Mural from Towson alum part of Ravens initiative to connect art with football and communities around Maryland
Nearly 65 years ago, the Baltimore Colts selected an offensive lineman by the name of Ernie Barnes out of all-Black North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central) during the 1960 NFL draft. He didn’t make it past the final cuts of training camp and his unremarkable career lasted only five years and spanned five teams, including the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League, where his playing days came to an unceremonious end with a fractured right foot suffered in an exhibition game.
Barnes’ second career, however, turned out to be far more enduring. His painting “Sugar Shack” appeared on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album “I Want You” and was featured throughout the television sitcom “Good Times.” Among his other achievements, he also served as the official artist of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
An artist since childhood in segregated Durham, North Carolina, Barnes referred to himself in an interview with The New York Times as “Buster Brown, big, fat, shy, and I loved to draw,” who at a young age turned to the solitary endeavor as refuge from being bullied. His professional works often depicted the life he saw all around him, a vibrant flow of bodies in leisurely pursuits in churches and pool halls and athletic fields. Long after his death in 2009, it would also serve as inspiration for artist and Towson University graduate Jordan Lawson.
“When I looked up who he was, I saw that he was a football player and it blew my mind because I didn’t even put two and two together that you could be a football player and a painter,” Lawson told The Baltimore Sun. “I thought that was so cool because it shows the talents that we have as humans.
“I enjoy his style in terms of portraying shapes and forms in an elongated way thats’ very expressive, and I try to use that in my work as well.”
Lawson’s work can be seen all around Baltimore — on the basketball courts at Patterson Park, on a half-dozen murals in Mondawmin Mall, at the Henderson Hopkins school — and now as part of the Ravens’ “Paint the State Purple” program, with the first of what the team hopes to be several murals around the state unveiled in November. The goal of the initiative is to connect the organization with the communities that support them.
“A lot of NFL teams have done mural projects around their city and inside their stadium, and in April we started thinking how it could make sense for us,” Ravens senior director of brand strategy and advertising Josh Lukin told The Sun. “We have a really strong artistic community in Baltimore. How could we connect the dots? Art and football don’t always go together.”
The first step was finding a location. They started with areas closest to Baltimore and selected Towson, where the mural appears on the northern wall of the Dulaney Plaza shopping center on the corner of Dulaney Valley Road and Fairmount Avenue, across from the Towson Town Center.
Then there was the task of selecting an artist. The team’s brand design manager, Nick Prevas, used to work for the American Visionary Art Museum and was familiar with Lawson’s work.
“It’s got a vibrancy to it,” Lukin said. “It’s a unique style. It’s playful, and it encourages fans to take pictures in front of it.”
It didn’t hurt that Lawson, 30, grew up in Woodlawn and has been a diehard Ravens fan since childhood.
“It was one of those things that I guess was bred in me,” Lawson said. “Growing up, my favorite player was Ray Lewis, and that’s portrayed in the mural as well as the Ravens fan has the number 52 jersey on, which is my personal favorite.”
The main focus of the mural shows a fan descending into the city with balloons that spell out the team’s name. The balloons are meant to give a sense of nostalgia and the carefree tendencies of children, Lawson said.
It also depicts other prominent landmarks in the city, including the courthouse, Fresh Market, The Rec Room and Johnny Unitas Stadium.
“I thought that was the perfect icing on the cake because John Unitas was a Baltimore Colt as well,” Lawson said of the Hall of Fame quarterback. “And he resided in Towson, too.”
As for the process of actually creating the art, it’s a laborious one that took 18 days to complete.
It started with Lawson coming up with a concept, sketching it out by hand then drawing it into an Adobe software program to digitize it. From there, he presents the imagery to the client and gathers supplies.
For this mural, Lawson began by painting the entire background baby blue, then projecting his image at night onto the wall, where he painted in the buildings and clouds. But the balloon letters that spell out Ravens, as well as other smaller elements, had to be painted freehand. He also applied two coats of paint so the mural would stand up to the weather and used an anti-graffiti coating that prevents it from being marked up and protects it from the sun’s ultraviolet light.
“It gives us a chance to do something new in areas we might not always visit,” Lukin said. “We do caravans for purple Fridays but can’t get everywhere. This gives us a flag in the sand in these areas.”
Already, there are plans in the works for another mural to be painted, potentially in Howard County, next spring.
And officials from Salisbury have reached out expressing their interest in one being painted there as well.
Meanwhile, the Ravens will begin the first of their $430 million in renovations to M&T Bank Stadium in 2024, a process that will take place incrementally over the next three years. One possibility among them is adding the artists’ work from the murals.
“I could definitely see a world where we’re starting to build relationships with artists across state,” Lukin said. “It would be great to bring their artwork to the stadium at some point.”
It’s a prospect that Lawson said would be a dream.
“I would definitely love to be a part of it,” he said. “I’m definitely going to put my proposal in to see if there’s any space for more art because I think that always makes the spaces more vibrant and more inviting.”