After a year on the building’s exterior, the inaugural artwork in the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art’s annual mural project was removed in mid-January 2022. The mural, Pacificaribbean, was designed and painted by Juan Alberto Negroni in January 2021. Bilingual catalogs and limited-edition prints featuring Pacificaribbean’s nature motifs are available to purchase in the SLOMA Bookstore.
Pacificaribbean’s concept was inspired by Juan’s upbringing in the city of Bayamón near San Juan in Puerto Rico. In Juan’s work, representations of the luscious local ecology of Puerto Rico capture a resilience of nature that beckons us to bravely encounter and embrace the unknown. Pacificaribbean invited us to celebrate and cultivate a relationship between our inner landscapes and the landscape around us and, even amidst times of separation and grief, find windows of hope.
A selection of visitor images shared over the past year is below.
SLOMA’s next edition of the annual mural project will be Calafia was Here by artist Erin LeAnn Mitchell. Calafia was Here references the fictional black warrior queen and the unrecorded histories of Black Americans in the West. The design is a nod to Erin’s existing textile practice and utilizes quilting motifs and ornamented designs. It will be painted by Erin, with the help of two student assistants, beginning on February 3 and concluding on February 24, 2022. It is the second in a series of murals that cover all four sides of the museum’s building in downtown San Luis Obispo.
Scheduled to change on an annual basis, the Museum’s mural project selects emerging artists with diverse backgrounds from across the country.