Note: This mural has since been painted over.
Location: 913 S. Brazos St.
Dimensions: Planters - 5'2" x 2'4" x 2' Date: May 1999 Lead Community Muralists: Katy Bone, Samantha Estrada, Angela Ibarra, Crystal Tamez, Janette Torres |
Patti Radle initiated Flower Power as a way to engage a group of middle school girls who frequented Inner City Development. The girls drew and painted floral designs on a row of planters in front of Giovanni’s, a local pizzeria, and added a row of matching flowers to the restaurant’s bright blue building. Two years later, in 2001, the same mural crew designed and painted Peace and Remembrance. Peace and Remembrance was a heavy undertaking because it spanned an entire wall and addressed inner-city violence, but the young artists grew in maturity as the moved from flower pots to a barrio memorial.
Artist Crystal Tamez reflects on the two murals:
Artist Crystal Tamez reflects on the two murals:
The first public piece was Flower Power. We did flowers, we were innocent. Our next mural, Peace and Remembrance, was for people we actually know who were murdered or killed through violence. That’s the realism here in the Westside, that’s what really goes on. Our innocence, Flower Power, but what really goes on is Peace and Remembrance. And we were all a part of the same hood, part of Flower Power, and then you know, Peace and Remembrance. They let us put our work up there and you can tell obviously children did it but that was our work, we were so excited at the time to see it. We were all happy. |
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History and Testimonial
The Flower Power artists were close friends who spent their afternoons and school vacations at Inner City Development (ICD), the first home of San Anto Cultural Arts. Janette Torres remembers growing up at ICD and San Anto, with Patti Radle and Manny Castillo caring for them like parents would.
Janette Torres
Patti, Manny would go around in their giant vans and they would pick up all the neighborhood kids and sometimes just random kids like ‘Hey, wanna do some painting, wann help at Inner City and help make bagged sandwiches for the homeless?’ And the parents didn’t mind; they were like ‘Hey, take our kids.’ We, for being teengers, I felt like they taught us how to be super responsible because our summers, we were teeangers ourselves, we learned how to be mentors. That’s one of the things I remember, learning how to deal with kids like me...I remember spending my summers volunteering at Inner City and volunteering in the neighborhoods for clean-ups and things like that. But it was fun, it never felt like work because we did it with our friends and it became like a family. |
Patti was like a second mom to us...We didn't have a lot of white people to say in our neighborhood. It was mainly hispanic, hispanic community and Patti was this hippy, super chill, artsy white lady with her hippy husband, and they played folk music and they had a giant peace tie-dye sign outside their purple house they were just different from everyone that lived in the neighborhood. We were always like, ‘Why is this white lady here?’ Like does she not know it's a hispanic community? There's gangs there. It just wasn't where we thought white people would live. And she's right there smack in the middle of these neighborhoods, doing all these marches and humanitarian work and community outreach programs. She did so much for us and didn't see color. And I guess where we didn't see hope she saw it. We just thought she was crazy and she kind of just took us group of little hoodlums and she was like, ‘Hey, let's do something!’ |
Manny was this funny, really creative, really hard working guy...He would always come pick us up all the time from the projects and take us to our to the mural meetings and taught us how to be a little more professional. Compared to the other kids in our neighborhood, I felt like we matured a little differently because they [Patti and Manny] were like, “You're artists and you may be children, but there's a certain way to present yourself and represent your neighborhood. You don't have to talk like this or be like this.” And him and Patti, he was more the harder one on us than Patti was. He was like the dad figure, so it was almost like a ‘Dad and Mom’ kind of thing. And that was what we had when we didn't really have it consistently in our childhood. We had them. |