Striking Mural Enlivens PDX Affordable Housing Community

By Lauren White, RCS Editor. 

Beatrice Morrow Cannady is enshrined on a building in Portland thanks to the talent of Mauricio Ramirez and the expertise of the Beacon Building Products team. 

The Schrunk Riverview Tower in Portland, Oregon got a major facelift when visual artist Mauricio Ramirez skillfully created a mural to rejuvenate the affordable housing community in the St. Johns neighborhood. 

Mauricio, along with other artists, responded to an artist’s call to transform this building in the Pacific Northwest. Ultimately, Mauricio’s style and vision for his mural of Beatrice Morrow Cannady were selected for the Tower. Based out of Chicago, Illinois, Mauricio studied teacher education and English at the University of Illinois. However, he always had a passion for graffiti art growing up, which is how he learned art theory, color and form. Later, he painted private jets in Illinois, learning how to work with paint before getting his own studio. When asked by Milwaukee Mag what themes his artwork portrays, Mauricio shared, “...community identity in the neighborhood, culture and diversity.” He continued, “I want to create artwork that everyone in the community can enjoy." 

This project was not without challenges, which is where the technical expertise of the team at Beacon Building Products came in. Randy McAdams, a senior outside sales rep who has been with Beacon for 20 years, worked closely with Mauricio to navigate this project. The substrate of the building is fluted blocks, meaning there are large, concave marks on the stone that make it a very rough surface. Randy shared that this project was going to be “extremely problematic because the silicone coating would be impossible to paint over with traditional paint.” He tried to talk Mauricio out of the project, but the talented artist persisted.   

Before painting commenced, the building was pressure washed and then a coat of white DOWSIL™ ALLGUARD was applied, creating a blank canvas for Mauricio. Since traditional paint couldn’t be used, Mauricio decided to use the same silicone elastomeric coating to create his mural. Other reasons for using DOWSIL ALLGUARD include its thermal, UV and water resistance. “With any luck that mural should be intact for a very long time,” according to Randy. 

Randy explained that there were limitations to the colors Mauricio could use because they don’t “like to load a lot of pigment in the coating.” Mauricio found a way to get the colors necessary for his mural though. And the waterproofing team at Beacon’s Portland branch mixed 45 color tints for Mauricio to adorn the building. Approximately 100 gallons of the silicone elastomeric coating were donated by DOW and Beacon.  

When I asked Randy about Mauricio’s process, his response was, “The whole process was super cool. He’s a very talented young man.” Everything was done by hand. Mauricio started by taking an image off of a computer screen, blowing it up on 3x6 sheets of paper with a stencil outline of the different blocks to be painted. A special tool with a spiked wheel was used to “put holes in the paper so the paper sticks to the wall,” Randy explained. “He [Mauricio] then takes a spray can and sprays the paint on the wall to have an outline.”  From there Mauricio hand painted between the lines using his various color tints of DOWSIL ALLGUARD. Watch Mauricio in action as he transforms this building into a work of art. 

With culture and diversity at the heart of Mauricio’s work, a mural of Beatrice Morrow Cannady is a fitting image to ornament the affordable housing community. According to Mauricio, “My more personal artwork is a contribution to the community; frequently a cultural icon that transcends rich intersecting historical and popular culture references that speak to the complex diaspora of the United States.”   

A cultural icon, Beatrice was a prominent civil rights activist and founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Portland chapter in Oregon. After teaching in Oklahoma and studying music in Chicago she found herself in Portland, Oregon, becoming the first black woman to graduate from Northwestern College of Law in Portland – she was one of two women in a class of 22.  Not only was she a legal advocate for minorities, but she used her position as the editor of the Advocate, the largest and only black newspaper in Oregon, to fight against discrimination practiced by restaurants, hotels and movie theaters throughout the state and in the Pacific Northwest. Using the pages of the Advocate and the new medium of radio, Beatrice successfully challenged segregation in schools and informed her readers of Ku Klux Klan activity throughout Oregon. 

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