Fresh fumes of acrylic paint synonymous with the 34th Street Wall in Gainesville hung in the air Thursday morning as a team of UF Health Psychiatric Hospital nurses, therapists and administrators created their annual mural for National Mental Health Awareness month.
This year’s image, titled “Walking Through the Storm,” serves as a visual representation of mental health challenges and triumphs and displays the phrase, “Healing is a journey…keep going one step at a time.”
The mural’s designer Jessica Yupanqui said the image aims to connect with the community by symbolizing emotional resilience, support systems and the journey toward mental health healing.
“Everybody just jumps in, and we modify the whole art during the process of painting it,” Yupanqui said. “We want everybody to be involved and everybody to feel what they’re doing because we’re doing it for a cause. We really want to create [awareness] about talking about mental health, which is still taboo.”
The paint-caked 34th Street Wall has been a Gainesville icon for over four decades, featuring layers of ever-changing messages such as happy birthday announcements, political slogans and permanent memorials as artists and community members feel inspired.
A team from the hospital donning “Mental Health Matters” T-shirts has designed and painted an image on the wall to raise awareness for mental health every year in May for the past four years. Yupanqui said they always claim the same spot.
“We always choose a specific piece of the wall because the traffic always gets stuck here,” she said. “People get to see this and get to think about it at some point in your life, at some moment you’ve been through this.”
Yupanqui said the storm in the design represents emotional challenges such as grief, anxiety and depression, while the umbrella held by the figure walking through it symbolizes support systems, personal resilience and coping tools that help carry people through the challenges.
The flowers blossoming on the path the person walks along symbolize healing, growth and life persisting through hardship, while the beams of light shining through the rain are meant to be moments of clarity and strength showing up through life’s darkest days.
A gallon of primer paint and a few aerosol cans later, the crew finished painting the image in about two hours.
“We’re trying to say that even though we have adversity, there’s a lot of life after,” Yupanqui said. “We’re always looking for the future, and we’re always looking to the good things.”
After battling anxiety and depression herself, Yupanqui said the image represents many of the muralist’s own mental health journeys. She said these struggles help them relate to their patients and other members of the community going through similar struggles.
Painter Laura Martin is a seasoned artist on the side and said she’s usually the one the team brings in for the more complex details. She said the meditative practice of art has brought her healing and she frequently incorporates it with her patients.
“There are a lot of people who find it very calming and soothing but don’t feel like they can do art,” she said. “Doing it with them helps them see that they can do it…it’s good for their self-esteem, it’s good for me.”
The UF Health Psychiatric Hospital team will be back at the same place on the 34th Street Wall for a mural related to National Suicide Prevention Month in September.
