Sharon Tang works to install a new mural on the Regent Street side of a Bayview Foundation apartment building in Madison on Sept. 23.
Bayview Townhomes, one of the most diverse communities in Madison, is now also home to a massive mural that features ideas and actual bits of painting from 120 of those tenants.
The artwork is titled “Hope Finds a Home” and is on the Regent Street-facing side of a new apartment building at 720 W. Washington Ave. It's the first in a series of public art projects that will be featured at Bayview Townhomes across from Brittingham Park on Madison’s south side.
A trio of Madison artists — Amy Zaremba, Sharon Tang and Alicia Rheal — have been working on the mural for months. The three artists also painted a mural displayed on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Discovery Building.
Zaremba owns Zaremba Art LLC and has been working with Tang and Rheal for years.
Creating the mural has been challenging because of the size of the wall it is occupying, Zaremba said. The mural stretches across about one full story of the building, on a side that also includes balconies and windows that had to be designed around. Then, the three artists used construction lifts to glue the painting to the wall — after the artwork was created in a workshop off-site — an especially difficult task on windy days.
“The gluing process is similar to wallpapering, but the glue we use is a pure acrylic and so it’s totally permanent. It’s weatherproof,” Zaremba said. “But with the windows and balconies it’s a big process and … trying to wallpaper off a lift with paper flapping in the wind was challenging. But it’s working.”
The artists began work on the final product at the end of July. They began to lay out the design on polytab mural fabric in a shop they rented.
“So we had a big, big shop where we were able to lay it out on the floor and kind of use a grid method to transfer the design,” Zaremba said. “And then once those pieces were prepped and mixed with all the paint colors, we took that back to the Bayview community and had a whole week where we were available in a community room and we had different groups come and paint.”
In total, 120 people came through to add little pieces of paint designs to the project before the team rolled it up and took it back to the shop to finesse the tenants' contributions into the overall design.
Zaremba hopes to have finished installing the mural on the side of the building by this weekend, after a challenging several weeks of rain and wind.
The Bayview Foundation put out a call for artists to work on the mural in early 2023. Zaremba was chosen and began working on a design in May.
“Bayview has an art committee. They have a number of public art projects that are in the works,” Zaremba said. “This is the first one. So they wanted the first one to be a big statement piece on a big intersection and they wanted it to be driven by the community’s ideas.”
Zaremba said it was fun to hear the perspectives of a wide range of age groups representing the residents.
“We met little kids and got their ideas and drew pictures with them,” Zaremba said. “We met with seniors who we made wait for their bingo. We talked about design ideas and they were like, ‘We’re ready to play bingo,’ but they had lots to contribute. We met with teens and families.”
They then compiled all of those ideas and each came up with design ideas. Those ideas were reviewed by Bayview’s arts committee, which chose the design.
Bayview was originally developed in 1971. Fifty years later in 2021, Bayview broke ground on a $60 million redevelopment aimed at providing better housing for the existing residents of the townhomes, as well as the ability to serve at least 200 additional tenants.
Nearly 50% of Bayview's residents are Hmong and the rest of the community also includes large groups of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Latino and Black residents.
Bayview also provides affordable housing to more than 90% of its residents, meaning its rental rates fit the budgets of people making 30% to 35% of area median income. That is the most needed type of affordability in Madison, according to the city’s housing department.
The Bayview Foundation, led by Alexis London, has solicited the visions and wishes of residents throughout the redevelopment process — starting even before any architectural renderings or concepts had been made.
“Ensuring that our work as a housing and community service provider is rooted in values that uplift the community and make Madison a stronger, healthier and more vibrant city for everyone is at the heart of what we do,” London said. “This mural is an example of a strong community engagement process that presents themes of home, safety, growth and family.”
Bayview Foundation followed the same model for the murals that had followed in designing the redevelopment.
“They wanted to show that they’re still here,” Zaremba said of working with Bayview. “There’s so many new developments that tear down the old and in this one they are tearing down old buildings, but that community isn’t changing. It’s just getting better.”
-Nicholas Garton