Rogers Spool & Wire Company mural
Acrylic paint
10' x 17'
The Spool Building, Rogers, Arkansas
My first look at the exterior elevation drawings for the Ritter & Spool apartments reminded me of late 1800s industrial and factory buildings. I was studying them because I'd been commissioned to conceptualize and execute a decorative mural and signage for the buildings in downtown Rogers. I didn't know the architect Rob Sharp or his work at that time, but I loved the classical forms and materials of these structures amid the more modern styling and contemporary materials common as Northwest Arkansas rapidly develops.
Curious about the architecture, I found a 2008 article highlighting Sharp’s work in Fayetteville, and I took note at the time of one memorable observation by the writer:
"Sharp’s firm has no signature style – put Lacuna and Three Sisters side-by-side for evidence of that – but he does have a consistent vision and philosophy of creating vitality and energy through a building’s or a neighborhood’s environment."
But my first real taste of Rob’s imaginative vision and philosophy came moments later when I continued to look at the West façade of the building the mural was slated for. Near the roofline, above the third-story windows, emblazoned on the brick in large capital letters were the words “ROGERS SPOOL & WIRE COMPANY.”
I may or may not have audibly exhaled “Whaaaaaat?,” but that was exactly my mind’s response. Perplexed curiosity. I didn’t understand, but it excited me.
What I did understand, naturally, was that these yet-to-be-constructed buildings were not intended to be, and will never become, a spool and wire company. They were only ever going to be a part of Rogers’ future at that point, yet this simple puzzling flourish of the architect’s imagination thrust the buildings into a unique, almost theatrical relationship with Rogers’ past that seemed to demand accounting for. Like an actor in a strange costume entering the stage, it’s instinctual to wonder who their character is and what action they are amid. If they are wearing shining armor, you’d be wise to consider them a knight.
So, with the future material presence of the buildings and their implied past functioning as both an urban stage and a creative prompt and armed only with a fictional company and the name “Ritter & Spool,” my first step in the process of designing the mural was writing a backstory to give it a creative foundation. Not having a signature style means I require information from the site to give the artwork direction, and in this case, I was going to need to come up with that information creatively.
The story that emerged from that creative exercise became the tale of an entrepreneurial 19th-century immigrant family and the business they built, set as faithfully as possible within the context of the area that would become downtown Rogers, and the world it existed in at that time. While creatively accounting for the presence of these new buildings I included several absurd details in the narrative as clues to the story’s fictional backbone.
I then allowed the story to shape the form and content of the mural, much like my movie prop-making days, conceiving it like an illustration or set piece featuring the main characters of the anecdote within a multi-layered, multi-media creative work. The mural’s heroic portrayal of the common worker is inspired by the legacy of Mexican muralism, especially Diego Rivera’s Detroit Institute of Art murals, American regionalist murals, and the Public Works Art Project murals, a New Deal program that employed thousands of artists during the Great Depression and commissioned over 15,000 murals.
The mural was also designed to function as a public enticement to investigate deeper, actively involving passersby in the discovery of the theatrical fable behind the image. If you’re reading this because you scanned the unique QR code, I applaud your curiosity!
I’d like to extend my thanks to the Rogers Historical Museum for research assistance as I developed the project.