Ellamonique Baccus, the art consultant and installer for the Carl Brewer mural, scrapes the front side of the building. She’s preparing to hang colorful panels that are about 5x11 each.
“There is thick, thick paint that I've been trying to chip off. I don't know how many decades of paint, but it will be transformed. We're not going to take away these hexagons because it is characteristic of the building and it's familiar, but the mural will be applied over them,” Baccus said as she steadily chipped away the paint.
“The original plan was that there were two Ghanaian artists that were going to come to Wichita and be able to paint this mural directly on the wall, but because of the political climate and all the things, we weren't able to secure their visas for them to travel to the US.”
Instead, Baccus, who has worked with mural cloth for 15 years, is putting it up. The mural cloth was taken to Ghana by lead artist Larry Poncho Brown of Baltimore, Maryland, who’s works have been published in Ebony and Jet magazine and shown on TV shows like “A Different World” and “The Wire.”
“He has a relationship with these artists and other apprentices who were able to all work together,” Baccus said. “I think it was about 13 people working together on painting this mural in a very short period of time.”
The mural is 100 feet long and 11 feet high with vibrant colors.
“You can see the brush strokes,” Baccus said. “You can see the artist's hands at work and in order for them to paint this, they didn't put it on a wall. They bent at the waist. They crouched down over it in the sun with the bugs in the whole environment. And so, every color that you can think of is incorporated in this mural. There are traditional African masks, there are Adinkra symbols.”
Baccus said Adinkra symbols are from the Akan people, Ashanti, seen on textiles, and are incorporated into the background of the mural.
“Each symbol has a different proverb or meaning that goes along with it, so the mural communicates a message on multiple levels,” she said.
The mural reflects Carl Brewer tracing his ancestry to Ghana.
“He's Asante and Ga ... those two people groups, and so all of the artwork either is from people who share that same ethnic identity, or those symbols and textiles and cultural identities are tied to those ethnicities in the artwork as well,” Baccus said.
Once Mayor Brewer identified his ancestry as Ghanaian and these particular groups, Baccus said he met with the Wichita African American Council of Elders, and especially Queen Mother Wakeelah Martinez.
“They took a trip to Ghana with others, and he was able to meet some royalty while he was there, the Manya of Krobo King, I think is the one he met the first time. And then the Yilo Krobo King actually came to Wichita,” she said. “So, there is this international exchange that Mayor Brewer started with the help of the Wichita African American Council of Elders.”
When the project first started, Baccus reached out to Elder Wakeelah, who works in both Guyana and Wichita, for guidance and advice on what would be most fitting for the artwork.
“She explained to me the history and this relationship of Mayor Brewer to Ghana, and I thought that would be perfect,” she said. “It would resonate with this community.”
“In doing his DNA and finding that he truly was a Ghanaian,” Elder Wakeelah said, “it was important for him to meet those royals that would welcome him home and that’s what happened for him. So, it just grounds you in his African life; his African essence is what’s so important about this. You can’t talk about Mayor Carl Brewer now without sharing what his inherent being is.”
Baccus said it’s exciting to see everything come together, to be able to celebrate the international relationship, but locally as well.
“For example, there are portraits,” she said. “There's two local artists that are on the artist team, Priscilla Brown Sexton and Paris Jane Cunningham. Their work is featured in the Brewer Center as well, and they've chosen to represent local heroes. So that's really exciting.”
“There's also the Black Educators Hall of Fame by Janice Thacker of ‘Art That Touches Your Heart,’” Baccus said.
Lead artist Larry Poncho Brown says, ”The rainy season brought short daylight hours and unpredictable weather. We worked entirely outdoors, battling intense heat, falling leaves, foliage debris, dust, insects and even the occasional bird dropping.
"We painted for 12 hours a day — standing kneeling and pushing through physical exhaustion. Yet, something deeper took hold. Our collective focus shifted into a spiritual rhythm. The artists were fully present, united in purpose. We completed [the project] in just 10 days with eleven artisans.”
Mayor Carl Brewer talking to students in Guyana, West Africa in 2011.
For ten years during Black History Month, Thacker would hang portraits of the educators at Wichita State University, then pack them away. They will now be displayed at the Brewer Community Center.
“So, this will provide a permanent home for those art pieces,” Baccus said, “and they celebrate Black educators, who are the ones who really made a difference, like the teacher that you remember that was pivotal to your life. Those are the people she celebrated year after year. So, it's really exciting to be able to create a space where people can see their grandparents or their mother, father, grandfather, uncles on the walls.”
All the work represents what Mayor Brewer believed in. There are images of educators, sports figures and other leaders in the community. There’s even artwork of his image throughout the years inside the center.
“I went in there and I actually cried,” said Elder Wakeelah
Martinez, “Because I couldn’t believe it. The idea was to bring his culture, his blood, his inheritance to Wichita in a visual form, and when you look at art in Africa, but more importantly in Ghana where I work a lot, every piece of work has a message.”
Baccus said the project was a unique opportunity to have artwork created in Ghana and then installed here in Wichita.
“I think that's a new thing,” Baccus said. “I don't think anybody's done that. I know nobody's done it in Wichita, but I've never heard of it being done internationally, where something was painted abroad and then shipped to the States and then installed. So that's really exciting to do something new.”
