New murals see beauty in everyone

Alayne McGregor

Claudia Salguero looks back with joy on her collaboration with downtown Ottawa Community Housing (OCHC) tenants.

“The thing that I love about my work is that I work with people from all kinds of backgrounds and genders and ages. The beauty of community art is that it is a beautiful tool with which you can bring people to work regardless of their background.”

The digital artist worked with more than 20 tenants last winter to create a mural in three panels, located on the exterior of the OCHC buildings at 415 MacLaren Street and 380 Somerset Street West. The mural’s theme is “I See Beauty, I See Beauty In You.”

The mural was officially unveiled August 20, although the panels were finished earlier. Salguero said they waited for the summer to allow “the whole community to be part of the of the inauguration.”

Tenants in the two buildings were invited by Centretown Community Health Centre staff to an out-of-doors, distanced meeting with Salguero to discuss a theme for the mural. At the meeting, she told them they would receive an art kit, with canvas, brushes, and paint, so they could create designs to be incorporated in the mural. She reassured the tenants they didn’t need to be artists to take part.

“The idea was to create something together, so what I always do with the community is that I just ask questions and invite them to talk about things important for them to create. We were talking about interaction, about COVID, about being isolated, about all these things that happen in a building like this one – and then one of the tenants said, ‘Well, I am a poet.’ ”

The tenant, Beverly, brought down a poem entitled “Picking Contentment.” It recounts what she had seen through her windows through 20-odd years living in that building, such as Chinese women dancing and doing Tai Chi, and the sun and the leaves and the snow and the sunset. The group took that as their theme, and agreed to paint what they saw through their windows.

After a few weeks, Salguero gathered together the paintings, digitized photos of them, put them together into three panels, and then painted further designs over top with a digital brush.

“When I was in front of all these paintings and looked at what they saw, then I saw them seeing each other right through the windows but all together. And I see all this diversity, and I see the kind of different persons we all are, and I see that there’s lots of beauty in all of this.”

When she brought the results back to the community, they named the mural “I see beauty, I see beauty in you” – “and so it’s a community creation where they put in their part, I put in my part, and then I added different kind of eyes symbolizing how different we are and how we can see things in a different way. But that doesn’t make us different, so we can still be together and we need to just learn to see the beauty in our difference.”

The mural panels were then printed on aluminum for display. But the tenants have retained their artwork and “the idea is that one day we can do an exhibition where they can expose their own creations together with the mural.”

Salguero has created more than 40 community murals in the city since 2014, 13 in conjunction with OCHC tenants. This is the first in Centretown.

“Through my work with the Ottawa Community Housing for years, we have proven that it is an amazing tool for interaction which is needed always.

“Even though we are living through a lot with the pandemic and lots of limitations, lots of challenges, when we work together, we can do a lot. [It shows that] the creativity of everyone, even not artists, [who] are trying to reinvent themselves as persons and professionals and business owners, has been incredible. These murals are part of that.”