“Color the World Bright” Project featured in Garden & Gun

Professor Joe Norman and students from the Lamar Dodd School of Art were recently featured in Garden & Gun Magazine for leading a project called “Color the World Bright”. In this program, Norman and students create and restore public murals of a bygone time. In restoring these “ghost- signs” he says, “A mural becomes a matter of civic pride, with everyone dropping by.”

“Not only is this tremendous outreach to the larger Georgia community, but an excellent example of conservation and restoration,” says Norman. “We have a simple philosophy, to do good and bring people together,” Norman says. “Murals can transform a community.”

In Greensboro, Georgia, they painstakingly revived a faded Chero-Cola advertisement painted on the brick façade of what is now Oconee Brewing Company (once the home of a bottling plant for the old Georgia soft drink). They restored a second Chero-Cola painting in Madison, and in Elberton, Georgia, they brought vibrant life back to a Coca-Cola sign.

Professor Norman teaches in painting and drawing at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and is a visiting professor at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island. He is the former Chairman of the Painting and Drawing Department and Founder of Study Abroad Latin America, Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Joseph Norman has lived and worked in Canada, Germany, Spain, Costa Rica and Cuba. His works are housed in prominent American museums and public collections including, The Museum of Modern Art, NY. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The National Gallery and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

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