Mt. Hope Mural with Hannah Resseger and Danny Lopes

Title

Creator

Uprise RI

Date

September 16, 2017

Date Created

April 19, 2021

Description

Hannah Resseger speaks about the history and origins of the Mt. Hope music mural at the mural dedication on September 16, 2017

Contributor

Hannah Resseger, Danny Lopes, Dannie Ritchie

transcript of

0:00: Hannah Resseger has a been a long time working in the community at Mt. Hope Learning Center for 14 years and as the site--
0:013 I'll tell them. Good afternoon everyone. I'm so overwhelmed I can't believe this is even happening right now because like she said this has been a 5 year vision in the making but I've been working in this neighborhood for about 14 years but hanging out here even longer. Every time I drove up this hill and saw that big gray wall I said this wall needs something, it needs a mural. And after we did the peace mural on Camp Street I've been thinking about this and what we could do. And I wanted it to be something about the history. So wehn Dannie finally got us some funding from Arts culture and Tourism, I started to do more research. My initial research actually started years ago with Silvia Ann Soares coming and meeting with the young women's group I've been running at the center, and she gave us a lot of history about the community, the stores, the people. And from there I kept thikning about images, and ideas, and what to include. There's so much rich history in this neighborhood. And I'm actually glad Terrell's here because my first experience with the Osbornes was being a part of music one for about 7 years. Represent Terrel in the back. But through thisprocess, an dI'm gonna call Danny up. Danny Lopes. I met with Danny and his group at the East Side apartments. And I learned from elders in the community who were teenagers at the time of the celebrity club all about the celebrity club and the music. The musicians who came from this neighbhroodd and the famous musicians who came here and hung out at the Carls Dickens record shop. And the Cadillacs. And I just started envisioning all that and I said let's make the theme music. So we can share that rich history with the community and the younger generation. So we started to design. I have two artists here who I couldn't have done this project without. I wanna call up Catherine Housley and Elijah Farris. They have been with me all along the way. And the teamwork that we experienced was phenomenal. I could not have done this without them. We've been working day and night to get this done for you guys. What I did was I took in old Platt map from the early 1900s and I sectioned it off from this neighborhood from Cypress to Pleasant, North Main to Hope St, to use it as the neighbhorhood. So you might see your street listed up there on the wall. And I started to collect the different artsist from the community. I've been talking ot Billy Osborne, Randy Ash. Danny can tell you a little more about that. And I made kind of a musical timeline with records and things like that. And I also wanted to include some information I got from DJ Leggs about his father, the work that he did. David Hect with the crate bikes with the kids back in the day. So you'll see some of that when we walk down to the wall. And just so you know, while we were working on this project, every day we were out there, cars were driving by, pulling over and stopping, and we were getting nothing but positive feedback. And I wish we had recorded it, because everyone driving by was saying, awesome, good job, looks great, thank you. People were so appreciative. Some people walked by and stopped. Danny walked by today and gave us some more knowledge about the musicians. And people were giving us information about the images we were putting up there, the history. I learned that some of the kids who were in that crate bike picture passed away, and I didn't know that. There's so much that we're learning as we're creating this project. And we were working on it all the way up until this morning. Elijah and I were up here finishing it and it still needs a tiny bit of touching up. If you have any images from back then that you would like to see included, we can try to make space for that to happen. So I'm gonna pass it off to Danny. Thank you so much for coming out to support this project. And I hope you enjoy the artwork that we created.

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