Kent’s Haymaker Farmers’ Market is about to get a facelift.
A new mural titled Market Stanzas will grace the concrete embankment under Haymaker Parkway Bridge, near where the market sets up each summer.
Market Manager Andrew Rome said the new mural will be installed this spring across from the market’s summer quarters on Franklin Avenue. Local artist Angelina Colasante will lead a team of local volunteers as they illustrate ‘Haymaker Community Poem,’ which Wick Poetry Center crowdsourced to collect memories, reflections, tributes and odes of market shoppers, vendors, volunteers and friends.
The mural was designed by Nate Mucha and Alex Catanese of Kent’s Each+Every design studio.
Designer Elaine Hullihen’s original work, created a decade ago and restored this year by a team Colasante led, is located on eight of the bridge columns and supports in the parking lot where the summer market takes place. It tells the story of Kent through historical stencils depicting the city’s important people and places.
Among images Colasante added to Hullihen’s work are an Indigenous person on a canoe, Kent activist Edith Chase, the Erie Rail Yard and Ben Anderson, distinguished by being the first Black person elected to city council and the first Black realtor in the county.
Colasante’s new stencils and Hullihen’s 21 original Kent history stencils can be viewed anytime at Haymaker’s summer market site.
Providing funds for the mural project are the Woodward and Kent Rotary foundations. City Engineer Jim Bowling and Kent City Council also helped by ensuring local and ODOT approvals.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.