A mural depicting a brightly colored train was carefully painted in Wappingers Falls this July. It was then transported in a truck to Manhattan, making its way to Penn Station. It sits there now, advertising Tracks Bar & Grill, reopening in its former space later this year after its temporary relocation to Grand Central in 2019. This was the work of Splash Art Murals, a commercial window painting studio run by Brian Zickafoose. “We’re committed to uplifting places and leaving them better than we found them,” he says.
Splash Art Murals’s team of Zickafoose and his three fellow artists have painted murals for storefront and businesses across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Zickafoose, raised on a farm in West Virginia, moved to Wappingers Falls in 2018. When a neighbor asked him to paint the windows of his bakery, Sweet Bakes, Zickafoose, 42, agreed. Without any experience working with windows, he watched some YouTube videos and then got to work. When the final product was posted to social media and Zickafoose saw the positive public reception, he decided to pursue window and mural painting seriously, creating Splash Art Murals in 2022.
Zickafoose values the collaborative process, between the artists, clients, and community, that public art pieces create. There is a constructive back and forth between the artists and the businesses, working to make art that tells the client’s story in an interesting way to the public, according to Zickafoose. Splash Art Murals services over 100 businesses, painting storefront murals for 50 Dunkin Donuts locations across the three states. “The communities that these public art pieces live in are really receptive to what we’re doing,” he says. “Seeing how it makes places alive has been one of the most fulfilling parts of doing this work.”
The project to paint a mural of a vintage railroad car in a hallway of Penn Station for the Tracks Bar & Grill was challenging. “When we saw the query come through, we weren’t even sure it was actually real,” says Zickafoose. “The opportunity to do something at Penn Station was something we did not expect.” There were logistical difficulties in installing a mural in an active transit hub, and barricades were used to keep a safe distance from commuters. For transportation, the company rented a van to move the mural panels from Wappingers Falls to Penn Station. “As we were installing it, people were giving us feedback in real time and we could see their reactions,” says Zickafoose. “It was awesome.”
While painting significant portions of the mural, Zickafoose says his position was more that of a creative director on the Penn Station mural, with his team contributing majorly. “You don’t level up by taking easy projects,” he says. “The challenge helped us gain a better understanding of what we’re doing and how to do it better.” He hopes this mural will be a landmark that will be recognizable years from now.
Splash Arts Murals is intended to be a creative studio that designs memorable public experiences, according to Zickafoose. Murals are their focus, but Zickafoose plans to expand their reach in the future, creating larger public art for more communities. “People think they’re hiring us for artwork, but what they’re really buying is optimism,” he says.
