Painting 6th Avenue brilliant colors

It was a Volunteer Saturday with Tucsonans out and about improving the city by doing everything from picking up trash in the Santa Cruz riverbed to painting a street to planting trees.

By 9:30 a.m. close to a hundred people had already turned out to paint one long block of 6th Avenue between Armory Park and the Children’s Museum. It turns out the guiding light behind this massive painting is the Living Streets Alliance — the same people who are bringing you Cyclovia on October 30th and who were instrumental in painting the Barrio Blue Moon roundabout a couple of weeks ago.

The painting, which was scheduled to end at 5 p.m., had just begun when I arrived and here is some of what I saw:

Some of the volunteer painters came on their own. Others were part of groups including Living Streets. The ones below looked like students from the University of Arizona.

A few children with parents joined in, but most of the painters were in their twenties, it appeared.

In addition to the art on the street, volunteers were planting trees in tubs, similar to the ones at the Barrio Blue Moon.

The artist who designed this impressive work is Yu Yu Shiratori, a woman who usually works in metal on a much smaller scale. To cover such a large space she relied on repeating simple geometric and organic forms. And, she said, she also relied on help from a Living Streets team who outlined the designs and dabbed paint in the outlines to show which colors went where. Like the other volunteers she was painting one of the designs.

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Removing trash; protecting the rivers and ocean

Still other volunteers on Saturday morning were a couple of miles away removing trash and debris from the Santa Cruz riverbed, but since I’ve written about this twice before, I’ll only show you a couple of images of river cleaners including the woman from Tucson Clean and Beautiful who kept everyone organized.

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If you are a Tucsonan and would like a starter tree for $5, go here for more details.