It's child's play at Fort Kid: New sidewalk mural is like a 'board game'

Making a positive impact on the community and having a good time while doing it is an artist’s dream.

Dustin Durham said he “had a blast” while he was painting an interactive mural on the ramp leading to the Fort Kid playground near World’s Fair Park.

Durham and city officials were there Nov. 29 for a ribbon cutting that officially opened the area to the public.

“I love public art for the civic good,” Durham said. “It allowed me to be creative.”

“Dustin had a great idea,” said Liza Zenni, the executive director of the Arts and Culture Alliance. “He came up with a plan to have the mural be a game as kids enter the playground.”

“Board games were always a tradition in my family,” said Durham, a native of Charleston, West Virginia. “At first, all I was going to do was the retaining wall. When I went out there to look at it, the idea of a board game struck me. It just hit me; it was like I was playing ‘Chutes and Ladders.’”

Fort Kid 'board game' gets kids involved

Durham said that as he planned the layout of this mural, he never lost sight of his primary audience.

“In each of the squares of the board game, I wanted to make it fun,” he said. “I created the prompts with kids in mind.”

Some of the examples: If it’s your birthday this month, go two spaces forward. If it’s not, take one. Did you pick your nose today? Yuck! Go one space back. Make a silly animal noise and go two spaces forward.

Durham said he has the instructions on stickers and will change stickers every few months to keep it fresh.

One of the most important things he wanted to accomplish was to have kids involved in the process of getting it together. On a Saturday in early October, he said, “two or three dozen” kids and their parents came out to help with the painting.

“I want them to say, ‘I helped do this,’” Durham said. “The parents were watching them, so it wasn’t too bad. I wanted them to know it was OK to be messy. If there were green footprints on a yellow square, I fixed it later.”

Making Fort Kid a ‘bright and happy place’

According to Zenni, the opportunity to have the public art came from pandemic recovery grants issued by the Department of the Treasury.

Durham came with a proven track record. He had done a mural on the side of a rundown building at the corner of Anderson and Cornelius streets that spruced up the neighborhood.

“So many of our artists do so much that you’d never know unless you knew them personally,” Zenni said. “I have a maternal feeling toward the artists. It’s like I’m their grandmother.”

Durham’s background is in architecture. Since graduating from the University of Tennessee Knoxville with an architecture degree in 2014, he works as a project manager for a nonprofit.

“Architecture deals in black and gray,” Durham said. “I like colors. I wanted to make it a bright and happy place.”

He used the colors of the Victorian homes that border the playground as inspiration.

Durham said about 90% of the project is completed. He will put the final touches on it in the spring when the weather is better for painting.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knoxville's Dustin Durham creates Fort Kid 'board game' on sidewalk