Yuba Sutter Arts Awards Contract for Cultural Celebration Mural

Yuba City’s Plumas Street business and arts corridor will be the site of a new mural to be created as part of the 2015 Cultural Celebration. Yuba Sutter Arts announced that well-known local artist and muralist Leslie Greenetz’s submission titled “Raining Fruit” was chosen by the mural committee which included John Tuscano, Luisa Leger and Linda Plummer. Five other mural artists had submitted entries.

Yuba Sutter Arts is proud to help facilitate the creation of this great work of public art to help enhance the Yuba City landscape. The mural will be created in two panels on the exterior south wall of the Sutter Theater, located at 752 Plumas Street in Yuba City. The mural will be painted on the two sections of the wall closest to Plumas Street. The scale will be dramatic with each section approximately 21 feet wide by 28 feet tall. The mural design is inspired by the rich diversity of the people of the Yuba-Sutter community and its strong connections to agriculture and farming.

A well-established mural artist in Sutter and Yuba Counties, Leslie was raised in South Lake Tahoe and moved to Yuba City in 1985. She has traveled the world to paint in Italy, France, Greece and Ireland. She has also gone on several short-term Mission trips, “always leaving a mural behind.”
“I love to be in a place and capture the light, essence and colors on canvas or paper,” says Leslie. “Looking at my paintings brings back a flood of memories of the hours spent sitting and feeling the warm sun, hearing the local sounds, smelling the lunches cooking,” she added. A high school art teacher for 16 years, Leslie also uses her artistic skills for set design and costumes at Creative Light Theater in Yuba City, for which she also write scripts and directs.

The new mural project is very much in keeping with Yuba Sutter Arts’ past activities which have reflected the region’s broad demographic diversity. Yuba Sutter Arts remains a key catalyst for increasing cultural exchange and understanding. The mural is part of Yuba Sutter Arts plans to reinstate the Cultural Celebration in Yuba City this June. The mural and Cultural Celebration are being funded by a grant from the California Arts Council as part of its Creative California Communities project. The intent of the program is to use the arts to “enhance community unity and sense of self to help build toward a better future.”