Norwood Cultural Council brainstorms with mural artist

The Norwood Cultural Council (NCC) met with homegrown artist Tara Bilotta on Monday during its regular meeting and made progress on the proposed mural for Downtown Norwood.

While about half of the hour-and-a-half meeting was dedicated to administrative housekeeping, budgetary concerns, meeting minutes and a fierce debate on the nature of specific candies (most of this took place before the meeting began and was not part of the public record), Bilotta’s portion was mostly dedicated to her mural.

The mural was pitched on the theme, “Many Stories, One Norwood,” to showcase Norwood’s past, present and future. The mural is set to be unveiled on Aug. 29, this year’s Norwood Day, at 11 a.m. with a small ceremony and some words from Bilotta on the mural itself.

The mural is sited to go on the side of the building behind Town Hall that houses Kappy’s Coins and Stamps, Essential Day Spa, Norwood Glass, and Sunrise Breakfast. Bilotta showed an early draft of the mural, which depicts an apple tree, the sky, the dirt and its roots. Its roots, notably, form into the numerals 1872, the year the Town was founded.

“I want to preface this with the fact that it’s done yet, obviously,” she said.

Bilotta said she wanted to fill in the sky and the dirt with birds and insects. The tree currently has “Norwood” scored into it, like how people used to carve their initials into trees to mark their time in the area or their loved one.

“There are going to be more carvings on the tree too,” she said.

Members and Bilotta went over how they could use symbolism to create callbacks to Norwood’s history. A camera hanging from the tree branch, for instance, was suggested to both reference Norwood’s noted photography artists Francis Holland Day and the Town’s longtime factory of Polaroid.

Sports, industry, art, and local callbacks were all pitched for the design.

“I want them to be in there,” she said. “I was also thinking there could be items in the soil.”

One idea was to put some of the references for past icons of Norwood in the soil or in the roots, and then put current and future symbols in the sky or branches. Bilotta said she wanted to use apple tree saplings to show what’s in the Town’s future. Ideas were thrown around for how to represent the Bird Tanning Factory (now Winsmith Mill) and the Morse Sawmill.

One piece she included was a tag, meant to represent a time when immigrants who spoke many different languages used tags to help identify themselves and what they were there to do.

“Which has some negative connotations, but these are also the people who built up Norwood,” she said. “And it’s very subtle. You’d only really know it if you recognized it.”

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Another idea was to “bury” tools symbolizing past industries, movements and neighborhoods, and putting other, more modern items in the tree branches. Other ideas included representing Moderna somehow, as well hiding “camouflaged” images in the tree leaves, similar to ‘find the item’ puzzle hunts in magazines like Highlights. Bernie Cooper Park, the Norwood Food Orchard, immigrants, the trails systems and other groups were also discussed.

“What I was realizing while I was working is that I have so much space to put in a lot of things,” Bilotta said.

“You could put a cow there waiting for Aaron Guild to come back,” said NCC member Marypaz.

An airplane in the sky was also suggested to represent both Norwood Memorial Airport and its former life as a U.S. Army Air Base.

Also discussed at the meeting was Bilotta’s remuneration for the mural. The base fee for the mural itself was agreed previously at $2,000, with another $550 for materials and incidentals. The NCC voted to approve an additional cap of $1,000 – for a total of $3,550 – for printing, licensing and associated fees so that the NCC could have prints made of the mural to sell and fundraise with. That was contingent, however, on the NCC being able to fundraise those monies independently of the NCC’s primary grant and funding system, which is dictated by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

For more information on the NCC, go to https://gvimes.link/ncc