Thursday mornings find Jennifer Drinkwater painting the town in Perry — or at least a part of the town at the north entrance to Perry City Hall.
Drinkwater, an assistant professor in the Iowa State University College of Design’s department of art and visual culture, is creating a mural with the theme of immigrant experiences in Perry. The mural is the final element in the Perry Public Library’s yearlong series of programs called Latino-Americans: 500 Years of History, which ran from June 2015 to May 2016.
“This mural is a kind of composite or distillation of a lot of lived experiences of immigrants in Perry,” Drinkwater said. “It emphasizes Latino experience because that’s what the library’s grant was for, of course, but there’s all kinds of immigrant stories in Perry that could be told.”
Followers of Perry’s cultural scene will remember last year’s library programs, underwritten by a $10,000 grant from Humanities Iowa.
The programs included scholar-led discussions of the Public Broadcasting System series, “Latino-Americans: 500 Years of History,” with a focus on the migrant worker reform movement hosted by Dr. Rich A. Sallas from Des Moines University, plus a program on Latinos in the U.S. military led by former U.S. Marine Eddie Diaz and a community-wide reading of Sonia Navario’s “Enrique’s Journey.”
A memorable event in the series was the Latino progressive dinner that started with appetizers at the Center for TownCraft and then moved to the Hotel Pattee for the entrée and further afield for dessert.
A less visible program involved two Perry groups, Hispanics United for Perry and Hometown Heritage. They set up a mobile recording lab in order to document the immigrant oral histories of Perry’s Latino residents, and Drinkwater’s mural project is an outgrowth of these oral histories.
“We have a number of things brought together in this mural,” Drinkwater said, all of which reflect the experience of Latin Americans’ journeys to Perry. A corn-husk doll dominates the left side of the mural’s field, with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe prominent in the upper right.
“The corn-husk doll was a table decoration at the progressive dinner,” she said, “and the Virgin of Guadalupe is taken from a picture in ThePerryNews.com. Both symbolize a whole way of life that was left behind but also partly brought along and preserved in Perry.”
The foreground of the mural shows a field of ripened corn, something common to both places, and the center of the painting features a trompe l’oeil involving the Rio Grande River flowing between a harvested field on the right and an urban cityscape on the left.
Drinkwater, who divides her time between the ISU College of Design and the ISU Extension and Outreach art and design application program, said the Perry mural will take about one year to complete. She said the paint is exterior latex and should stand up well to the weather.
“The mural is bigger than I had anticipated,” she said, “but it would be cool for this to lead to other murals around Perry that document and celebrate the multiple migration stories from Perry residents and community members.”
