In Touch with Southeast Iowa
On today’s program we talk with Denise Roth, writing teacher at Highland schools and three of her students; Danika Kraus, Jack Krotz and Jared Diaz about their poetry and earning awards and being published in the Lyrical Iowa competition.
One thing that makes Rochester stand out compared to other cities is the abundance of public art: Murals are on the walls of many buildings and painted electrical boxes adorn multiple streets. If a local Gofundme is successful, the city will gain another mural, this one honoring Black Liberationist Malcolm X and Rochester civil rights leader Connie Mitchell.
In November of last year, Ephraim Gebre, Darius Dennis, Jared Diaz and Dan Harrington painted the massive John Lewis mural, which is on State Street. The 3,000-square-foot mural was painted in honor of Lewis, who had connections with Rochester, after he died last year.
click to enlarge PHOTO PROVIDED One afternoon last spring, during what appeared then to be the darkest and loneliest days of the pandemic, when nearly everything was closed and the infection rate was climbing quickly, I took a drive to the old Fedder Industrial Park on the east side of the city and just parked. The exterior of the complex, a former factory on East Main Street that has become a repurposed refuge for artists, craftsmen, and creatives, is a canvas for some of the best street art in the city, if not the country. I had come to see “Avery,” the towering spray-painted mural of a young woman that graces a brick silo on the site. She was created by the Canadian artist Jarus six years earlier, and her quiet confidence and beguiling beauty has yet to fade.