The Mural “The Wild Thread of High Street” is a great example of what community support can do for downtown.
If you’ve walked or biked on the Deckers Creek rail-trail near the Mon River recently—or if you’ve driven over the South High Street bridge heading into downtown—you’ve seen a spectacular new mural.
Artist Joel Dugan and his team of community volunteers presented The Wild Thread of High Street, painted on the back of South High Station, on August 9. The 6,500-square-foot masterpiece serves as a reminder of the wildlife in and around nearby Deckers Creek and welcomes all who visit the city.
Chairman of Fairmont State University’s Department of Architecture, Art, and Design, Dugan started a public art program in 2018. He finds partnerships, identifies fundraising opportunities, and rallies students and volunteers to complete projects.
This mural has relied on the input of a lot of organizations and people, he says. He’s been working with Main Street Morgantown and the Friends of Deckers Creek for the past year to get it off the ground. He raised approximately $22,000 through grants from Fairmont State University, the Monongalia County Commission, Morgantown High School, and Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia.
Meanwhile, Dugan worked with Morgantown High School students to create rough sketches of the mural. Back at Fairmont State, his students Hannah Sprout, Joshua Merritt, and Gabriella Reyna put finishing touches on the sketches. Then, with a combination of spray paint, acrylics, and hard work, he and volunteers painted through June and July, finishing in early August.
He notes the 20-plus years of work that community groups have put in to make Deckers Creek more habitable for wildlife, and he wanted the mural to reflect those community efforts—so you’ll see images of muskrats, a kingfisher, a red tailed hawk, and a 45-foot rainbow trout. “We wanted it to show a fruitful array of flora and fauna that could live here if we continue to work on cleaning the water,” Dugan says. “So, there are some species of animals that aren’t in the Deckers Creek waterway, but there are some we are hopeful will return.”
He loved the collaborative way it all came together. “It was a great project to work on because there were so many community volunteers and leaders inside of that area that were willing to pitch in anytime we needed help,” he says. “It was just inspirational to see them put forth the physical effort to inspire that change.”
Dugan enjoys projects like this because he believes in putting others above himself, he says, and he encourages other artists to bring the public into their personal work as well. “I think, as artists, it’s really important when we put ‘we’ before ‘me’ and allow ourselves to be an approachable conduit for how art can transform the way that we see ourselves in public spaces, and that is really indicative in these public art pieces.”
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