A couple blocks away from the five home project coming soon to Hoffman Street, we stumbled upon what looked to us like a brand new mural on the side of a large warehouse at 7th & Moore. This building has been home to Woodcraft Industry for many years, supplying builders with cabinets and plumbing supplies. It's certainly not a glamorous business, and the building suggested as much.
Recently, artist Shira Walinsky completed a new mural on this wall which has been titled "Language Labs." This work is part of a larger Mural Arts project called Southeast By Southeast, a mental health and community-based arts program created in partnership with Lutheran Children and Family Services. The mural, you can see, is an enormous improvement over what we saw previously.
The mural is broken up into boxes with illustrations and names of various items and animals. Each box contains the word for each object in a different language. The result, according to the project's Tumblr page, is a limited but beautiful pocket dictionary for languages including, English, Karen, Chin, Vietnamese, Pashto, Urdu, Khmer, Lao, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and others. Our favorite, barely visible in the images above, is an image of the 47 bus, which stops right in front of the mural.
If you have a chance to see this bad boy in person, we recommend it. The photos don't really do it justice.