Stella Rose Outdoor Piano Hart Fowler Rita Brame Stella Rose Outdoor Piano The Burg Blacksburg Blacksburg Ribbon Cutting Event Tuesday!!!
The Official Ribbon Cutting for Rita Brame’s The Local Jam, Downtown’s Blacksburg newest Music Mural presented by 16 Blocks
Mural Ribbon Cutting-Meet the Artist-Live Music
Come One, Come All and Join us in the Celebration of Public Art and Local Music in Welcoming Blacksburg’s newest homegrown attraction.
There will be acoustic music, cool drinks, and a display and appetizers (and AC) in the Burgs.
Special Guest Speaker will be newly elected Councilman Liam Watson.
The Local Jam is the music mural featuring 29 living musicians who have played the New River Valley poised in performance on an epic 800 square foot Stage on the corner of Jackson Street and Draper Road in the center of Downtown Blacksburg and a block from the Virginia Tech campus.
Rita Brame is a Radford and Floyd native and graduated from Radford University with a BFA in Painting and earned an MFA from Winthrop University in Sculpture. She is a lifelong professional artist and designer, and16 Block Magazine’s Creative Director and Cover Artist.
16 Blocks Magazine is the nonprofit organization that produces the bi-monthly print and online arts and culture magazine covering Southwest Virginia. Creating public artworks has been a tradition for the magazine (the previous mural from 2013 was a 16 Blocks 1.0 Co-Production), and The Local Jam follows up Rita’s artistic decoration of the Stella Rose Outdoor Piano under the tents beside the mural in Fall 2023.
The mural was an independent production with materials funded by local sponsors. Lowes, Home Depot, and Spectrum Paint came together to provide the finest materials required to properly deliver the scope of concept. These substantial sponsorships allows the mural to pop up close and from a distance, with the vibrancy of the colorization visible from distant lines of sight.
Local-owned The Good Vibes Shop provided a donation for additional supplies.
Steel Rose Enterprises has been a major patron of most of the downtown murals, and 16 Blocks worked with the Cranwell family to produce the Market Square Park murals and the Michael St Germain mural we replaced with The Local Jam.
The Town of Blacksburg approved the design.
The local artist’s three-week mostly solo-process created a local viral social media sensation and is quickly becoming a traveling destination spot with mural seekers anxious to see the work coming less than a month after the ribbon-cutting for Coffeeholics “Neon Owl” across the street.
Learn more at 16blocks.org
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Draper Block is growing into a FULL-ON-ART-REVIVAL on hot summer days, and already has that “Field of Dreams” magnetic draw to it with canopy tents and two gigantic new murals, the Stella Rose Outdoor Piano and the anxiously anticipated Town’s phase I of an improvement plan.
Stella Rose, the piano in the center under the tents, is the outdoor piano we upcycled from a Church in town that needed a home. Rita recently added detail and color.
Rita’s first cover drawing “Draper Block” is an Iconic Image capturing a moment in time in Downtown Blacksburg History, and will be remembered as one of the few benefits of the nationwide and local quarantine and Social Distancing. The time after the quarantine was lifted and the tents and closed-to-cars street remained, leading to the further improvements beginning this Spring will make Draper into more of a public park than street.
