ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Al Wilson, above, is the driving force behind the Beyond Walls mural festival that is unfolding in the streets of downtown Lynn.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
LYNN — You may have seen him running through the downtown, sleep deprived and overcaffeinated, while catering to the needs of almost two dozen prodigies and fielding technical problems with aerial lifts.
The vision behind Beyond Walls, Al Wilson, has a plan to make the city more vibrant with the ongoing mural festival. But it goes deeper than celebrating Lynn’s culture with art.
Wilson shares a vision with local officials to make the city a destination where people will stay to eat, drink, shop, and spend money. He envisions murals, antique signs, and bright lights sparking a Lynn renaissance.
“Lynners who have left Lynn have heard about this festival and come back to the downtown,” said Wilson. “They’ve stood in front of these murals with tears streaming down their faces. They said they never thought this could happen in Lynn. That’s powerful.”
Beyond Walls is a group of Lynn residents, business owners, and public art enthusiasts working to create a sense of place and safety in the downtown. As part of the project, a 10-day mural festival transforming 15 of the city’s brick walls into masterpieces, is underway.
A Walpole native, Wilson, 40, visited Lynn as a child for soccer games, taking note of the diversity and culture of the city early on. As an adult, he spent many afternoon commutes stopped in traffic in the city, gazing at empty buildings and depressed neighborhoods that he didn’t feel matched the city’s potential.
While living in Florida, he witnessed the revitalization of the once-dilapidated neighborhood of Wynwood in Miami as it was transformed into an eclectic district in the urban core of the city.
The allure of street art sparked the transformation of a neighborhood that was once filled with neglected warehouses and vacant factories into a mecca for the arts, innovation, and culture. Today, the 50-city-block district is filled with art galleries, retail stores, antique shops, artisan restaurants and bars, small businesses, and one of the largest open-air street-art installations in the world.
“Suddenly, people were traveling there to see the art and other businesses started sprouting,” said Wilson. “The economics were right — you could open an eatery and it would be successful. For whatever reason, that had me picturing Lynn.”
Wilson later attended a lecture at Boston Architectural College focused on King’s Cross, an inner city area of London, which was being portrayed as a youth- and culture-oriented neighborhood.
“My family is from England,” Wilson said. “I knew King’s Cross. I had been there in 2010 and it was known as an area of prostitution, crime, and drugs.”
Wilson set out for London to see the transformation himself. Again, Lynn flashed through his mind.
He drafted a four-component plan that includes a 10-day mural festival, the installation of retro neon signs and colorful lights beneath dark underpasses, and the creation of a sculpture to pay homage to Lynn’s rich industrial history as the home of America’s jet engine technology.
His plan was presented to city officials and the Lynn Business Partnership, an association of CEOs in the city. Charles Gaeta, the executive director of Lynn Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development, quickly jumped on board. Partnering with Neighborhood Development Associates, a nonprofit organization, made the project eligible for grant programs.
A Beyond Walls Committee formed to focus on crowdfunding and raised more than $80,000 from about 1,400 donors, and $50,000 from MassDevelopment’s Commonwealth Places program.
“Charlie Gaeta, not even knowing me, saw my vision for what it was when others didn’t,” he said. “Without Charlie, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Two associate directors, Pedro Soto and Amanda Hill, joined the team. Hill even left her job to focus on the project full time, Wilson said.
Community partners joined the cause, including building owners who offered up their brick walls as canvases, local businesses that made financial donations, and Item CEO Beth Bresnahan, who took on the task of making connections.
Bresnahan secured financial commitments from various organizations and supplies and labor from painter and electrician unions, Wilson said.
“There are many unsung heroes in all of this — Beth is one of them,” he said.
Gordon R. Hall, president of the Hall Company, donated a wall, office space on Union Street, and financial contributions to the project. Hall, who is also the chairman of the Lynn Business Partnership, said he was driven to contribute because he felt Wilson’s plans struck the right tone for Lynn.
“I don’t know what it was when Al blew into town,” said Hall. “First, I thought the idea was a really good one. It was different than what Salem or some other community might pursue. It seemed interesting and Al was the guy to pull it off.
“He’s unusual,” said Hall. “You don’t meet many people like him, I don’t think. He’s a visionary, but he’s also grounded enough to handle the nuts and bolts.”
It wasn’t until after the artists began working that Hall realized that the art was bringing more than culture to the city.
“One thing I didn’t understand before, but have come to appreciate, is how much this is building community,” said Hall. “There are people hanging around Lynn who don’t usually. The people I’ve talked to are enthusiastic about the art being there.”
In preparation of the mural festival, which concludes on July 23, more than 60 applicants were narrowed down to the 20 artists chosen to create 15 murals throughout downtown Lynn in just 10 days.
“The real challenge was narrowing it down,” said Wilson. “The artists we picked were chosen because they best represent the culture and the demographics of downtown Lynn. We chose artists that reflected the community.”
To celebrate the city’s sizable Cambodian population, the Beyond Walls team sought a Cambodian artist, and were willing to fly one in from Southeast Asia to do the job, said Wilson. Luckily, they stumbled across FONKi, who lives in Montreal.
FONKi was born in France of Cambodian parents, who were refugees of the Khmer Rouge genocide in the ’70s. He discovered graffiti at age 15 and gradually grew into one of the most prominent figures in Montreal’s new generation of graffiti artists.
This week, he’s leaving his stamp on Lynn with a portrait of a woman on a 1,709-square-foot brick wall of a canvas at 22 Munroe St.
The buzz Beyond Walls staff hoped to create is already in full swing, with small businesses seeing a noticeable increase in demand.
“We are normally closed on Sundays,” said Kato Mele, owner of White Rose Coffeehouse in Central Square, who decided to open up her shop last Sunday. “We typically have no foot traffic (downtown) on Sundays. Once the mural festival started, we saw an increase. On Saturday, from the time we opened to the time we closed, it was packed. We did three times as much business on Saturday than we did on the Saturday before.”
Mele said an interest in the festival is drawing people in. She hopes regularly scheduled events downtown will keep them coming back.
“A lot of people who have been coming in live in Lynn and have never been here before,” she said. “They don’t come downtown. We also had a lot of people coming from surrounding towns and Boston.”
In addition to the $1,000 payment each artist will receive at the end of the festival, they were each given a $450 Visa gift card to spend however they choose. Wilson said it’s not lost on him that the artists have decided to spend the money in the city’s coffee shops, bars, and restaurants.
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.
