Today we’d like to introduce you to Greta McLain.
Hi Greta, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I came up in the Minneapolis Public Schools and had an incredible elementary art teacher, Denny Sponsler. In 4th grade, he had our class design and paint a large safari scene in the hallway and I was like, “what is this?!” Painting large, in a public space, with my friends??? I’m in! It also introduced me to the power that community muralism could have to seed ownership of a place, (I felt like that hallway was mine!) and offered a shift from “look at me, I made this, to look at what we made, together!”
I ended up going to school at the University of California Davis and being “adopted” by my mural mentor to this day, Malaquias Montoya, Chicano artist, and highly prolific and successful poster artist and community muralist. His guidance and continued example to this day have guided and shaped my career as a community muralist. He was the one that first sent me back to Minneapolis (when of course I wanted to stay in California) he encouraged me to activate my community and start there.
I have now been painting murals for 20 years and I’m proud of the community muralism that we have sown in Minnesota and am now honored to do most of my mural work outside of Minneapolis. painting and also teaching community mural practices in communities across the US! Go Murals Go!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
When I first started murals there were very few women in muralism and in public art in general. That was one big obstacle that I was constantly running into at the beginning, people coming up to me and asking where the muralist was, etc. Once I was getting larger commissions, I was really excited to get more women on my crews, more women trained on lifts and painting large scale, to start to shift this vision of who can do large-scale public artwork.
There was also very little real funding to do community process/outreach and organizing through muralism at the beginning. So as we worked on shifting who got to participate in public artwork, opening it up to the greater community, I was always proposing larger and larger budgets, trying to convince the market of the value of high quality, community-engaged public art, and the difference it can make when we use high-quality materials, longer/more in-depth community process, and pay our muralists better.
I’m excited to say that there is now way more consciousness about the value of community muralism!!
Yay!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a community muralist and public artist. I am a working mom and small business owner. I am creative, an educator, and an organizer.
GoodSpace Murals was created to hold the whole mural-making team, from project management to the people who prime and cut the canvas, to those that are teaching in the classroom, to those that are painting on the wall. Sometimes we are a giant crew and sometimes it’s just me, but always our intention is to center on the positive, in the Good. Where are we going? How can we seed hope for our communities? How can we use art as a tool to connect to our neighbors, classmates, and local government, while giving us space to take on large complex community narratives one brush stroke at a time?
Our mission is to create high-quality, large-scale community-driven public art that seeds community ownership and agency in public spaces, uplifts women and community voices, and empowers youth while transforming walls into bridges for positive change and connection.
What matters most to you?
One of my key values in that of connection. How do we connect and get our hands dirty together, try new things and be vulnerable, meet people that aren’t just like us and still find common ground and respect and spaces to listen to one another?
That’s what matters most to me, and I love using murals as an excuse to get people together and introduce something colorful, beautiful, and hand-made, into our public, often shiny and seemingly perfect/neutral/glossy public spaces. I’m a painter, and I love painting murals, but what I really care about is connection.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.goodspacemurals.com
- Instagram: @goodspacemurals
- Facebook: @goodspacemurals
Image Credits
Noelani Marie Photography
