From left, Chris Lambert, Morgan Boswell, Lori Thompson, Leslie Babcock, Shannah Dean and Shanna Coulter work on completing the mural.
RAILROAD STREET MURAL: BY SHANNA COULTER
Artists create for many reasons. The past year was filled with unrest, wrecked plans, chaos and loss. So, when I heard about a call for artists for a downtown mural project in Canton, I thought it could be something to bring Cherokee County art teachers Shannah Dean, Chris Lambert, Lori Thompson, Leslie Babcock, MaryJo Mulvey and me together, something we could
collaborate on to help us process the challenges. When I saw the wall, I immediately envisioned a parade of legs through history, marching toward the present moment. Sometimes, ideas crash like lightning, and this was one of those times. A friend suggested I enter, and then Susan Jones also contacted me about it. I took that
From left, Shannah Dean, Chris Lambert and Shanna Coulter pose in front of a stretch of the mural. 14
AROUND CANTON | July 2021
as confirmation I should go for it. MaryJo wasn’t able to work on the mural, but Susan joined us, and I invited the new art teacher at Cherokee, Morgan Boswell. And everyone was in! In early November, we were notified by the city that we were in the top three for the mural, and they wanted a life-size sample of our idea. Shannah and I created the panel and started planning how we actually could pull this off. I made a 3-inch by 45-foot paper scroll, and we placed critical dates and photos we wanted to include from 1800 to 2020 on the 540-foot wall. Then, we were awarded the bid! We met with Canton City Council members, artists and historians on the steering committee, to show them the plan. We discussed the overall concept, dates, critical events and legends, and rummaged through exhibits and resources at the historical society, taking photos to work from. In early February, we bundled up and went to work. We understood the overall vision, but the wall seemed longer than when I first saw it. It had 25-foot concrete sections, so we used them to break up time by decades, and began sketching out figures. As we worked, with our faces inches from the concrete wall, people would honk as they drove by.
