New SLO County mural invites community to learn together: ‘What’s your story?’
“What’s your story?”
That’s the question that Arroyo Grande bookstore owner Taneesha Regez is asking members of her community through a new mural recently completed on the side of her downtown shop, Monarch Books, at 201 East Branch St.
The new public art piece, painted by Marmalade Mural Co., was approved by city leadership in April, after some debate about whether the mural, which depicts symbols including a monarch butterfly, constituted an advertisement for the bookstore or not. City rules mandate that public art cannot promote or include references to products affiliated with at the attached business.
However, after a public comment period rife with support for public art and the beloved bookstore, the City Council ultimately voted 4-1 to approve the mural. Councilmember Jim Guthrie cast the lone vote against the mural.
But now that the mural is complete, Regez hopes it serves as an invitation for members of the community to learn about each other and explore their differences and similarities.
“Hopefully it gets people talking to each other and realizing we all have a unique story, but we all have commonalities in our stories as well,” she said.
The symbols included in the mural — a bird, a spaceship, a horse, a whale’s tail, a ship with waves and the monarch butterfly — each represent something that could be found in a book or within the bookstore, but could also be found in the imagination or memory of anyone passing through the Central Coast.
Regez told the Tribune on Tuesday that it would be impossible to create a mural without a reference to anything in her shop — because bookstores, with their wide range of genres and topics, inherently sell “everything.”
“It would have to be a blank wall forever,” she said of the west-facing alleyway wall that the mural now sits on.
Regez, who grew up in Arroyo Grande, said she wants locals to start learning more about each other. She said the growth the area has seen over the last few decades has created a sort of division between the people who grew up as locals and those who have moved in as newcomers — and she wants to see her neighbors bridge that divide.
“It’s good that we start asking each other: What is your story? And who are you? And where did you come from?” she said. “So that we can see that we’re all the same.”
She added that she hopes to see more people taking photos with the piece and posting them to social media — and maybe eventually, the art piece will become a destination that people will visit, bringing more business to the downtown.
“They’re going to walk the whole Village, they’re going to see our whole community, and that’s what we really want, too,” she said. “I mean, no one’s going to come and just look at the mural and just look at our bookstore and leave, so we’re excited that it’ll be getting people here and seeing how, how unique and great it is here.”
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