There is an alley in downtown Lafayette, behind the old Mulhaupt's building at 5th and Ferry, with a 38-foot wall of stained concrete block that most people walk past without looking at. We are going to paint a seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting on it.
Vanitas on Fifth is a 570 square foot hand-painted mural, free to see, open every hour, with nothing between you and it. The image comes out of the Dutch and Flemish vanitas tradition, where painters filled a canvas with cut flowers at their peak precisely because cut flowers are already dying. That is a strange and beautiful thing to hang in a museum. It is a stranger and better one to put on an alley wall that weathers in the same weather you do.
The design is original, built from public domain floral sources and typography of my own. The painting is by Pamela Bliss of Indianapolis, who has been making public murals across Indiana for decades and who is the reason this can be done at all.
Your money goes to the artist's fee, to preparing and priming a wall that badly needs it, to a protective topcoat, and to a reserve so the mural can be recoated years from now instead of being left to fail. Building owner Michael Gibson gave us the wall.
Every dollar is tax-deductible through Fractured Atlas. Nobody will ever be charged to look at it.