Hope
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Tape Art Crew: Struan Ashby, Erica Duthie, Michael Townsend

In the spring of 1995 we were at an arts festival in OKC when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. The arts festival was cancelled, but we remained in the city.

We drew in the hospital rooms of children pulled from the blast site and drew themes of recovery with students in elementary schools that were close enough to the explosion that their windows had blown out.

We were eventually invited by the city manager into the height of the rescue efforts - the Myriad Convention Center - where we created a mural on a wall adjacent to where rescue crews were entering and exiting the space to the blast site. We drew for the next 58 hours straight as rescue crews cycled through on 12-hour shifts.

The mural depicts an assembly line of people tying feathers onto frames to create wings they lash onto people's backs before lifting them into the air. Many of the rescue workers interpreted this as a representation of their work freeing people from the wreckage.