In a tribute sure to warm the heart and soul of any true artist, eight children gathered Tuesday around the downtown Perry artwork of popular local muralist Jennifer Drinkwater of Ames.
Drinkwater is an assistant professor in the Iowa State University College of Design’s department of art and visual culture. Her Perry City Hall mural, with its theme of immigrant experiences in Perry, is an enduring element from 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 told ThePerryNews.com. “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.”
The work outside the Perry City Hall could become the first in a series of Perry Pilgrimage Murals, Drinkwater said.
“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,” she said.
Drinkwater learned just this week that she received a $10,000 grant from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). The funding comes through the DCA’s Iowa Artist Fellowship Program, which supports artists like Drinkwater, who demonstrates exceptional creativity and the capacity to contribute to the innovation and elevation of the arts in Iowa.
