“And she makes sure I have everything I want and need.” “‘We feeding you,’" Reynolds recalled White saying. White didn’t let her go hungry, she said. It was cash only, and she had forgotten her debit card. Reynolds remembers visiting White's soul food restaurant in her 20s. White’s Golden Rule Cafe, which has been open since 1964, and the grandmother of the founder of Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles. The mural will feature a portrait of Elizabeth White, the founder of Mrs. “Those Japanese flower gardens were the product of Japanese internment camp victims who took that tragedy and produced treasure for the whole of south Phoenix,” she said. She fondly remembers him chasing her out of his flower grove on Baseline Road: “‘Kids, what are you doing over here?’ ‘Smelling tulips.’” There will be a portrait of Hiroshi “Nick” Nakagawa. "He reminded us that our voice mattered," Reynolds said, and in the mural, he will be "pointing the way." And he's still fighting the good fight,” she said. Decades later, just months before he died, she recalls seeing him at a Black Lives Matter protest. “He made himself look like love to us,” she said. Goode, a Phoenix civil rights leader and the second Black Phoenix council member, called the “conscience” of Phoenix City Council, regularly visiting her class at Palmdale Elementary School to read to students and encourage them. “We don't go far without honoring our past heroes and our present ones,” she said. The mural she will create for the light rail extension will honor some of the individuals who she saw as pillars in the community. "But there was so much investment in that Black community,” she said. “I grew up in the hood of south Phoenix, which was predominantly Black because of redlining and racism," she said. Throughout her childhood, she was surrounded by individuals who cared for her community. She took art and theater classes at the South Phoenix Youth Center, where she found mentors who "invested in me as an artist," she said. Reynolds’ art teacher was one of many people who supported her through her health condition, which lasted until she was 18, she said. And he would have me do origami, like 100 cranes. There would be days when my hands wouldn't work. “So he understood the struggles of what my body was going through, because there would be days when I was paralyzed. “I had this amazing art teacher who himself was paralyzed from the waist down,” she said. Because of a debilitating neurological condition she developed at 14, she said, she was unable to take any electives besides art. Reynolds’ background as an artist began during her childhood in south Phoenix. And I haven't yet decided what to paint her as, but representing our future. “And then at the end, there'll be a little girl. “One will be a faceless Indigenous person from the Tohono O'odham people who were the originators and the foundation builders for south Phoenix,” she said. The mural will include five portraits flanked by two scenes “honoring our past and our future.” The murals will appear against a backdrop of the flower farms that used to line Baseline Road, as well as South Mountain, including the “red light spires" that serve as a sign of home for many, Reynolds said. Therosia Reynolds will celebrate her childhood in south Phoenix in her mural at the Carter Street Traction Power Substation. At Carter Road, a mural to honor pillars of south Phoenix Here’s an early look at some of the projects that are underway. The artists were chosen in 2017 by selection committees of community members. Finnerty, Valley Metro’s public art administrator. Emerging artists were recruited for the substation and signal buildings, said M.B. Artists commissioned for stations received $260,000, while artists commissioned for the traction power substation and signal buildings received $44,000. Valley Metro’s art budget is 1% of the overall construction budget for the South Central Extension and Downtown Hub project.
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