BURLINGTON — Gina Carrera is pressed for time.
The local artist and disability advocate is, at long last, restoring her 1992 “Rainforest” mural in downtown Burlington. But if there’s a cold snap, she says, the paint won’t adhere to the wall. She is determined to finish it before temperatures dip too low — by the middle of this week, she says.
After years of controversy around the murals that have decorated the wall on Leahy Way — and, for Carrera, years of fighting for artists’ rights to her original mural — the only thing standing in her way is the weather.
For now. At a Parks, Arts and Culture Committee meeting Thursday, city councilors discussed the future of Carrera’s mural, and whether the city will step back from that wall. Councilors still don’t want to.
In 1992, Carrera painted her expansive rainforest mural on Leahy Way, which connects Church Street and a parking garage, working with donated paint and without compensation. “It was a gift to the community,” she told VTDigger. “I really put my heart and soul into it originally.”
Now, she says, she feels “happy and excited like a little kid” as she works on the mural daily, in seven-hour shifts. In the upper right corner, she’s adding a flock of colorful parrots to a once-empty sky.
She is also repairing the holes and cracks left by the controversial “Everybody Loves a Parade!” mural, which, until last month, covered Carrera’s artwork. The parade was painted on a series of wooden boards, and then afixed to the brick.
The city commissioned Canadian artist Pierre Hardy to paint the parade mural in 2009, and it was placed over Carrera’s mural in 2012. Hardy’s mural featured a cast of French settlers and mostly white Vermonters, as well as a series of flashy, paid-for logos of local businesses. It was widely criticized in Burlington as racist and out of touch. Others pointed out the irony of that mural covering up the work of a local artist of color.
Activists defaced the parade mural several times over the years. In 2018, the city, under pressure, slated the artwork for removal “by 2022.” But spurred by additional protests, the Burlington City Council voted 11-1 in May to accelerate that timeline. Removal began the last week of August, and the parade mural is now in indefinite storage at the Burlington airport. A person has approached the city about buying the parade mural, councilors said Thursday.
Some Burlington leaders, such as city Councilor Zoraya Hightower, have argued that the city’s focus on the mural shows that it prioritizes optics over more serious expressions of racism and inequity in the city.
For Carrera, though, the removal of the parade mural — and the Parks, Arts and Culture Committee’s August decision to let her repaint her rainforest — is a long-awaited victory. Carrera has argued that the Visual Artists Rights Act protects her mural from damage or removal by the city. She never gave the city permission to install a mural over hers, she says.
The city’s plans are more uncertain. Before the arts committee agreed to have Carrera restore her mural, city attorneys wrote her a letter, saying the city has control over the wall, under an easement granted by the property owner.
“There are legal ways we can put another mural over her mural,” city attorney Eileen Blackwood told councilors on Thursday, but warned that the city should not repeat its past mistakes if it does so.
“The ‘Everybody Loves a Parade!’ mural issue is not done yet,” Ali Dieng, the Ward 7 city councilor, said on Thursday. “It is only done when we commission a new mural, in my perspective.”
Dieng and other councilors on the committee said they would want to involve Carrera in that process. Still, they have so far declined to grant her permission to paint a new mural for the city, as she has proposed, leaving the future of her rainforest mural uncertain.
“If the idea is to be inclusive, how do we defend the idea that Gina [Carrera] is the only artist that gets to be part of this?” said Joan Shannon, city councilor for the South District.
Councilors did not respond to questions from VTDigger at the meeting to clarify their reasons for commissioning a new mural for the wall.
Carrera says she does not understand the city’s fixation on her mural. “Why that wall? Why is everybody so focused on that space?” she said on Thursday. “Why would you want to put boards back up?”
For now, the city has no firm answers. And Carrera says she is focusing on the repair work ahead of her. “I am just happy that it will go in a positive direction,” she told VTDigger after the meeting. After all, she said, the weather this week has been unusually warm.