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YBI mural designed by students at YSU
YOUNGSTOWN
A mural, more than one year in the making, intended to symbolize the cultural and economic transformation of Youngstown, was completed earlier this week downtown.
It stretches nearly a block from one end of the Youngstown Business Incubator to the other.
Essentially a large sticker, the vinyl printout is pasted to the windows of both the YBI’s main building and its Taft Technology Center, where companies in its managed cluster are based.
YBI officials have said their building is merely a backdrop for the art, which began as a class project for an independent-study course at Youngstown State University in January 2012 taught by former graphic-design professor Charmaine Banach, who now teaches at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.
“For me, it’s really been about Youngstown. When the class first sat down, we decided to choose one word to encapsulate what we were trying to say with this mural about a city people live in,” Banach said. “We wanted to include its design imagery and inform the city of its new cultural identity — the word we chose was metamorphosis.”
From there, designing the piece was not always easy, Banach said. A large part of the artistic challenge was highlighting both the positive and negative aspects of the city’s growing pains in recent years.
More than six students worked on the project from the conceptual phase through the design and installation phase. The mural was designed on a computer and printed at a location in Cleveland after arrangements at a Youngstown facility fell through.
Each student was in charge of designing a section of the mural, with the overall goal of combining those parts to tell an entire story. The mural is intended to make sense when viewed from any direction.
The end product, installed over three days, was a rolling piece of vinyl that’s highly visible to passers-by on West Federal Street. It depicts Youngstown’s cityscape and at turns includes dragonflies, outdoor scenes and graphics of smokestacks and steel workers, all done in pastels with undertones of darker colors at points.
Though the 300-foot mural could last up to two years or more, it likely will be up for only one year, Banach said.
The project was funded by 122 donors through an online Kickstarter campaign that raised $7,500 to print the mural.