Thanks to New Times Web Editor Jonathan McNamara, you can now watch Phoenix muralist Francisco Garcia creating the Blue Boy image that so freaked out the little town of Pine-Strawberry, Arizona, that he was ordered to take it down and replace it with the image of a cabin. McNamara squeezed four hours of video into about a two minutes, so it's an easy watch.
Francisco Garcia Paints "Blue Boy" from Jonathan McNamara on Vimeo.
Garcia's mural, of which the Blue Boy was just a part, is the subject of an item in my Bird column this week. School officials insist the move was not racist. But statements they made in e-mails to Garcia reveal that race and ethnicity were issues in the decision for the school, which only has one African-American kid, and a few Latino children.
You can check out more of Garcia's work at his Myspace page myspace.com/grafftruth. He's a talented cat, and he tells me that he's planning to make prints of the Blue Boy image to sell online. Hey, why not T-shirts, with slogan like, "Too blue for Pine," or "Censored in Strawberry"?
I'll post some of the other images from the mural shortly.
