The coronavirus didn’t just temporarily shut down a lot of small businesses, it also put a lot of public art projects on hold. But the owner of popular Hyattsville eatery Busboys and Poets is working to turn that around.
After his Anacostia location was vandalized during the pandemic lockdown, Andy Shallal, who opened the first Busboys and Poets in D.C. in 2005 and received his MBA in 2019 at University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, was putting up a piece of plywood over a broken window.
“It was painful, it looked like a scar on the storefront,” he told WUSA. “I painted a piece of plywood over it, but I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to put some positive messaging on more windows, to let people know that there’s something beyond this?'”
Shallal, an artist himself, painted “Busboys [heart] Anacostia” on the plywood and then set out to decorate his other locations, hiring artists and starting a movement called #PaintTheStoreFronts.
For the Hyattsville location, he hired Greenbelt artist Luther Wright, who made a colorful triptych of a jazz band and a heart with the words “We will make it” emblazoned across it alongside another colorful window mural, “Defeat Covid19,” which depicts one’s thought process during the pandemic.
In addition to his artwork on Busboys’ storefront in Hyattsville, Wright told the Hyattsville Wire he he’s been working on as many as nine other murals throughout the Washington, D.C. area during the pandemic with positive, uplifting messages.
Other artists who helped in painting Hyattsville’s Busboys’s storefront include Keiona Clark, who painted “All we need is love,” which can be seen from Baltimore Avenue. Clark is gallery manager for 39th Street Gallery in Brentwood and a curator for the Gateway Community Development Corporation, which focuses on arts-centered economic revitalization projects along the Route 1 corridor.
During the pandemic, Shallal himself has painted five of chef Jose Andrés’ restaurants and is paying out of his own pocket to hire local artists for similar projects, promoting the idea with the hashtag #PaintTheStorefronts, in part to help muralists who have lost work as D.C. has suspended a popular mural program. So far, he says they’ve painted over 80 storefronts.
“For these artists, this became an opportunity to safely get out of the house, earn some cash, do what they love and spread positivity all at the same time,” he said.
