I love participating in projects that beautify public spaces. Art – in the form of sculpture, murals, mosaics – interacts, reflects, enhances the urban landscape adding character to it.  My first experience participating in a public art project was in Mumbai city, where we painted dilapidated sidewalk walls with graffiti. The paintings transformed the face of an otherwise unnoticed piece of sprawl to something that people would stop and watch. It became a ‘selfie point’ too.

Last year, I participated in my first Martin Luther King Jr. Day volunteering activity – I was part of a group that painted car Hubcaps with spray paints. We used bright colors -red, blue, pink, yellow and orange to transform the round metallic spheres into circular petal faces of flowers that would line housing projects, parks and community gardens in East Jacksonville.

Here’s a photo of me (red tee) spray painting hubcaps in the project that was organized by The United Way of Northeast Florida and conceptualized by the Jacksonville Cultural Development Corporation.

I absolutely loved the idea particularly because it made use of waste – Car Hubcaps. Otherwise discarded or usually found abandoned on highways, hubcaps are defined as the ‘removable covers for the center area of the exposed side of an automobile wheel, covering the axle’, as per Merriam-Webster.

Here are photos I took of the whole process. We made the petals, stems and leaves.