Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit. -Henry David Thoreau

Murals: Parade of city's history

By Mike Rutledge
Post staff reporter

On the same day organizers unveiled five large murals that portray moments in Covington's past, they also announced plans for the next 11 murals, to be painted over the next two years.

Next year's murals will show the engineering principles behind the Roebling Suspension Bridge; Covington's art history; its religious history; Northern Kentucky's African-American history; and the 1897 reconstruction of the Roebling Suspension Bridge.

Observers of this year's batch found them even more visually impressive than last year's images, of bison crossing the Ohio River at Covington, and frontiersmen gathering at the same site in preparation for Indian raids in Ohio.

The most moving of this year's murals is the haunting image of Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave who killed her young daughter to prevent the child from returning to a life of slavery when slavecatchers approached on the Ohio side of the river.

 The image shows Garner and her children in a group that crossed an iced-over Ohio River after midnight in January 1856. The mural's muted blues, grays and whites show the backdrop of Covington's snow-topped skyline at the time.

"It was 3 o'clock in the morning, they were up all night. It was 10 degrees," nationally renowned muralist Robert Dafford explained this week as he added details to the painting in a cold wind himself. "It was a dark night. It had snowed and snowed and snowed through the evening."

Garner, whose life became the basis for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, and who will be portrayed in an opera commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera, was trying to kill her other children when her captors stopped her in a Cincinnati home. She was sent back into slavery and died two years later in Mississippi.

By coincidence, her mural, just west of the suspension bridge, is almost directly across the Ohio River from the under-construction National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which can be seen from the mural.

"This is some nice, historic stuff. And so historically correct," said Charlie Keeton of Newport, who has visited the artworks daily. "I'm just impressed as hell with the Covington Blue Sox. I knew nothing about that."

This year's murals eclipsed the visual drama of the two painted last year, because the subjects allowed more stunning images.

"After seeing last year's, I thought, 'How can you outdo that?' But I was in error," Keeton said.

"Mr. Dafford is one hell of an historian," Keeton said. "He's probably more of an historian than he is an artist, and he's a hell of an artist."

The murals, painted on the floodwall from RiverCenter to the Suspension Bridge, make a chronological march forward through time, beginning with the bison. The plan is to end them in 2005 with an image of "Covington Today."

"The cool thing about it is most of these murals will be set in the same setting," said Traci Griffin, a co-chairwoman of the mural project, which is organized by Legacy, an organization that cultivates leadership skills of people under age 40.

"Like where the Buffalo Road was, that's how the topography looked in 8,000 B.C.," she said. "And then as you go down, the Meeting at the Point (with the Indian fighters), that's the same view of that.

"The whole series down the line is that same site, but you see how the development has come, the buildings have gone, the way the topography has changed," Griffin said. "If you just follow it all the way along, you'll see how the Covington riverfront has changed from the way it was in the beginning to where it is today."

Last year Legacy found two sponsors for its first summer of painting. Organizers also obtained permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Covington in just a few months. Toyota will sponsor the African-American history mural, and local developer Oakley Farris will sponsor the bridge engineering mural, but otherwise, sponsorships remain.

Sponsorship of large murals costs $35,000. Smaller ones cost $20,000. Organizers also are looking for help supplying meals to the painting crew over the next few months. People interested in sponsoring can call Trent Lucas at (859) 655-5272.

This year, five murals were painted. It would have been six had the weather cooperated, Griffin said.

"We had over 45 days that they missed painting because it was just too wet," she said. "I know people think that it was a rainy summer, but you don't know how rainy until you're marking it on the calendar every day that you're paying to house and feed artists who aren't painting."

"Each (mural) just continues to impress us with the amount of research that he puts into them and the detail," Griffin said. "These works of art, that is exactly how it looked at that particular point. Every building that's in those paintings was actually there. It's not just up for artistic impression. He spent hundreds of hours doing research, between him and the historians that we had working on the project."

Mural enthusiasts also are excited that the city seems to be accelerating plans to create a park in front of the large artworks, she said. "We think the murals are a big catalyst," Griffin said. "Obviously having that parking lot in front of it does not do the justice needed for such wonderful pieces of art."

Here are the murals Griffin said are planned for painting in 2005: Daniel Carter Beard and the Boy Scouts; the old Latonia racetrack; the Great 1937 Flood; Christmas Shopping at Madison Avenue and Pike Street around 1945; and Covington today.

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