Bhubaneswar: The Temple City which is slowly emerging as the sports capital of India is all set to make its mark as the ‘Mural Capital’ with some of the finest contemporary 3D street artists in the world adorning the city with some of the top class murals.
Bakul Foundation has brought in Tracy Lee Stum, Anat Ronen, Zee Schindler, Julio Jimenez and Sayak Mitra for Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC’s) Street Art and Mural Project (STAMP) to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the city.
Earlier, Bakul Foundation had played a major role in the murals and street art scene of Bhubaneswar and had got the most prominent murals made for BMC in 2017.
In time for Hockey World Cup, Bakul has proposed to BMC to bring in the best global street artists to transform the cityscape. With BMC’s enthusiastic support, Tracy, who had visited Bhubaneswar twice earlier as an ‘Arts Ambassador’ of the US Government and conducted workshops at Bakul, agreed to curate a 3D mural project with other celebrated artists, all currently based in the USA. BMC offered them a huge canvas of the sidewalls of flyovers at the most prominent locations in the city such as Vani Vihar, Acharya Vihar, Jaydev Vihar and Indradhanu (ID) Market turning.
Within a span of 15 days, Tracy herself created one of her biggest 110 ft by 24 ft mural titled, “Over the Rainbow.” Surely, it’s a celebration the city’s development into a child-friendly smart city. It depicts huge figures of happy children playing on swings. It appears as if the flyover wall has opened up and we see the children playing with a rainbow in the backdrop, which curls back as a slide as well.
Anat, originally from Israel, painted another huge mural (70 ft by 28 ft) of the endangered pangolin at Acharya Vihar Square and it looks like a huge dinosaur towering over the tiny vehicles to those uninitiated to wildlife. It again creates a 3D illusion as the pangolin appears to be stepping out of the flyover. Aptly, it has been located close to the Natural History Museum because of which the pillars of the Acharya Vihar flyover had paintings of birds.
At the Jayadev Vihar flyover, which is close to the Hockey World Cup venue Kalinga Stadium, predictably the theme is hockey in the 3D mural by Julio, originally from Mexico. But he has made the inside walls look as if one is actually at the hockey stadium with a game being played and the field seems to extend till the road.
At ID Market turning, Zee Schindler from Brazil, took inspiration from the colourful Indian trucks and presented an illusion of trucks breaking through the flyover wall onto the road. In another 3D illusion, she is presenting huge eco-light bulbs plugged into the flyover wall but reflecting the ecological concerns through images of water conservation, wind energy etc.
PNN