By Emily Bishop

Saturday, July 24 was one of the hottest days of the year, but the hosts of the second fundraiser for the McLean Mural project stayed in the kitchen and showed that they could take the heat. 26 people bought $20 tickets so that they could go to three homes and enjoy good food and conversation. A last minute attack on one of the families by a stomach bug meant that plans were shifted to entertain at just two homes. Leslie Thompson and Mark Morrison of Young Avenue were first on the list followed by June and Justin Hurt of Evelyn Avenue. The fundraiser was enjoyed by many CY residents as well as friends from Central Gardens and the Overton Square area.

The Progressive Potlucks provide a fun way to raise money and meet new people, but the name of the event is a bit misleading. Although the event is progressive (going from one house to another), it is not acutally a potluck. The hosts provide all of the food and beverages. Watch for annoucements from the CYCA about the next Progressive Dinner for the McLean Mural on the website cooperyoung.org.

By June Hurt

For those of you who missed the opportunity to show your support and participate in the May McLean Mural fundraiser, you have another chance in July! We are excited to announce that there will be a second Progressive Potluck on Saturday, July 24th. The first Progressive Potluck was impressive indeed, so the pressure is on for another group of Cooper-Young neighbors to create one more night to remember. Tickets will be on sale soon so keep your eyes open and get ready to have a wonderful evening with your friends and neighbors raising money for a great community art project. Tickets are $20, to researve your spot email June at cyca.june@att.net or call 901-488-0022.

By Kristan Huntley

For those of you who enjoyed the article entitled “Celebrate with a party for a project” and have been eagerly awaiting the first progressive potluck fundraiser for the McLean Mural Project, you don’t have to wait much longer!

On the evening of Saturday, May 22nd, the first progressive potluck will officially kick off. There will be approximately five households in Cooper-Young that will serve as hosts and open their homes, lawns, and decks to around 40 hungry mural supporters. Since this is the first progressive potluck fundraiser we have held, we want to keep it small and intimate; therefore, the potluck tour group will be divided into two groups of around 20 so that they will be manageable for both the hosts and the attendees. The tours will start on Philadelphia at the home of Chad Ahren and Beth Tidball as well as the home of Robert and Sharron Johnson. The tour will then proceed to Evelyn at the home of Brad Gilmer and Sarah Kyle. From Evelyn, the party will move one block over to Nelson at the home of Andy and Sydney Ashby. At each stop, you, the lucky potluck ticket holder, can enjoy tapas (fancy word for finger foods), meet neighbors you may not have met before, make some new friends, and then journey on to the next stop to further partake in the gastronomical experience. It is not too far to walk between stops if you want to work up an appetite, or you are free to drive as well. Kids are welcome to join in, but all adults and kids over 12 must have a potluck ticket.

The progressive potluck will culminate at the home of Patrick Miller and I. We will be opening our backyard to guests and have ice cream and cold beer for an after-dinner sugar rush. You will have one extra-special treat as well: live music! The Stand-Ins will be rocking out, and the wonderfully talented Jeremy Stanfill, formerly of Streetside Symphony, will be performing. Some good ol’ rock music is just what the doctor ordered to fight off that after-dinner nap you know you want to take. And, parents, the live music is also a kid-friendly event, so they are free to boogie ‘til their hearts are content (and then sleep well that night!).

Tickets will be $20 per person. Since the progressive potluck hosts are generously donating their time, homes, and food, all the proceeds will be going to help fund the McLean Art Mural Project. Good food, good friends, good cause. You can’t go wrong! Tickets will go on sale soon, so keep your eye on cooperyoung.org, and make sure that you are signed up on the Cooper-Young mailing list for the announcement. Also, if you would like to host a stop on one of the later progressive potluck parties in the coming months, please let me know at k.huntle@yahoo.com, or you may contact Maggie Cardwell with the CYCA at 901-272-2922 or info@cooperyoung.org.

By Kristan Huntley

Let’s face it—Cooper-Young will get together and have a party for pretty much any reason, be it the annual Night Out, to support the Cooper-Young Festival 4-Miler runners, or whatever other happy occasion comes up. Well, here is a chance to party and hang out with your neighbors while raising money for the community!

I am happy to announce that we have received the green light from the city to proceed with the McLean Mural Project. This is a major milestone in the Mural Project because we can now proceed with raising the funds needed. As stated in the March edition of the LampLighter, the anticipated cost of the project is between $10,000 and $15,000, with a completion goal of late summer or early fall. With great excitement, we are switching to fundraising mode and kicking it into high gear. We are exploring the possibility of corporate sponsorship and trying to locate local businesses that may be interested in leaving a lasting mark in Cooper-Young (so if you know of anyone or a business that may be interested, please direct them our way!), but, at this time, we are mainly relying and planning on private donations.

So, this is where the parties come in. Everyone knows fundraising is hard work, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun! One idea that was suggested to the Beautification Committee is to hold progressive potluck parties this coming spring and summer. If you have never had the occasion to attend one of these potluck parties, basically there is one or maybe two smaller dishes at each home along the potluck route, and folks go from home to home enjoying each dish, spend time talking to friends (and making some new ones), and then move to the next home and repeat the prior steps.

