Moving on and Mural-ing up

You may remember the days when the WEA Centre was covered with a colourful mural depicting students and tutors learning all kinds of wonderous things. This post tells the story of how the mural came to be, how the Adelaide Council's strict signage law was thwarted, and how important it is to give detailed briefs when it comes to murals! 
Thanks to former Education Officer and WEA Life Member Larry Kern for this recollection:

 

Shortly after the WEA building at 223 Angas Street was renovated for use as an Adult Education Centre ( it was originally a chocolate factory) a mural was painted across the face of the building that was approximately two metres high and forty metres long. There is an interesting story on why the mural was executed and how the design of it evolved.

223 Angas Street, now the site of the current WEA adult learning building

Its creation was initially inspired by the Adelaide Council's restriction on signage. When the Project Manager of the WEA building project, Larry Kern, submitted plans for the conversion of the chocolate factory to an Adult Education Centre, the Adelaide Council rejected the signage shown on the plans as being too large. In fact the signage shown was quite modest when compared to existing signage on other buildings around Adelaide. Since we wanted to ensure that the public were aware of what was happening inside the new building Larry proposed that we have a mural on the building, citing the example of an inspiring mural that the Adelaide Zoo had on their wall that ran along Frome Road (at that time you didn't need Council approval to have a mural on a building).  Staff thought this was a good idea so a mural artist, Ziggy Moskwa was located and grant applications were made to fund the mural project. Ziggy was then given a brief, which turned out to be too brief on what the mural should be. He was advised to refer to the WEA annual report and to create a mural that showed the range of WEA activities. What Ziggy first presented clearly showed that he didn't read the Annual Report! He brought us a roll of canvas about six metres long and a half a metre high that showed steel workers pouring steel from a vat and of men digging ditches by hand and with huge heavy equipment! Not for the first time did someone fail to understand what the WEA stood for! The mock up that Ziggy presented would have won prizes in Soviet Russia during the Stalinist era!  Ziggy was re-briefed via a tour of the building during class operations and shown many photos of past classes. His second mock canvas was excellent and showed adult students doing pottery, cooking, doing bush walks, learning how to operate computers and learning foreign languages. The students and tutors shown were clearly identified from class photos so many of them were contacted to gain approval  now that they were two metres plus high on the WEA building.

Flood lighting was installed so that the mural was richly lit up at night. We certainly obtained our objective: no one could be the least bit uncertain where the WEA building was nor what went on inside the building.

Larry Kern