May 21, 2013 By Bill Parry,
An internationally acclaimed artist who lives and works on 40th Street will be painting a mural on a Sunnyside building next month that’s been targeted by graffiti vandals for years.
Mark Salinas, the artist, will start painting the mural at 42nd St. and 48th Ave. on June 8 with the help of local teenagers.
The mural will be based around a theme of Rise-N-Shine. “It’s also a play on Sunnyside,” Salinas said, referring to the name of the neighborhood and the need to revitalize the 48th Avenue corridor that is full of abandoned stores.
“The idea came to me while I was taking part in a [Sunnyside] cleanup day last year,” Salinas said. “We were covering up graffiti and I started thinking of creative ways of improving things through neighborhood beautification.”
The artist enlisted members of the Sunnyside/Woodside Boys & Girls Club to help out.
“My thought was, if kids are involved in the creative process, their friends may stay away from tagging it,” Salinas said The project is funded by the Queens Council on the Arts, a non-profit group that dispenses $300,000 of grants each year in increments of $1,000-$5,000 per project throughout the borough.
The mural project has the support of Sunnyside Shines. “It’s outside the BID so I couldn’t help with funding,” said Executive Director Rachel Thieme. However, “I was happy to help point him in the right direction in finding the building’s owner.”
Paint for the project will be donated by Gleason’s Paints in Woodside, while Papa John’s will send pizzas to feed the kids.
Salinas has lived in Sunnyside for the past 15 years and has recently accepted an Artist Residency at Cite Internationale in Paris for the summer of 2014.
