Ward Five City Councilor Brendan Crighton, the Office of Economic and Community Development, and Inspectional Services Department have teamed up with Raw Art Works and local artists to create public displays of art in Downtown Lynn.
On Saturday July 23rd from 10am-2pm, artists participating in RAW’s Good 2 Go program will be painting murals on five utility boxes located in the Downtown’s Central Square. The murals were all designed by local artists under the supervision of RAW’s Jason Cruz, who runs the Good 2 Go program. This program began in 2005 with five of RAW’s original members who were part of the group Men 2 Be at the time. Their first public art project was on Union street in a lot owned by a friend of RAW. The program allows young men the opportunity to use their artistic talents to get noticed in positive ways, while beautifying their community. Good 2 Go has rules, expectations and each member is a teacher as well as a student. Additionally the program provides temporary youth employment as the artists are compensated for their work.
Since the beginning Jason has hoped the program would take on the task of beautifying the city’s many utility boxes. The five boxes surrounding RAW in Central Square will serve as a pilot program for the city-wide project. For this project RAW has brought back two alumni of Good 2 Go, Dano and Derek Chapman. The rest of the team, of which every member’s role is important as the next, consists of Jorge Pimentel, Omar Young, Francisco Vasquez, Damien Coley, Kadeem Dally, Dariel Valdez, Luis Deleon, Rafael Gonzalez, and Ryan Karakudos.
Jamie Marsh, the Director of Lynn’s Community Development office was able to provide funding for the art supplies. Dottie Thibodeau of Lynn’s Inspectional Services Department helped to coordinate the cleaning of the utility boxes as well as priming them to be painted. These city officials and Councilor Crighton worked with Cruz to develop the mural theme of “Arts and Culture”, which tied in well with the efforts to get Lynn designated as a Cultural District by the MA Cultural Council.