Ozzy Villate is flanked by two palm trees, camped for the day on a plastic dropcloth near Third Street and Ogden Avenue. He's halfway through a turkey sandwich that he snacks on while breaking from his mural.
Tourists trickle past, stopping to read the interpretive signs in the outdoor Neon Museum where Villate's "Pyramids @ Red Rock Canyon" is taking shape on the back of the Fremont hotel.
Villate (pronounced vil-AHT-ay) anticipates that this intersection, anchored by Lady Luck casino, a parking garage and the Fremont hotel, will soon be a popular hot spot. Even as he assesses his mural, a bulldozer digs a hole in front of Hogs & Heifers and an adjacent building soon to be a cabaret.
But it's more than foot traffic that interested the Havana-born, New York-raised Villate when choosing the area as the site for his centennial mural.
Spreading his arms and looking toward the outdoor garden of retired neon signs on permanent display, he says, "Where else better to have a mural than a museum?" Villate is among the group of artists and schoolchildren involved in "City of 100 Murals," a centennial project designed to tell the story of Las Vegas from the perspective of American Indians, business leaders, working artists, Mormon settlers, lifelong residents and community activists.
By November's end, there should be more than 100 murals in the schools and at least 60 community murals throughout the downtown area, including the Cultural Corridor and the Arts District, Winchester Neighborhood, the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, West Las Vegas and Boulder City.
"It's a visual narrative," said Richard Hooker, cultural activities specialist with the city of Las Vegas. "In the end it's going to tell the story of Las Vegas in many ways."
The Centennial Commission provided roughly $100,000 for the project, which is coordinated by the Mural Task Force working under the Cultural Working Group of the Centennial Commission.
Dedications are piecemeal as murals are finished throughout the year. Each site receives an initial $1,250, and Home Depot provided $25,000 for supplies.
The murals, both temporary and permanent, will be maintained by the host site.
Villate's mural, framed naturally by the two palm trees, serves as a surrealist homage to the gaming empire amid the natural beauty of Las Vegas. Mountain-size red dice grow as pyramids in Red Rock Canyon. The landscape was originally a class assignment at UNLV for the 43-year-old Villate, who works as a professional artist doing artwork, murals and faux finishing.
On Friday, Villate's and three other murals will be unveiled in four separate dedication ceremonies beginning at 4 p.m. Among the murals are "Nitelite," a five-panel illuminated collaborative work by Mary Warner and Rayanne Figler for the Red Garage on Fremont Street Experience, a wall mural of the original Ice House on South Main Street, and Diane Bush's photographic images "peering out" from the third-floor windows of the Golden Gate hotel on Main and Fremont streets.
"We want to open up the meaning of possibilities of Las Vegas and its interpretations," said Markus Tracy, referring to Bush's project and other nontraditional murals, which include translucent window murals at UNLV and Catherine Borg's nighttime projected murals illuminating through the windows of Nevada State Bank.
"It's open to all mediums so it gives people an understanding of interpretations of art production today," said Tracy, who is working with Richard Hooker on the eight-member Mural Task Force that oversees the project. "But we want to keep our doors open to more traditional murals because that's important, too."
More than anything, he added, "Site is really critical to the artist as the artist is to the site. So it all blends."
Cowboys and Ice
Los Angeles artist Alexis Smith, who was an artist-in-residence at UNLV, will create a mural at Lewis Avenue and Fourth Street. Chicago artist Mr. Imagination, with the International House of Blues project, will create a mixed-media mural on the Nevada State Bank. And local artist Jerry Misko is creating his abstract neon work at Cashman Center.
Tate Wright's resurrection of the original Ice House on the side of a TNT lawnmower store will be dedicated by Maxine Spencer, the 92-year-old woman who owns TNT and used to get ice from the Ice House, which provided ice for three counties during the early 1900s.
"It manufactured ice and after that it closed down," said Wright, who was born and raised in Las Vegas and remembers the second Ice House that once stood on the vacant lot next to the railroad tracks.
"I decided to use the Ice House because it fits the spot perfectly. It's a good way to give people who are not from here an idea of what it was like. It's kind of like a flash of history."
Seventy-five-year-old artist Paul Richardson chose to paint Roy Rogers and Dale Evans for his mural that will be displayed on the parking garage on Fourth and Fremont streets.
