Mime Spenard was created by the artist team Kendall | Marrari in 2017 and progressively built an interactive community and business engagement project. This three-month creative placemaking event focused on the area of Spenard road and the local business that was impacted by a large road reconstruction project.

Becky Kendall and Enzina Marrari created an interactive spectacle that grew during construction, from spring through summer. #MIMESPENARD began stealthily and mysteriously, first with a simple black and white mural hashtagged with #mimespenard and then with a small number of participants performing as mimes along the Spenard Road corridor. Becky and Enzina worked with business owners to place mimes at their businesses and used social media to promote their locations. Ongoing mime training was offered so that they numbered 100 on MIME Day, the project’s culminating event. During the intervention, media outlets picked up on the mime activity, but the artists embargoed the full story, focusing only on informing residents that businesses were open during the road construction. The full reveal was published in a local newspaper’s cover story featuring master mime Brian Hutton.

The project helped many beleaguered commercial ventures retain business with a sense of levity and sparked widespread enthusiasm, curiosity, and engagement in neighborhood civic life. The artists’ organizing through #MIME SPENARD created a deeper understanding between those advocating for road construction and the local business owners that would be most directly affected. The project also added new creative strategies to the Cook Inlet Housing Authority’s tool chest, showing the organization how this new vision for interactive public art could drive community building.

Learn More

Mimes and Road Construction: An Unlikely Partnership for Community Investment, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Community Development Innovation Review, Transforming Community Development through Arts and Culture - Volume 14, Issue 2, November, 2019