When murals are created on large, old structures, “it becomes part of the landscape.”
High atop a massive grain elevator in the middle of Minot, North Dakota, artist Guido van Helten swipes a concrete wall with a brush that looks more appropriate for painting a fence than creating a monumental mural.
Back and forth van Helten brushes, focused on his work and not bothered by the sheer enormity of his task as he stands in a boom lift, 75 feet off the ground, and focused on a few square feet of a structure that stretches over most of a city block.
“When you use these old structures to kinda share stories and use them as a vehicle to carry an image of identity, it becomes part of the landscape,” he said. “I’ve found that people have really adopted them and become really super proud of them.”
The work on the former Union Silos is van Helten’s latest effort to paint murals on a gigantic scale, with earlier projects on structures ranging from a dam in Australia to part of a former cooling tower at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. Although he has created murals throughout the world, grain silos in the U.S. Midwest have been among his most frequent sites.
“I do enjoy the opportunity to uncover stories that are often kinda considered out of the way or flyover communities,” he said.
