Keep McAllen Beautiful Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Sep 5 2021

Location: 

McAllen, TX

Located throughout McAllen are over 200 irrigation pipes, which come in all shapes and sizes, and are part of the city’s rich agricultural history. To this day, some of those concrete pillars continue to regulate flow of irrigation-water to help maintain farmlands. A few of those pipes stand vigilantly along the City of McAllen’s Hike and Bike Trails and have long been eyed as a promising place for public murals, and thanks to local artists, some have now been transformed into beautiful works of art.

Take a walk or run along McAllen’s trails on 2nd Street or Bicentennial Blvd and ones’ eyes and heart will be delighted.

In 2019, a Call For Artists was placed and after a thorough application process, several artists submitted design concepts to use these pipes as their canvas. Keep McAllen Beautiful’s Public Art Committee then met to review applications and selected artists based on their work and submissions depicting local history, culture, and/or native habitat. Students, teachers, and retirees were amongst the artists selected.

External sources: 

https://www.keepmcallenbeautiful.org/irrigation-pipe---public-art-project
Posted by Noah_jaffe on Apr 25 2023

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
The long term goal of this project is to shift culture to cultivate an increased appreciation for the natural beauty that pervades the town of McAllen in Texas. Because Texas is the state with the most pipelines in the United States by a large margin, there may be less consciousness of the stark consequences of excessive pipeline utilization. It seems like the organization that practitioned this project were looking to shift the culture that surrounds nature.

Notes

I think that this project is ingenious. The goal of the project is to shape awareness and culture around a small community. I think the impact and scope of work done in this project fits with the community it's impacting. The project attempts to create a small effect with an apprpriately sized affect.