Cason began with the history of a decaying Duke St and a young man asking for help or dreaming of a community engaged in saving and transforming a once proud neighborhood of strong and faithful workers, family members, professionals and children. Faith needed to be included in this mural, but today faith means so many different things and takes so many different forms, so the artists approached it from a more generalized concept of faith. The boy is praying and from his mind we see either the actualization or his dream of the community joining together because of the boy’s call to save and grow and find the pride that was feeling lost as the community took a downward turn.

 

You can see graffiti drips behind the boy that eventually get cleaned up on the right side of the image. There is also the inclusion of swirls that carry the story from left to right but also provide an area of mystery and personal interpretation. The same can be said for the futuristic element that crosses across the image, starting at the Duke St sign and moving to the Marcellus sign where we see the flowers of progress growing, alongside the workers and tools that connect the demise of Duke, through the landscape of “raw potential” and to the symbol of abridge from the old into the new, and again with the futuristic element, into the future.

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