If you’ve seen Travel Oregon’s “Only Slightly Exaggerated” campaign of 2021, meant to draw tourists to Oregon with animated images of the state’s wonders, you might agree it’s pretty magical. The staff at Explore Lincoln City certainly did, particularly the scenes celebrating the city’s famed kite fest. But the original campaign was several years old; the last of the murals it inspired for the Oregon Mural Trail dedicated in 2021.
Last year, staff members mentioned to Kim Cooper Findling, the new executive director, that they thought a still of the kites from the state tourism agency’s video would make a great mural on a Lincoln City wall. Findling agreed. It couldn’t hurt to ask, right? And so, she did.
The Oregon Mural Trail originally spanned seven rural locations – The Dalles, Ontario, Prineville, Roseburg, Oakridge, Forest Grove, and Yachats – all murals installed between September and October 2018. A mural in Gold Beach was added in 2019 and one in Pendleton in 2021.
“From Travel Oregon’s point of view, the mural trail was done,” Findling said. “They had nine locations, and we weren’t one of the original locations. But I called them up anyway and said, ‘Hey, would this be possible? We have a wall and a budget. Can we use your art?’”
The answer was yes, and on Sept. 6, the city held a ribbon-cutting for the mural, 26.5 feet tall by 62 feet wide, coloring Lincoln City’s City Hall and McKay’s Market. It’s visible from U.S. 101 and less than a half mile from where the kite festival, which just celebrated its 44th year, takes place twice a year at the D River State Recreation Site.
The “Oregon, Only Slightly Exaggerated” campaign by the Weiden+Kennedy ad agency launched in 2018, inspiring a trail of seven murals statewide. In subsequent years, the video was updated and the mural trail expanded. In 2021, after a break brought on by the pandemic, Travel Oregon launched the new iteration of “Only Slightly Exaggerated,” describing it as, “Fresh creative, imbued with hope and optimism that will remind Oregonians and potential visitors of the awe-inspiring vistas, abundant outdoor recreation and cultural richness of the state.”
And now, it’s a permanent part of the Lincoln City art scene, which last year saw the unveiling of $3 million in public art at the Lincoln City Cultural Center – less than a mile from the new mural.
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The city paid $25,000 for the mural, titled The Magic of Oregon, painted by Oregon artists Blaine Fontana and Jeremy Nichols.
“We’ve done many murals together around the world,” said Fontana, who worked with Nichols on the mural in The Dalles. Nichols also painted trail murals in Coos Bay, Pendleton, and Yachats.
To create the image, the pair worked at night to project the mural on the wall, outlining the image by the light of a wide-screen projector. By day, they filled in the rest of the image.
“It came out fantastic,” said Fontana, a fifth-generation Oregonian. The city invited professional kite-fliers to the ribbon-cutting, resulting in what Fontana called a “three-dimensional, amazing sensory overload. Inside the mural, there’s a whimsical rhino kite … and now they want to actually build one to represent that. So, it’s kind of like art imitating life imitating art. Full circle. It’s so cool. One of the main reasons I love doing murals is — along with the view, the accessibility, the impact — it pulls on the heartstrings.”
Travel Oregon’s Allison Keeney explained that the purpose of the mural trail was to bring artwork to life in rural areas. The seven original communities were chosen because they had gone through the state’s Rural Tourism Studio, a training program aimed at helping rural areas develop tourism. “It just kind of made sense to reward those destinations with a beautiful, permanent piece of artwork,” Keeney said, “with the hopes that people would take a road trip there and eat in the restaurants, spend the night in a hotel, stimulating the local economy.”
Fontana thinks the latest mural will be a traffic stopper – literally. “These are so strategically placed,” he said. “They couldn’t have picked a better spot for this – right at Highway 101. It becomes this iconic place you stop at on a road trip to get a photo of. Even when we were working on it, people were stopping by, circling back and asking, ‘What is going on?,’ taking videos. The impact they make is not lost on us.”
