Mural Team l-r Sarah Patterson, Rowan Carroll, Jeni Rosenthal, Pare Matena,
Waimarama Matena, Manu Bennett and Carla Purdue

In mid January a team of Whanganui Regional Museum staff, volunteers and Jeni Rosenthal, a Canadian mural artist and designer now resident here, painted a mural on the Whanganui Community Foundation building in Park Place.   Whanganui children created all the artworks, their inspiration “What I Love About Whanganui”.  The 22 children had attended the Youth Summer School at the Museum where they sketched and coloured most of Whanganui’s many and varied icons.  Each child now has a picture immortalised in vivid colour, but on a much larger scale, the canvas being a two-story building.

As the mural team worked, the children and their families stopped by to see progress and to sign their names to their works.  The children were delighted and their parents were justifiably proud.  The mural team were just plain exhausted as they had to wait until nightfall to project the images onto the building, finishing at midnight each night, and paint through the heat of the day to reach the promised deadline.  “We had decided the children needed to see the results of their work immediately.  It would be so easy just to say, yeah, we will paint it one day,” said Ms Rosenthal, “so here it is, in living colour, and it looks fantastic”.

The mural project was made possible through funding from The Whanganui Community Foundation. Resene supplied the vast quantities of paint.  Staff from the Museum, Sarjeant Gallery and Wanganui District Library taught the students, enabling them to appreciate their town’s wonderful facilities and to create a community masterpiece.