A new piece of public art highlighting some iconic local institutions is brightening an alley in downtown State College.
Unveiled on Monday, the mural is located along McAllister Alley near the Calder Way intersection, on the west side of the Calder 1 building above India Pavilion.
Building owners the Friedman family and property management and leasing company Continental Real Estate Management collaborated on the effort, bringing in Emily Cooper to work with Margaux Friedman in creating the mural celebrating community culture.
Cooper owns Faces and Spaces Artistry and is known both for her facepainting and for the artwork in the windows of numerous downtown businesses. Friedman, of State College, is a high school student who attends the Grier School in Tyrone and who has exhibited her work at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
Their mural features an octopus at its center with its tentacles holding representations of The State Theatre, The Tavern, The Corner Room, Schlow Library, Penn State football and the Berkey Creamery. It also features a nod to Friedman’s dog, Biggie Smalls, who community members may have seen wagging his tail on his walks downtown.
They started out with a “general community vibe” with many different possibilities, Cooper said. She had already been thinking about that particular wall for public art even before she was contacted by Continental.
“I’ve been here for 12 years now and I like talking to people all the time and making connections for other people,” she said. “And so I’ve kind of just called myself an octopus because I’ll stretch out a tentacle in one direction and another tentacle in another direction. You meet people that have these different gifts and services and then you might run into someone looking for that specific thing. So it’s nice to be able to be like, ‘Oh hey, I just met this person a few weeks ago, bam, now you know each other.’
“So, that’s where the octopus came from, which is funny because I’m sure there’s going to be a million people being like, ‘Why an octopus?’ And like [Comet Properties CEO Jonathan Friedman] said, why not an octopus?”
Geoff Reyes, of Continental Real Estate Management, said the mural was a collaborative effort with the Friedmans to “come up with ideas to beautify downtown State College,” and they reached out to Cooper about four months ago.
The mural adds to the variety of public art in the downtown, Continental Real Estate Management’s Dave Fonash added.
“Obviously it beautifies downtown and it brings more attention to local businesses and just helps the downtown area generally look better aesthetically,” Fonash said. “I think it’s also great because there’s not only Emily, but there’s other artists that are doing murals around town so it’s not kind of a mono-artistic vibe, but there’s a lot of different representation which I think is cool.”
Cooper has taken an active role in beautifying downtown and her work has been “transformative,” Jonathan Friedman said, noting his appreciation for her mentorship of his daughter, Margaux.
The mural is mounted to the wall and can remain or be moved. Friedman said he hopes it is the start of a series of public art that can be rotated throughout the downtown, an idea brought forward by the Downtown State College Improvement District.
“We’ve worked a long time with people hoping to have more public art and more connections to the community, and Emily offered us that opportunity and we jumped on it,” Friedman said. “I just talked to her about helping us as we go forward as a consultant about what can we do to be better, what can we do to add more. And you know, Three Dots does it, Arts Festival does it — we bring art to the community. We just want to keep on doing it.
“We just couldn’t be happier with how it turned out, and her willingness to help, to work with my daughter and grow this. We’re just looking forward to seeing how everyone receives this, hopefully positively, and then from there sky’s the limit.”
