Bellwater's riverfront trail has a new look this week, with nine large-scale murals now lining the Kestrel River Greenway between Downtown Core and Foundry Row, the result of a city arts grant that very nearly didn't survive last year's budget season.
The murals, painted across the concrete flood walls and pump-station facades that line the greenway, were unveiled Saturday during a ribbon-cutting that drew several hundred people despite a steady drizzle. The project paired nine artists, five of them Bellwater natives, with sections of wall ranging from 40 to 160 feet long, each responding to a theme organizers described as “the river remembers,” an exploration of the waterway’s industrial past and its more recent revival.
Bellwater Museum of Art curator Priscilla Adeyemi, who helped select the artists and coordinated the project with the city’s arts office, said the installation was designed specifically to bridge the greenway’s two very different neighborhoods. “You start the walk in Downtown Core, past the murals about the courthouse and the old rail depot, and by the time you reach Foundry Row you’re looking at pieces about gene sequencing and wind turbines,” Adeyemi said. “The whole point was to let the murals tell the story of how this city got from one end to the other.”
A grant that almost didn’t survive
The $340,000 grant funding the project, drawn from the city’s hotel-tax-supported arts fund, passed the city council by a single vote two years ago after several members questioned whether public art spending was appropriate given other budget pressures. Council President Walter Kowalczyk, who cast the deciding vote in favor, said he has no regrets watching the finished work. “I took some heat for that vote,” Kowalczyk said at Saturday’s unveiling. “Standing here today, looking at what these artists did with a stretch of wall most of us walked past for twenty years without noticing, I’d cast it again.”
Not every council member has come around. At the time of the original vote, Council Member Gary Petrowski argued the money would have been better spent on treatment services in Cedar Hollow, and he reiterated that view this week, though he said he did not object to the finished murals themselves. “I don’t dislike the art,” Petrowski said. “I dislike that we found $340,000 for wall paintings the same year we said we couldn’t find funding for a second outreach van.”
Public art and public health funding shouldn’t have to compete against each other for the same pool of money. The fact that they do says more about how this city budgets than it does about whether murals are worth painting.
Gary Petrowski, City Council Member, District 4 (Cedar Hollow)
The artists behind the walls
Muralist Ines Carrizo, a Bellwater native who painted the installation’s largest single panel near the Foundry Row end of the trail, said she wanted her section to acknowledge the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation without either romanticizing or condemning it. Her mural depicts factory workers from the neighborhood’s ironworking era alongside laboratory researchers rendered in the same visual style, connected by a single continuous river current running through both scenes.
“I grew up two blocks from where I painted that wall, back when it was still mostly boarded-up storefronts,” Carrizo said. “I wanted the mural to say that the people who worked here before deserve to be in the same picture as the people working here now, not erased by it.” Carrizo’s panel sits roughly a quarter-mile from the site of a pending lawsuit over affordable-housing commitments at a nearby apartment development, a dispute Adeyemi acknowledged has shadowed some of the neighborhood conversation around the project.
“We didn’t want to pretend that tension doesn’t exist,” Adeyemi said. “If anything, Ines’s piece is the one mural in the series that looks that tension straight in the eye instead of looking away from it.”
What comes next
The museum plans to offer free guided walking tours of the mural series every weekend through the fall, led by museum docents and, on select dates, by the artists themselves. Adeyemi said the museum is also developing a companion audio guide, narrated in part by Foundry Stage Company actors, that visitors can access by scanning a code posted near each mural.
Kowalczyk said he expects the council to consider a second phase of greenway murals within the next two budget cycles, extending the series further into Riverside Heights, though he acknowledged that vote would likely face the same funding debate as the first. “I don’t think that argument ever fully goes away, and honestly, I don’t think it should,” he said. “We should have to justify this kind of spending every single time.”
For now, Adeyemi said the museum is simply watching how the murals change the way people use the greenway. Early foot-traffic counts from the city’s parks department show a roughly 20 percent increase in trail use since the murals went up compared with the same period last year, though officials cautioned that the ribbon-cutting weekend itself likely inflated the early numbers.
Several of the artists said they hope the project leads to steadier funding for public art beyond a single grant cycle. Carrizo, who has painted smaller commissioned pieces around the city for nearly a decade, said this was the first project that paid her enough to treat the work as a full-time job for the six weeks it took to complete her panel. “Most of what I’ve painted in this city, I did on nights and weekends around a day job,” she said. “This is the first time the city actually paid me like the work mattered.”
- Guided weekend walking tours begin this Saturday and run through the fall, departing from the museum’s riverfront entrance.
- A scannable audio guide featuring narration from Foundry Stage Company actors is expected within the month.
- The city parks department will publish a full foot-traffic report on the greenway’s mural corridor by the end of the season.
Adeyemi said the museum has already fielded inquiries from two other artists interested in contributing to a possible second phase, though she cautioned that nothing has been finalized pending the council’s future budget decisions. “We’d love to keep going,” she said. “But we also know exactly how that first vote went, and we’re not taking a second phase for granted.”