Rise Up Manitou Balloons

This chalk mural of inflated balloons on a string was created in 2017 by Audrey Richter and Angella Rivas on the side of a building in Manitou Springs. At the time, the artists were students at Liberty High School and were members of the school’s National Art Honor Society and the Art Club. The mural was created as a community service project. The artists also set up a hash tag #riseupmanitou to facilitate community response. The artists said the following about their mural:

“The purpose of our mural is to create an uplifting, literally and figuratively, image in an area where there is already a lot of appreciation for the arts. We wanted people to be able to pose with our balloons and to create a sort of surreal sense of what is everyday life. It has taken off in bigger ways than we ever thought was possible. To see other people enjoying something that we put so much time and effort into is amazing. Everyday more and more people are taking pictures with it and using our hashtag. It is so exciting for us to share our creativity with the people of Manitou.

We used chalk to create this mural because we envisioned this as a temporary project. Since we have received so much positive feedback, we are considering making the mural permanent.

The purpose of our hashtag ‘#riseupmanitou’ is to measure how people are affected by our art by seeing the pictures that they have taken with it and tabulating the number of responses. It was a cool idea because every time either of us would check our hashtag on Instagram and there were new pictures we would get so excited to see what those people thought about our art. We even received comments on our own pictures about how much people loved our mural.”

(Source: information provided by the artists and the Liberty High School Art Club advisor)