For the hosts, the progressive potluck parties are easier than hosting an entire party on your own because you only have to take care of one dish, be it an appetizer, a salad, an entrée, or a sweet treat, and you don’t have to create and manage an invite list on your own. Therefore, the host has more time and energy to enjoy friends, neighbors, and the other food (because we all know that food that others made tastes better).

The Mural Project fundraiser would be very similar, but with a Cooper-Young spin. The progressive potluck is still in the planning phase, but we are hopeful that residents of Cooper-Young will volunteer their homes, their front lawns, or even their back decks and yard to host a stop in the progressive potluck. In typical Cooper-Young style, we want folks to make it their own, though. Do you have kids or know what kids enjoy? Feel free to make your stop the place that all the cool kids want to go! Are you musically inclined? We all love good music, so please play away! And you don’t have to do it alone—get a couple of friends together, pick a house, and go for it! We will ask the progressive potluck guests to purchase a ticket for the event (right now, we are thinking around $20), and, with that ticket, they can enjoy all the food, music, and Cooper-Young merriment our neighborhood has to offer.

Interested or want more information? Please feel free to drop me a line at k.huntle@yahoo.com. Also, please don’t forget the March poll on the cooperyoung.org site, and let us know through that if you are interested, as well.

By Brad Gilmer

In the summer of 2008, the Cooper-Young Community Association Beautification Committee began discussing ways to combat the graffiti that had become increasingly prevalent in our neighborhood. While Cooper-Young prides itself on its art and diversity, most of the graffiti that was going up in the district mainly consisted of “tags” or signatures of the taggers with black spray paint. Graffiti is certainly an accepted art form; however, the tags in our area were generally in the form of simple vandalism that could be confused with gang-related tagging. This resulted in anger among our residential and commercial neighbors, not to mention decreased property value. Our neighborhood works hard to maintain its quaintness and its place among Memphis’ most respected historic districts. Graffiti in or near the gateways to the community, on businesses, and even on residential fencing and homes was taking away from the charm of Cooper-Young.

For months, the committee examined the issue and, eventually, devised two plans: one for the short term and one for the long. First, we would create a task force to document instances of graffiti and paint over it. This would provide a short-term solution and, perhaps, discourage tagging in the neighborhood. Secondly, we would explore public art options. Most urban culture and graffiti experts agree that graffiti artists respect public art and will not vandalize it. Through the hard work of a few devoted neighbors, particularly Andy Ashby, our short-term plan was a great success. By removing tags on a regular basis, graffiti seems to have been greatly discouraged in the district. Nevertheless, we wanted to follow through with a more long-term solution.

When tackling part two of our plan—the public art option—we really needed the help of professionals. Memphis is lucky to have UrbanArt to promote public art. Public art can come in many forms, including murals, public graffiti walls, and installations. Many factors must be considered in deciding what best fits a community. One of the most important considerations is simply space. After consultation with UrbanArt and considering the space available, we decided to first explore mural art near a gateway to the community. We have the beautiful trestle on Cooper, which remains free from graffiti, so we decided to find another gateway into the neighborhood on which to focus. The underpasses at Barksdale and McLean, south of Central, are two other popular entrances into Cooper-Young, and both had been two main havens for tagging. We chose to start with the underpass at McLean because it had a higher traffic volume and serves as a gateway to and from three historic districts. Moreover, the underpass is really a unique structure in and of itself. If successful, we hope to move on to the Barksdale underpass and other gateways into the neighborhood.

Once we established the McLean sight as our target, we looked for local artists to design a concept for the first mural. After considering several candidates, we chose Memphian Carl Moore to undertake the project. Mr. Moore is an established artist. His work combines bold colors, broad lines, and strong imagery in a simplistic form that will translate well onto a large space. The McLean underpass is an interesting structure as it has a built-in skylight between the two trestles overhead and roman archways throughout the underpass that create twenty separate picture windows on the walls. We wanted to fully utilize the architecture of the space. Moore’s concept envisions a separate symbol of Cooper-Young or Midtown in each picture window, which, when combined, will show the assortment of people and things that make our neighborhood home. He has carefully considered the available natural light and shadows so that pedestrians, bikers, and those passing by in their cars will be able to enjoy the mural to its fullest extent each time they pass through.

We presented the McLean mural concept at the February CYCA General Meeting, and it was greeted with excitement and great anticipation by the approximately fifty people who attended. Many wonderful ideas, suggestions, and questions were offered by those in attendance. Now that the concept and draft design has been presented to the community, we will now seek the necessary approval from the City to proceed forward, including clean-up and repairs of the site. In the meantime, we will begin fundraising efforts. The project is anticipated to cost between $10,000 and $15,000. Our goal will be to complete the project sometime this summer or early fall. We plan to raise money through corporate sponsorship and private donations. The new farmers market coming to Cooper-Young has expressed a desire to work with us in developing fundraising ideas, and we hope others will soon join. Many people, businesses, and organizations have already volunteered equipment and labor when the time comes.

This is a very exciting project, and we hope that it leads to more public art projects in the neighborhood to showcase our amazing community. Please stay tuned for future updates and opportunities to help.