Athens, Ohio 2007

Hi Joanne!
I was just following up to inform you that my team and I completed a peace mural here in our little college town of Athens, Ohio. The team organized a mural creation in Donkey Cafe, a quaint coffee shop in the heart of Ohio University's campus. We chose this venue because the public of Donkey cafe is unique, diverse, and quite expressive. It ended up being the perfect place for a public mural! We had so much fun taking part as peace ambassadors for the Art Miles Mural Project! The mural project has inspired me to do community projects in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH. It seems quite feasible now that I have actually completed a mural and understand the "steps to success!" Thanks for all your help.

Author: Leah Wainscott
Ohio University Student, Global Leadership Center
Final Reflective Paper

I was proud to be assigned the Art Miles Mural Project because I believe in the project’s objective to promote peace through the universal language of art. Creating a mural at Donkey Café was quite rewarding because my team did not have to encourage people to paint, they just did. The public came into the café and saw a blank 12ft x 5ft stretch of canvas, and were enticed to make their mark about world peace.

Amanda, Leah and Lauryn

Watching the mural be created was gratifying because it was intriguing to watch what people painted. The artists were quite diverse, but they all came together for the common goal of promoting world peace. I could not do my homework that day because I could not help but watch their every move with a gleaming smile (quite creepy to those who saw me staring, I am sure!)

We did in fact create one beautiful peace mural, but our original goal was to create three with three different organizations. I now know that three murals would be way too much to handle in a matter of weeks. The team also understands that despite the fact we had the plan to work with different organizations, we ended up not working with any one particular group of people. Our conclusion was that the public of Donkey Café was an ideal venue for an expressive peace mural because the customers are both liberal and creative. So despite the fact that most of our original plans fell through, the final project worked out quite nicely. The only thing I would do differently is not to depend on outside sources so heavily in the beginning. Since school was canceled so often, we could not complete a mural with Kids on Campus like we anticipated. We had done so much planning for this specific mural, and after 6 or 7 weeks passed, we realized time had run too short.