Gramma’s Garden is Everywhere
2024 Street Wise Mural Festival
Location: Garage Door of Harvest of Hope Pantry, 4830 Pearl St, Boulder, CO 80302
Photos by Dona and Niko Laurita, and Cam Margera
Kaylee Bender’s mural for #SWMF2024 plants a seed of hope and resilience. Gramma’s Garden is Everywhere reveals the land as ancestor, provider, and kin and celebrates living in balance with the Earth and the beings that surround and support us.
The garage door appears like a scene out of The Wizard of Oz, an inspiration for Kaylee’s mural. A young black girl in a light blue dress reminiscent of Dorothy rests on a yellow brick road. Wild blueberries surround her. The yellow brick road cuts through the center of the land as it leads to dark purple mountains where a large yellow sun rises.
The girl searches for home along the yellow brick road. A pair of hands reaches down from above and releases fresh bay leaves and sage onto the land below. These hands represent our ancestors and the spirit of the land, who guide the girl and show her that she is not alone. These hands give her the tools to feel at home in this world.
A dandelion grows mystically tall behind the young girl, its yellow leaves popping against the purple backdrop. The girl reaches for one of the dandelion’s fluffy white seeds as they float away. This flower symbolizes resilience, hope, and strength - the dandelion cycles from a yellow flower to a white seed head, the seeds will disperse and allow more golden yellow flowers to grow.
Kaylee fills the sky with dark purple silhouettes of tomatoes. This alludes to time the artist spent in her grandmother’s garden full of tomatoes, squash, zucchini, and mint. The artist also includes local plants like dandelions, wild blueberries, and Russian sage to celebrate their medicinal and cultural uses. By including this array of flora, Kaylee emphasizes our relationship to the surrounding world through plant life and food.
This is especially important when we consider the context of this mural at the Harvest of Hope Pantry. The nonprofit organization provides healthy food to Boulder families and individuals at no cost in a safe, welcoming and non-judgmental environment. Living in balance with the world also means community care and supporting those in need.
Gramma’s Garden is Everywhere asks the viewer for grace and gentle care of one another, including ourselves and our community.
About the Artist:
Kaylee Bender is a lifelong artist born in Pittsburgh, PA and based in Denver,CO. She is a queer, black artist drawn to painting, portraiture, poetry, music, and community organizing as vehicles of liberation for our community. Inspired by jazz and the blues, her practice celebrates art as motion and disruption.
Her art explores, beauty, culture, resilience, and history through surreal imaginations of human nature and our diverse stories, including work for MLB Allstar Game, the Denver Art Museum, and the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. Her community engagement is centered on art’s role in building a sense of identity in the community and its role in our emotional and physical well-being. She mentors with RedLine’s Youth Art Mentoring programs and launched the “Colfax Cares” public art and mutual aid project in 2023 to better serve these goals.
Her practice integrates the larger issues of loss of communal practices and freedom of expression and discusses contemporary methods of segregation based on socioeconomic status. Her role is to help to make art and free expression a part of daily life for all community members: improving access to the arts on a grand scale is to permeate and disrupt the caste system, starting with ourselves and the community that surrounds us.