A view of Fluid Structures from the University Student Center.
Photo by Suzanne Townsend | The Crow’s Nest.
By Suzanne Townsend
This year the SHINE Mural Festival is shining on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. At the intersection of Second Street and Sixth Avenue South you can now find the campus’s latest public artwork titled “Fluid Structures.”
The SHINE festival has been keeping St. Petersburg vibrant since 2015. It is produced by the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance with the mission of “revitalizing areas, inspiring dialogue, and uniting our community.” This year visiting graphic arts Professor Jay Giroux and a team of eight students and two of Giroux’s team members were a part of it. On Oct. 14 you could find the group hard at work stenciling, priming and painting the road outside of the University Student Center.
One of the participating students is RJ Martin, an architecture major who helped out on the project. “It’s fun planning…I cut the stencils for it. It’s a good feeling to be able to point out to people, ‘Hey I worked on that,’” Martin said in a USF Newsroom video.
The oxymoronic title “Fluid Structures” is appropriate for the work’s modernist motif which includes abstract geometric and curvaceous shapes in green, orange, red and white. Giroux explains that these big shapes are simple and easy on the eyes.
“A lot of direction for all these street murals, as far as the way that we take, it is built with efficiency, so everything’s kinda gotta be on a grid, everythings gotta be relatively simple to not only draw out but paint.”
Giroux also points out that an added benefit of the artwork is that it is traffic calming. “Not only is it a beautiful mural but it will help calm traffic and prevent any kind of pedestrian accidents.”
“Fluid Structures” will now join the other campus murals that can be found on the Harbor Hall and Piano buildings.
