"Dancing with the wall"

Muralist Felipe Ortiz brings "Awesome Blossom" to Provincetown's MacMillan Pier

Felipe Ortiz, “Awesome Blossom” 2024. Provincetown Public Art Summer 2024. MacMillan Pier, Provincetown. All photos courtesy the artist.

Last fall, painter Felipe Ortiz took part in Provincetown’s MacMillan Pier Trap Shed Program, which opens a handful of 20x10-foot sheds up to artists, and rented temporary studio space there. He realized the building’s outer wall was the perfect size for an idea he’d been cooking up: a movable mural.

“I envisioned movable surfaces that could be temporarily installed throughout the Cape,” he wrote me in an email. “A rotation of temporary murals. We did an installation at the Cape Cod Museum of Art last year and experimented with the fabrication of custom temporary surfaces that could eventually be re-installed elsewhere.”

Felipe is known for his public art around Boston and beyond, paintings that sway and surge with the tropical tones of his native Colombia and are often populated with the country’s flora and fauna. In Provincetown, he partnered with Sam Tager, executive director of the Provincetown Public Art Foundation, and came up with a trap shed mural for Provincetown Public Art Summer 2024. The result is “Awesome Blossom,” which he painted on a temporary backing and then installed on the trap shed.

I’ve always loved the tones and movement of Felipe’s murals. In 2022, he told WBUR’s Dana Forsythe that his approach comes in part from what he took from three years studying with painting professor Kofi Kayiga at MassArt: “I learned about art and the spirituality of it, the connection to energy. He taught me how to be more receptive and perceptive to the world around me.”

Felipe is using paint, the environment he’s in, and the environment he comes from to channel that energy onto the wall.

Felipe writes: