Beth Sumner calls it a “love letter to the community.” The director of destination development for Visit Alamosa was talking about an upcoming community mural painting party that the tourism agency will host on Saturday, April 6.
Artists Katie Dokson and Bianca Maestas are leading the project, creating 12 mural designs that community members will then help create through a paint-by-number pattern. Dokson and Maestas led a similar exercise at Cole Park last year with their Day of Kindness community-mural project.
This time community members are invited to show up at 8591 South River Road beginning at 10 a.m. on April 6 to help paint the panels, which will then be transported and installed at the Visit Alamosa’s Colorado Welcome Center off Sixth Street in downtown Alamosa.
“We’re pretty excited about it. We got the chance to see the panels in progress and could not be more excited,” Sumner said during a taping of The Valley Pod. “It’s something really special. It’s very representative of, I would say, the entire San Luis Valley, and then knowing that they’ll find their home at the Colorado Welcome Center for years to come, it’s pretty exciting.”
Sumner promises that there will be lots of signage and lots of orange balloons leading to a big red barn on the South River Road where the community painting party will occur. The artists have come with designs that will get painted with 36 different colors, making it a splashy mural display that townspeople and visitors to the Colorado Welcome Center will see.
Beautifying Sixth Street: Visit Alamosa has been busy overhauling its area ever since it demolished the old Sixth Street Motorway building in 2022. “We’ll brighten up Sixth Street,” is what Visit Alamosa Executive Director Kale Mortensen promised at the time. He wasn’t kidding.
The community mural of love, with 12 panels and 36 colors, will undoubtedly brighten up Sixth Street.
But even then, Visit Alamosa isn’t done. Also coming into the area later this year is Jocelyn Russell’s “Cranes in Flight” sculpture commissioned by the Woman’s Citizenship Club of Alamosa.
“When we jumped into this project, we really wanted to look at ‘How can we beautify Sixth Street?’ because there’s a lot of traffic that comes down that way,” Mortensen said on The Valley Pod. “How can we get ’em to stop at the welcome center? How can we get ’em to enjoy our town?”
A 12-panel mural painted by community members, a bronze sculpture by a world-renowned artist in Alamosa’s Jocelyn Russell, complimented by a sculpture already on site by another world-renowned sculpture in Huberto Maestas, and Visit Alamosa has one of the most creative blocks you’ll see anywhere in the Valley.
“It’s so lucky that I’m in the position that I am because really, Visit Alamosa does what it does because we love our community and my job in particular, I get to do things that the community will enjoy as much if not more than visitors do,” Sumner said.
“Things like the mural project, it kind of feels like a love letter to the community. We want the community to feel connected, that they’re a part of what we’re doing and to share that with them.”