Bringing art to the community.

Columbia is home to a thriving art community, and if you aren’t prone to spend an afternoon in one of the various galleries or museums, simply take a drive around town and let the art come to you. Throughout Columbia — from the North Village Arts District to the Arcade District and downtown and scattered around town — passers-by are gifted aesthetic breaks from the brick-and-mortar buildings that are common to cities.   

And some of the artwork occupies a few extra doses of space.  

“Murals impact our community a little bit quicker. They’re more accessible,” said Columbia muralist David Spear. “You’re bringing art to the people, and you’re bringing new life to a community.”   

Spear’s work decorates the walls of Columbia restaurants Addison’s and Sophia’s. He grew up as a creative, and art was a part of his home life with his grandmother encouraging him to become the artist she knew he already was. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) and his graduate degree from MU, but it was his job as a bartender at Addison’s that changed the trajectory of his career.  

Unbeknownst to Addison’s owners, Spear created a large charcoal drawing of one the servers as an example of what could go on the wall.  

“I showed them the rough drafts, and they decided to go with that plan,” he said.  

After several years bartending, Spear took what he had saved and traveled. Those travels later inspired his work for Sophia’s.  

“I traveled around Europe for a few months, saw a lot of Greek mythology,” Spear said. “When I came back, they were making Sophia’s. I was getting married and had a baby on the way, so I decided to do Greek mythology in a modern context. I used my wife when she was pregnant and her mother and grandmother — the thread of life ­— for The Three Fates painting in Sophia’s.”  

When Spear created the pieces for the original Addison’s on Cherry Street, he had just opened a downtown studio called Alleyway Arts. To transfer the works of art from studio to restaurant, he and one of Addison’s owners, Matt Jenne, simply walked the pieces through the bustle of The District. When Sophia’s recently moved locations in south Columbia from 3915 S. Providence to 3910 Peachtree Drive — about 250 feet to the west — Spear and Jenne hit repeat: T hey walked the original Sophia’s paintings from the old location to the new.  

One of Spear’s favorite things to do when creating a mural is to collaborate. He recently completed a mural for the Missouri Department of Conservation in Salem, Missouri. The mural covers a span of roughly 250 feet by twenty-five feet and is located on the exterior of the Ozark Natural and Cultural Resource Center (ONCRC). Inspiration came from multiple collaborative meetings with members of the community, ONCRC volunteers, and the Department of Conservation.  

“We got different groups together, and we did brainstorming sessions,” Spear said. “I wrote down everything they wanted to be in the mural, and then I did another session with the volunteers of the ONCRC. We did the same thing, and I wrote down everything. At the end of these sessions, I told them, ‘OK you get three dots to put what you think the most important thing is.’ Whatever got the most dots got into the mural.”  

The first large mural that Spear created is closer to home, located at 1000 College Avenue. It depicts the story of one of Columbia’s most famous citizens, William “Blind” Boone, who lost his eyesight as a child. Boone went on to become a well-known ragtime pianist. The mural covers 100 feet horizontally and twenty feet vertically. Spear’s murals around Columbia don’t stop there. His most recent work of note is located in the Arcade District.  

The Story of a Mural  

Previously the last stop for beef cattle, visionary Bobby Campbell repurposed what had been a portion of Columbia’s stockyards, as well as an area with multiple manufacturing plants, and brought it back to life in 2022 as the Arcade District. With a tag line of “Innovate. Disrupt. Live,” Campbell’s venture is a nod to expecting anything but status quo.  

Campbell approached Spear as well as another Columbia muralist, Adrienne Luther Johnson, and asked each of them to create a mural for separate sides of the Redbud VC building at 709 Fay Street. Each artist met with Campbell separately and created their mural based on his vision without the benefit of collaboration with the other.   

Luther, also known as co-owner of downtown restaurant Cafe Berlin, along with husband Sam, generally creates art that is playful and with bright colors. She enjoys working with children and for children, and her work is scattered across the windows and chalkboards of businesses and restaurants around town as well as on playgrounds.  

“I was really intrigued by the idea of having the feminine form that large on a building that is of a more masculine architecture,” she said of her work for the Arcade District. “It was very interesting and a challenge to paint the female form on those edges, but it was actually really fun because you have these really harsh verticals and you have to add the curvature of a woman’s body. It was a really interesting creative process.”  

Spear, for his part, also enjoyed the creative process and had some fun with it.  

 “The Arcade District’s branding is create/disrupt/live,” he said. “So I was kind of going off of that scheme, and what’s around his [Campbell’s] idea of disrupting. I have that eyeball on each side with the six hands around it, and they’re not tearing the city up; they’re just kind of disrupting things a little bit.”  

Another image represents the balance of mind, body, and soul (in, as Spear calls it, the “weird yoga shape”). Triangles show up several times in the mural. Spear’s inspiration for those came from the area itself, noting, “There are a lot of triangles around the area. There’s a seeing-eye triangle mural that’s on the old gas station cover that’s nearby.” He took the triangle one step further and incorporated Pablo Picasso’s quote, “The sun is a thousand rays in your belly.”   

Some of Spear’s symbolism in the mural comes from “taking the ideas from the past and working with them and then replacing your ideas into the future.” You can see this on the mural where, as he says, “on the left side is the old Wabash train. On the right it’s a newer version of the Wabash train, but it’s all done in code like it’s like a matrix. It’s like where the past and the future meet at that person in the middle.”   

Then and Now  

Murals are nothing new — just ask a caveman. According to National Geographic, the oldest known cave paintings are estimated to be 65,000 years old, with the majority of pieces being closer to 40,000 years old. Spain and France house most of those natural galleries, but they are not alone. Russia, Argentina, Bulgaria, Indonesia, and, yes, even the United States (Tennessee) are just a few of the countries where cave art can be seen.  

Our prehistoric, cave-dwelling ancestors created their murals primarily with red and black paint made from various rocks. Today’s muralists prefer acrylic paint that comes ready-made — no pounding to smithereens necessary.   

While today’s walls tend to be a bit more uniform in shape and texture and obtaining the paint itself a little less labor intensive, one thing remains the same: the subject matter. Both then and now, artists depict life. In the caves, we see a variety of animals and humans either hunting or being hunted, resting or at work or play, and lest we think that abstract art is something new, we see examples of it in cave art called finger flutings.  

Art has come a long way in the past 65,000 years, but as with prehistoric cave paintings, and indeed all works of art, murals are forms of communication: from one generation to another, from one culture to another, and from artist to beholder.  

Behind the Brush