As soft-spoken as 26-year-old Pierre Lucero is, his art cries out in splashy graphics and bright hues of color.
Tuesday morning he lent his talent to a boarded-up window in downtown Aurora, smashed out during unrest Sunday night, that was to become a canvas for hope.
“I’m just here building up the community,” he said, talking while sketching. “There is a lot of good in Aurora, more good than bad. I like to stay active in the community, help out when I can.”
Lucero was just one of many volunteers who came downtown for day two of the cleanup after the destruction that took place Sunday night. Many volunteers came out Monday morning to begin cleaning up the mess and board up broken windows, and many more volunteers came out Tuesday to make those boarded-up areas look more beautiful.
Jen Evans, Aurora’s public art director who helped organize the event, said Shelley Massie, who is part of downtown Aurora’s Goldfinch Cafe Project, brought the idea for the downtown painting to her.
Massie also picked up the paint from paint manufacturer Sherwin Williams, which donated multiple colors to the cause. Evans put out a call for volunteers and artists early Tuesday morning, and by noon, in the heat of the 90-degree day, they were working on all kinds of art all over downtown.
“It was anywhere in downtown Aurora where there were smashed out windows,” Evans said, which included a block of Broadway, and parts of Downer Place. “It’s just to beautify the space we’ve all worked so hard on.”
Aurora Public Art got involved as a point organization to make sure “it is as inclusive as possible,” Evans said.
And the artists came from all over town, and the themes allowed had some, but not complete, direction from Public Art.
Local artist Sam Cervantes didn’t even wait for primer. He painted an “Aurora Strong” message directly on plywood. Some of the volunteers, like Ellie Esparza, were downtown participating in the peaceful protest when it turned more violent on Sunday, but came back Tuesday to help deal with the damage.
“I’m supportive of the original message,” she said. “And I understand the anger protesters felt.”
Evans said officials do not want “to ignore what’s going on and what happened, but we also want to be uplifting, supporting local business.”
Less than a year ago, Evans was making plans for new murals in downtown Aurora this summer, including organizing a mural event for the city. That ended when the coronavirus crisis took all the funding away.
“So these are the murals for this year,” she said.
Local artists Cheryl Holz and Maureen Gasek were supervising volunteer help to put a whitewash primer on one set of windows on Broadway, trying to plan what they were going to paint on the newly-created, four-panel canvas.
“This all happened in the last couple of hours, so we don’t know what we’re going to do,” Holz said, laughing. “We’re kicking around some ideas.”
“We’re just showing there’s community support,” Gasek said.
