New Beginning,” was officially unveiled on July 28 and blessed on July 29. It’s a tribute to Trinity Lutheran’s heritage, history and mission of service and inclusivity. The project was funded in part by an Eli Lilly Foundation Clergy Renewal grant that supports sabbaticals and sent Trinity’s “Pastor Sue” Schneider on an impressionist art tour of Europe last summer.
Latasia Dhami
The mural’s four panels feature symbols of immigration and inclusion.
Over the last year, Gao and DAMA worked with the church to develop the theme of the mural and paint it. DAMA works with artists to engage communities in producing works of public art that beautify shared spaces. The organization also involves young people from marginalized communities who have fewer opportunities to participate in artistic projects. Gao’s interviews with congregation members led to the themes in the mural. In the church basement, members of the congregation painted with members of local groups, including the Boy Scouts, the UW service learning program, the nearby Goodman Community Center and the Canopy Center, a child abuse treatment and prevention agency that uses space in the church.
“It’s a community-builder and it creates a sense of ownership and pride that you really can’t get any other way than doing something together,” says Schneider.
The left panel of the mural features a joyful woman in traditional Norwegian dress. Three birds eat from her hands against a wash of yellow, blue and green that spreads across the stucco wall. The imagery is a tribute to the immigrants who founded the church in 1906, as well as a reference to its name — Trinity. The next panel depicts a girl in a tutu, an homage to the children who dance in the church’s aisles to the sounds of the church choir. In the third panel, a child writes while sitting in the branches of an ash tree, symbolic in both ancient Norse and modern Christian spirituality. In the final panel, a multi-species flock of Scandinavian, native and migratory birds rises from a nest. In the nest are several hatchlings and an egg, which on closer inspection, resembles a globe.
Schneider believes the analogy of the nest is fitting for a church congregation that is driven to improve life in the community. “Our ministry is for a place where people get fed and rested, but that’s to feed them to go out and do stuff in the world,” Schneider says.
And she also hopes that passersby will feel like the mural is for them. “I really do think that people who live in the neighborhood will claim it as their own,” says Schneider. “Not just the people who painted it and the people inside the building, but the people who walk by. It’s part of their neighborhood, it’s part of the landscape.”
Editor's note: We corrected this story to reflect the artists' intention that the individual sitting in the tree in the mural's third panel is a gender-neutral child, not a boy.
