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- Jamie Bedard mural at Lakeside Pharmacy
Burlington residents pass murals daily: the yellow snakeskin-like design on the façade of Old Gold on Cherry Street; the wind-whipped sailing scene on the Lyman Building at Perkins Pier; the Buddha face on Burlington Electric Department's storage building on Pine Street. These are only a few of the public artworks visible on walls all over town.
Burlington photographer Carolyn Bates began shooting the murals for fun in 2018. Bates, 79, is primarily known as an architectural photographer whose work has landed in Yankee, Fine Homebuilding, Old House Journal and other publications. For that work, she often visits buildings multiple times, her accordion 4x5 camera in hand, to capture the best light and dramatic shadows. But murals are flat, so usually her iPhone 14 Pro sufficed.
Through sharing her mural photos on social media, Bates learned about more street art around town. Eventually, she collected enough images to fill three books. Volume 1 of Street Murals of Burlington: Past and Present is a brightly hued compendium of the city's surprisingly rich array of public paintings. (The second volume just came out; the third will appear in early spring.)
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- Street Murals of Burlington: Past and Present, Volume 1 by Carolyn Bates, 168 pages; Volume 2, 226 pages; Volume 3, forthcoming. Self-published. $45.
The books not only capture city murals but also provide information about the artists, including who funded their projects, other art they make and biographical details. Bates interviewed some artists for her books; others wrote about themselves or each other. Professional writers also contributed and, in some cases, Bates reprinted Seven Days articles about the artists.
"My goal is to have a great record of the artists during this time frame" of 2018 to the present, Bates said during a phone call.
Twenty-nine artists are covered in Volume 1. Some appear in all three volumes.
"I have a long list of artists; it was arbitrary," Bates said about her organizing principle. Volume 1, she added, ends where it does because she wanted it to be ready in time for muralist Frank Gonzales' 100th birthday in September. The book includes video stills of Gonzales' 1977 mural on the former Adams School and photos of the annual puppet parade he organized in honor of Burlington-born education reformer John Dewey.
Volume 1 is more immersive experience than chronological record. The King Street Laundry mural by Elizabeth Antoinette Emmett, who has two different entries in the volume, is undated. (She created it in 2022.) The 1988 Edmunds Middle School sea-life mural made by Bob Wyland and students is, remarkably, still there, though in need of restoration. Among the bygone murals Bates documents are several panels from Burlington City Arts' temporary mural project in 2019, in which 25 artists painted works to hang on the fence enclosing the CityPlace Burlington construction site, aka "the Pit." (The murals are now in BCA storage.)
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- Detail of Tara Ariel Goreau mural at Turning Point Center
Kate Long Hodges, who painted the Perkins Pier mural in 2004 and restored it in 2020, began her Vermont mural career painting on trees. She would hang from a climbing harness and use biodegradable ink to create towering illustrations on beech, maple and birch trees. When she met Bates, Hodges said during a phone call, she was working on a mural for Edelweiss Mountain Deli in Stowe. The photographer wanted to see her in action, so she went to the yurt Hodges uses as a studio at the Cornwall apple orchard where she grew up.
Bates was truly interested in artists' personal stories, Hodges recalled, and was "quirky and fun — she'd take a picture of my yurt floor." With Street Murals, she continued, Bates "wanted to honor this history of Burlington and all the interesting artists and their lives. It didn't stop with her taking a quick picture of the mural."
Bates is from Wichita, Kan. At Skidmore College in upstate New York, she majored in biology and art, then worked at a bank in Chicago briefly before becoming a ski bum in Aspen, Colo. — an experience she recommends to everyone. After a couple of years, she "drove east to escape a bad boyfriend and ran out of money in Vermont, [where] friends I had there welcomed me."
That was in 1971; within two years Bates had opened her own photography business. "I did anything. [I was] often a photojournalist, always a freelancer," she said. In 1985, she took a class at Harvard University whose purpose was to "help you figure out what your new business should be," she recalled. Hers turned out to be architectural photography.
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- Carolyn Bates with Aaron Grossman mural at 412 Pine Street
Bates continues to work freelance jobs, including a recent one for Investors Corporation of Vermont. In 2019, ICV renovated One Burlington Square, the urban renewal-era office building with a black glass curtain wall at the corner of Pine and College streets. Its reflective surfaces drew Bates to return every day for a month to get the perfect shots.
Meanwhile, she has become something of a custodian of the murals she knows so well. In 2021, when tagging appeared on Tony Shull's 2017 mural on Nunyuns Bakery & Café on North Champlain Street, she helped remove it.
When Emmett's mural at the former Advance Music Center on South Champlain was tagged repeatedly by "Oman," Bates recalled, "we spent four and a half hours with a water jet and got it off. Then we all went back the next day and helped [Emmett] repair the mural." The artwork has since been covered with a protective coating.
Are Burlington's murals truly special? Hodges, who lives part of the year in Tucson, said the Arizona city has "really incredible, sophisticated murals — realism, huge faces, [almost] like the Mission District of San Francisco. Burlington is a little different. [There are] these very personalized murals, about the land, gardens, insects. It's ... down-to-earth and community oriented. The murals of Burlington are not just painted by the big artists; they're by real people."
Street Murals of Burlington celebrates those people, documenting an art form that is often short lived and seemingly anonymous yet vital to the feel of Vermont's biggest city.