KEWANEE — The writing is all over the walls in this Henry County city.
This isn’t about a decline in industry and commerce in rural America, although Kewanee has seen its share of that.
This also isn’t about population loss, although the number of residents in Kewanee peaked almost 90 years ago (about 17,000).
It’s about how some Kewaneeans who wanted to restore a little pride in their hometown decided to throw something at those blank walls and see if it stuck.
It did. They and plenty of others seem to like the looks of it.
Once the self-proclaimed hog capital of the world, Kewanee might be better identified today as the public mural capital of west-central Illinois.
In and around the downtown area of this city of about 12,500 residents are 18 murals, painted during the past six years.
Some of the murals are splashed directly on the sides of buildings. Others are painted on panels attached to the sides.
All are the work of the Walldogs, a loose national and international confederation of muralists and sign painters. They stage public mural-painting festivals in municipalities around North America.
Each Walldogs mural in Kewanee, founded in 1854 about 50 miles northwest of Peoria, highlights an aspect of local culture or history. Notable people from the community’s past also are depicted.
The most recent mural was painted a few weeks ago during the Prairie Chicken Festival, an annual event the artwork has helped spawn. (Kewanee is a Native American word for prairie chicken.)
Mural No. 18 is about 12 feet high and 30 feet wide. It depicts the Kewanee Black Knights Drum and Bugle Corps, whose heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s.
During a sweltering week, Walldogs and volunteers painted the mural on panels affixed to a building at 102 W. Third St. None of the Walldogs or the local hosts appeared to get hot under the collar, evidently.
“They’re the best bunch of people. So nice,” said Dianne Packee, a member of the committee that helped bring the Walldogs to Kewanee.
“We did this and the Prairie Chicken Festival because we love our town,” she said.
Packee saw what the Walldogs did during a mural festival a decade ago in Pontiac, where she once lived. She thought it might be a good thing for Kewanee, where she helps operate the local Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership.
Others in the city concurred with Packee. So did at least one person outside of it.
“The idea is that towns can use these meets and resulting murals as a way to revitalize industrial/Rust Belt towns through art and art tourism,” Kewanee native Joy Hernandez stated in an email.
Hernandez works in television in Indianapolis. But in her spare time, she’s an artist who helped found an Indy gallery.
Painting is Hernandez’s forte. Earlier this year, she helped lead a Walldogs festival in New Hampshire.
The Kewanee meet took place in 2013. More than 200 Walldogs painted 15 murals. The festival was the product of a civic fundraising campaign of more than $100,000.
“There were hundreds of people at midnight, still walking downtown, looking at all these murals,” City Councilman Steve Faber said. “We had people from all over stop.”
Since then, smaller groups of Walldogs have returned to stay in local hotels or with local families and paint more murals. That included the most recent endeavor.
The Black Knights were selected through public vote, according to Hernandez. The ballots were dollars — it takes about $10,000 to finance a Walldogs mural.
Other finalist subjects were the local history of baseball and boxing.
Among subjects immortalized on city walls are the long-closed Kewanee Boiler Co. and Walworth Co., one-time top manufacturers in the city; the defunct Sandy’s fast-food chain, which Kewanee natives founded in the 1950s; and late Kewaneean Neville Brand, a motion picture and television actor.
“We’re telling a story,” said Scott “Cornbread” Lindley, a Mount Pulaski-based Walldog who helped design and coordinate the Black Knights mural. “But we’re still using our skills as hand letterers and pictorial painters, and we’re combining all that to tell that narrative.
“I think the story is super important.”
Stories Kewaneeans shared with Walldogs about mural subjects sometimes found their way into the final products. Like the name of someone’s great-uncle who worked on the railroad, or a shamrock for a Kewaneean of Irish descent who liked a particular beer.
“They just incorporated so many things that the public was telling them into a lot of these paintings, just to make it as personal as possible,” retired local teacher Roger Malcolm said.
Perhaps ironically, the newest mural is emblazoned on a building that houses Spets Brothers Inc., a firm that sells carpeting and ... paint.
But the Walldogs brought their own supplies, along with the requisite enthusiasm.
“Artists’ temperament can be somewhat erratic and emotional,” said one of the muralists, Murphysboro resident Christine DeShazo. “But to come together and work with like-minded people from all over the world, there’s just an energy to it that is unlike anything I’ve ever gotten to experience before.”
That energy isn’t always found in villages and cities where the Walldogs might be welcome, according to Nancy Bennett, who founded the group in the early 1990s.
Although Bennett is the top Walldog, she traveled from her home in Centerville, Iowa, to join DeShazo and Lindley and others who worked on the most recent Kewanee mural.
“Lots and lots of communities ask for us, but not very many of the ones that ask actually follow through,” Bennett said. “Because they don’t have the drive or the capacity to care about their town, the pride in their town and the willingness to do the hard work that it takes.
“So Kewanee’s a pretty special town.”
Special enough that a few thousand dollars already have been raised to fund the 19th mural, which is to be painted next year. Theme and location are to be determined.
Faber suggested the murals have boosted the Kewanee economy, although no hard and fast numbers have been calculated. That’s OK with him and other committee members, he said.
All in all, it isn’t just another brick in the 165-year-old wall of this community.
“It’s not about money,” Faber said. “It’s about having our town look nice and people coming to our town to see what we’re doing. That’s what it’s all about.”
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| Yesterday at the town's farmers market I bought huge organically grown tomatoes. They are fantastic. |
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