Though Dayci Curran spent considerable time planning and painting Seward’s newest mural the past two months, she enjoyed a quiet dinner in the garden at the Liberty House Garden before she left town.
“It has given me time to unpack a lot of things,” she said of the Seward Creative District’s Artist-in-Residence program and her temporary residence and garden oasis at Liberty House.
Curran unveiled her mural at the alley entrance of the Red Path Gallery and Cocktail Lounge’s during a 1920s-themed Speakeasy Night event Oct. 24.
Much of her residency was devoted to the mural, but she serendipitously discovered a flower blooming in Pat Coldiron’s garden – a devil’s trumpet that only blooms at night – that she already had a picture of on the mood board she uses to inspire her paintings.
Now she is thinking about what her Seward experience, work and relationships will mean for her as she returns home to Hebron, where she has a few projects lined up.
Curran launched her business during college. DACE is a version of her name but also an acronym for Design, Amplification, Connection and Engagement.
She won $500 in a college quick pitch business competition and invested in her website, DACEmurals.net. Now, at 22, she continues to think about the business of art.
After finishing a general business degree at Northeast Community College in Norfolk, she moved to work on murals with her mother, Jamie Luttrell, or on her own in Michigan, Iowa and Nebraska. She has designed logos and done some interior painting based out of the Tru Value hardware and paint store owned by her father, Ryan Luttrell, in Hebron.
“I got my entrepreneurial spirit from him,” she said. “There is no option for me not to do creative work.”
Busy years after school
She spent a year back in Hebron, a town of 1,700 people, where her family has lived since she was two years old. She married Conner Curran, who she met while working on the mural in Michigan.
“I let a year go by to kind of come down from all that,” she said.
She applied for the Seward Creative District’s residency as soon as it was announced.
She saw it as an artistic sabbatical, using time away from her usual work routine to create this public mural and explore some smaller-format, more easily marketed art pieces.
“I just wanted to take a little while and make some things happen,” Curran said.
Part of that was having her own space to work, which she had at Liberty House and the gallery.
“I wanted to get into having pieces for myself that are not commissioned pieces,” she said.
Her exhibit at Red Path included drawings, photography and a painting. She sold two of those pieces.
One person is also interested in buying the painting, even unfinished off her easel before she explained her purpose in it. He told her what he saw in the painting.
“It means something to me, but it also means something to somebody else,” she said. “It is the most intense relationship I have had with a piece of artwork.”
Now, she said, she is ready to go home to her husband, house, garden and family in Hebron.
“Somehow this is a puzzle piece, but I cannot quite see it all,” she said.
Building skills, base
She has been working on murals with her mother since she was 10, getting to help with color-blocking as a teenager.
“She is the lady who taught me to paint,” Curran said.
She collaborated with her mother for a mural in Alexandria and one in Holland, Michigan, and is proud to have contributed the letter layout for her mother’s town-identifying Hebron mural.
Curran completed an internship with Chester artist Cindy Chinn in which she spent time soldering delicate details on a peacock’s tail and learning cloisonne work for the peacock’s eye, which uses fine wires to connect colored pieces.
Like her mother, Chinn is an accomplished muralist and both women have developed significant creative opportunities from their bases in rural Nebraska.
“Those two women have had a huge role to play in how I got here,” Curran said.
She completed a large project of her own, “Tracks of Time” on the Katelman Steel Fabrication building in Council Bluffs and has done business-related murals in York, Shickley, Blue Hill, Hebron and other towns.
In Seward, she appreciated that she could gather people’s input about the gallery and its role in the community as she determined how best to illustrate that role in the mural painted on two former window spaces.
The gallery’s speakeasy event had been planned earlier, and she thought it was a great theme to tie into this small-town get-away.
She included several specific images in the mural to depict what lies inside. For example, the paintings on the wall of the pictures include cranes, landscapes and a portrait (all with small, red “sold” stickers), and the unique tile ceiling and lighting are included. The gallery’s back door now replicates the bank vault door inside, including Red Path’s keychain.
“I pretty much came up with the context of the design,” Curran said. “They are having a good time and you should go into this business.”
Like other murals there was significant prep work to give the wall-turned-canvas some permanence.
“I got to take away a picture of it, but it stays with the business,” she said.
