Most museums are intimidating and do not appear genuinely welcoming, but one look at Nini Andrada Sacro’s murals and all eyes promenade with pleasure.
It’s the perfection of her compositions, the rich colors, and the advocacy behind all the artful efforts that achieve the kind of community sodality many museums and artists can only dream about.
Sacro did the mural across the Makati Medical Center under a commission from the Makati Commercial Estate Association. When she said yes to the offer, she had only one thing in mind: she would do it for the benefit of the country’s remote mountain communities.
While Sacro was immersed in the mural project, nurses and patients from the third floor of the hospital who wanted a share of the high spirits they saw in her while painting came down the next day and invited themselves into the project.
Other people and street children in the area took it to themselves and picked up paintbrushes too, and pledged to keep an eye on their artwork for possible vandals.
Recently, the same spirit of creativity and community goodwill was seen at Circuit Makati.
The Ayalas of Makati—delighted at the people’s response to the mural across the Makati Medical Center—asked Sacro to enliven the otherwise inanimate Circuit Makati wall along the Symphony Drive with another cultural presence.
As expected, the second mural project drew a bigger crowd, with donations of school supplies from teen artists, dabblers in a variety of age; and kids grasping their first paintbrush, weaning themselves from the usual crayons and coloring books, to find out about everything from team building to some instinctive bits of art lessons.
Sacro has, to good purpose, put her mural across like the heart-melting pleasure of children doing exactly what pleases them. Her doodles have successfully enlivened the walls. The floral motifs, repeated like a beautiful pattern of a gift wrapper, march across the wall surfaces like magic.
She has created a new aesthetic, the spirit of today’s popular modern art, out of her own fears and a variety of other distractions (she herself is a cancer survivor).
The Circuit Makati mural is riotous with glowing colors, loose and light, playful, romantic but not sugary, feel-good, and runs free as a child’s imagination that brings a happy relaxation and gaiety into each panel.
There are no grotesqueries, no images teetering to politics and social commentaries; just a happy zone of warmth created from a handful of elements with terrific output down to the smallest detail.
Good things happen when they come from the spot deep inside us. Money isn’t always the inducement. It’s mostly about listening to the heart. Sacro’s murals look like a promise of a future for a new echo signal for street art.
Photos by Diana B. Noche