Project Atrium: Muralists in Action Dustin Harewood & Shaun Thurston
Local artists Dustin Harewood and Shaun Thurston have teamed up to lead the creation of a mural inside the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville. Their collaborative installation, part of the museum’s ongoing Project Atrium series, is more than a mural—it’s a living process, unfolding over weeks in full view of museum visitors.
Harewood and Thurston have both contributed to the development of Jacksonville’s now vibrant mural scene, which even a decade ago looked quite different. Think back to 2010 or 2015 and you might remember significantly fewer public murals and a much smaller pool of artists creating them. Today, there are well over a hundred public murals around the city, with dozens in the urban core alone. You can hardly turn a corner downtown without seeing a work of art. Murals have been integrated into our urban landscape and the talents of muralists are leveraged to enliven otherwise lackluster interior spaces in local businesses, libraries, medical offices, restaurants, and schools.
THE ARTISTS
Between them, Thurston and Harewood bring decades of experience, experimentation, and community engagement to the project.
Thurston was raised locally and attended Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. Harewood alternately, was born in New York, spent his teenage years in Barbados, and moved to the Jacksonville area as an adult. Both artists have spent years developing their artistic practices and refining their skills. Both have created murals in and out of Jacksonville, with Thurston’s on view in various cities throughout the United States and Harewood’s spanning countries, including the U.S., Barbados, and Japan. Likewise, for both artists, their relationship to the natural world is at the core of their studio practices, showing up in themes that examine the beauty of natural cycles like destruction and creation, detritus and decay.
