A week and a half after artists began the mural at the corner of U.S. Highway 160 and Main Street in Mancos, it’s finished.
“Anyone who drives by will see it,” said Mancos Creative District’s Executive Director Chelsea Lunders. “I’m really excited to have such an important wall feature Indigenous art.”
The Mancos Creative District was awarded an Arts in Society grant in 2020 to fund an artistic project that would impact society.
Originally, Lunders reached out to Cortez-based artist Keith Smith to create the mural, but he said he lacked experience painting on such a large canvas.
Smith recommended she reach out to Duane Koyawena, an artist with mural experience.
“When Duane showed me what he had in mind, I just was like, ‘I think this is it,” Lunders said. “It was a unanimous yes when we saw Duane’s design.”
So Koyawena spearheaded the project, and Smith worked with him, “learning and kind of shadowing him in the process,” Lunders said.
Though the Creative District had money for the project four years ago, the pandemic skewed the timeline, as did its location on the LivWell marijuana dispensary.
“Through Colorado law, it had to run through the company’s compliance department,” Lunders said. “Basically, they don’t want something that expressly draws children because of the nature of what they sell.”
Clara Martinez, a former board member with the Mancos Creative District who wrote the grant, said she wrote it with the intention of bringing Indigenous art to Mancos.
“Mancos is on Ute Mountain Ute land and there’s zero representation of that,” she said.
The town has two mottos. It’s “A Gateway to Mesa Verde National Park” and “Where the West Still Lives.”
“I have Native roots, and I’ve lived in Mancos for 34 years. Almost that whole time, I’ve felt the void of representation of the Ute people living here after the Ancestral Puebloan culture and still here alongside the more recent pioneer cowboy culture,” said Martinez. “Mancos isn’t just a cute cowboy town … there’s more to Mancos.”
Koyawena and Smith, the two artists who created the mural, echoed that point.
“Especially for Mancos, you don’t see much of the Indigenous-type style of artwork, it’s all Western themes, stuff like that,” Smith said.
They said their mural honors the original inhabitants of this area.
“These designs are from thousands of years ago,” Koyawena said.
The black-and-white design of the background is inspired by similar looking pottery from Mesa Verde that goes back 1,500 years, he said.
“It’s just really amazing that back then, that many years back, they were able to develop these kinds of patterns,” Koyawena said. “These are just some of the patterns I’ve seen on some of the pottery. There are others that are very intricate and that really amazes me.”
To get it right, a lot of measuring went into it, which was possibly the hardest part, he said.
“They used to just do this on their pots and their cups and stuff, probably without even thinking about it and just doing it,” he said. “I’m amazed by it.”
The waves and the hummingbird on the mural tactically point toward town.
“It kind of has a directional flow to it that we hope welcomes people and ushers people to turn into our town,” Lunders said.
She also said public art like this of course beautifies a space, but it’s more nuanced than that.
“Sure, it beautifies, but the social and the psychological and the physical benefits really go deep,” she said. “I’m always trying to champion for that and encourage people to take the time to think deeply or to spend some time with the artwork.”
Koyawena is Hopi, and he said to him, the hummingbird represents innocence and purity.
Smith, on the other hand, is Navajo, and he remembered something his grandfather used to tell his mother about hummingbirds.
Like a moth or a butterfly, hummingbirds have dust on their wings, Smith said.
“He told her, if they’re able to cup a hummingbird by the palm … with that dust on their wings, so when they captured that dust on their hands, they used to rub the dust on the horse’s legs to make it run faster,” Smith said.
As far as painting goes, the mural is finished, but Martinez said they’re talking about adding a QR code to it so people can stop and scan it to learn more about the significance of the art and its Indigenous roots.
“The mural isn’t totally complete because the informational piece is still to come,” she said.
Sometime soon – either this fall or early spring – another mural will be going up in Mancos, and this one will engage children, Lunders said. An artist named Dai Salwen will be creating it, and the location has yet to be determined.
These mural projects are largely made possible by a partnership between the Mancos Creative District and the town of Mancos, which prioritizes art in the town.
“We’re always looking for the spaces, the public spaces that are best suited for new pieces of artwork,” Lunders said. “We really want to keep it going. It’s always a matter of finding a good chunk of funding.”