Richardson was in the Helldorado Parade with Rogers and Evans, and appeared in the 1946 movie "Heldorado," in which Rogers plays a Nevada State Ranger Captain in charge of the Rangers Reclamation Service and attends the Heldorado Frontier Festival (The movie studio was required to use only one "L" in "Helldorado" to avoid indecency).
"They did a lot to promote Las Vegas back when it was important to have people visit Las Vegas," said Richardson, a former police artist who sketched suspects, stolen jewelry and crime scenes for the Las Vegas Police Department and worked intelligence for Howard Hughes.
Richardson will also create a mural of Hughes at Spring Mountain Ranch, which Hughes owned during the late 1960s, and a mural of actors Rex Bell and Clara Bow, who lived in Southern Nevada.
Similar to Rogers and Evans, Richardson said, "(Bell and Bow) had a lot to do with bringing all the Hollywood people to Las Vegas. They had a 300,000-acre ranch in Searchlight. Then they had the western-wear store just off the corner of third and Fremont. Then he became lieutenant governor and ran for governor and he was so popular he would have won.
"I went over to watch him speak one day and he went home and had a heart attack and died."
Regarding the murals, Richardson said, "The great thing about it is that I knew all the people I'm doing the paintings on."
Community voices
Other mural sites include the Lied Discovery Museum, the already dedicated UNLV Flora Dungan Humanities Building (home to the "Big V" window mural), the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, the employee dining room of Wynn Las Vegas and the sound wall at the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, where five artists are creating two murals each.
The artist Dray has already turned his neighborhood in the Arts District into a canvas by painting a large-scale mural that covers the side of his apartment building and a stencil of Jimi Hendrix and an original painting onto a nearby Dumpster.
Dray's "Interpretive Vision," a centennial mural on the south side of The Funk House, owned by First Friday founder Cindy Funkhouser, features Las Vegas imagery and Dray's noted cubist/graffiti-style art.
Dray says he's glad to see the city draw attention to the arts. "It's funny how Las Vegas does things," he added. "They're making this instant culture thing happening."
But Dray, who is in his 30s, is not complaining. Being from Los Angeles, he's glad to see murals become a more appreciated art form in Las Vegas.
"The mural I found more interesting is the Springs Preserve project because I'm dealing with kids," Dray said, "They're so inquisitive. Once you see them drawing, you see how talented they are at such a young age."
Dray and the nearly 300 fourth-grade students are collaborating on the development of a mural about the railroad and how it influenced Las Vegas, as well as the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign. Dray will combine his interpretations with the students' renditions.
In addition to featuring schoolchildren, some projects incorporate other young people, such as the Las Vegas Indian Center, which had youth from the Spring Mountain Youth Camp, a minimum-security detention center, prime the wall for the mural.
"We have a lot of artists as community activists who work with the community in the process itself," Tracy said. "The process itself is as important as the art."
Lucita Woodis-Jones' mural at the Las Vegas Indian Center is part of an eight-week workshop in which Jones has been working with children in the American Indian community.
The mural, to be unveiled May 2, is of a medicine wheel outlined in the shape of a turtle that includes tribal colors and nature symbolism: The face of an Indian chief represents spirit, fish for water, big-horned sheep for earth and an eagle for air.
"The Las Vegas Indian Center has been here for 30 years. So we wanted to get in there somewhere, get in a Native American voice," said Tammi Tiger, vice chairwoman with the Las Vegas Indian Center board of directors, who learned of the centennial murals while looking for ways to expand the center's community outreach.
The center, which serves as a meeting place for the American Indian population, is in an old city fire building. The mural will help in the marketing of the facility, Tiger said, explaining, "No one knows where we are."
For Misko, the site at Cashman Center near the Neon Museum's Bone Yard is a perfect fit for his abstract neon and bulb images.
"It's in the same style of the rest of my work," Misko said, referring to his mural. "My paintings are more about lines, color and composition. The fact that they're signs is just a bonus."
Born and raised in Las Vegas, Misko, 32, said, "It's nice that it's going to happen. It's great for the Centennial (Committee) to try to do. One hundred is a bold endeavor on their part."
Wright, another native son, is equally as welcoming.
Standing next to the half-finished mural of the Ice House, he said, "I used to remember going to California and seeing murals and saying, 'If only Las Vegas could be that way.' "
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