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Going the Extra Mile in the Mile High City of Denver
an article by Joanne Tawfilis
The logistics of bringing over 5,280 feet (l mile) of murals created by over 30,000 people from over 100 countries sounds mind boggling. The Art Miles Mural Project and the City of Denver ended up creating 10,912 feet (2.3 miles) of murals exhibited on Earth Day 2005.
The Mile High City went the extra mile to break the Guinness Book of World Records. One week before the planned unveiling we discovered that 3,000 children in Abu Dhabi painted a 9,762 foot mural in honor of Mother's Day leaving us about 2,500 feet short.
But Denver came through and decided that we would paint during every free moment and put out a call to the public and did they ever respond! And so, on behalf of global painters, we flew from Egypt where we were organizing a 2010 gala event, to Vienna and onward to California, picked up 30 murals in ski bags packed as luggage, and onward to California, rented a truck to drive over 400 murals to Denver, and in the final hours painted an additional 3,000 feet of murals while waiting for the rest of the murals to arrive from other parts of the world.
That extra event alone was amazing, with Denver citizens coming out to City Park to paint from dawn to dusk. On April 23rd at 0500 am with over 50 AmeriCorps volunteers unrolling over 900 murals and connecting them together, we can only say "you had to be there" to see what all those murals looked like like from the air and the road and in the park where they formed where they formed the Longest Painting in the World. For the record, the most precious result of all was not the record book or the murals; it was the process that brought all those people together as part of our objective to create global harmony through art!
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