I have always loved this mural in Davie because it depicts one of my favorite subjects, history. In…read morethis case it is the history of the Town of Davie. You can find the Living History mural on a building in the Old Davie School Historical Museum complex on Griffin Road. Old Davie School is the first permanent school in the Everglades and is Broward County's oldest existing school building. It has been turned into a history museum and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
Living History is part of the Broward County Centennial VisualEYES project which placed one mural in each of the nine Broward County Commission Districts and one at Port Everglades. Local artists were chosen to create the mural with community involvement and city initiatives.
Living History was created by Andrew Reid, a renown graphic artist in his native New Zealand and in New York. In 1991 he moved to Miami where he creates art using a variety of media, including painted and carved murals, sculpture, and three dimensional wall pieces. Reid started with a digital rendering of this mural. He first painted the midtones and then painted from light to dark using 60 different colors.
The mural blends together monochrome images of Davie's past while present day Davie is depicted in bright colors. The community offered a large number of suggestions of what they wanted to be included in the mural.
The past images include a school teacher reading a book, a female farmer with a shotgun protecting her chickens, the words "In Zona" which was the original name for Davie, a young boy sitting on the handle of a plow with a frog in his pocket, and a woman attempting to hang laundry as the winds from the 1926 hurricane begin to blow.
Contemporary images include a Seminole tribe member, a plane from the nearby airport, the Four H Club, a Boy Scout, a cowgirl, a bicyclist, an equestrian, and a hint of the Nova University skyline. Also included are scenes from nature and animals including oranges and orange blossoms, a goat, a pig, a rooster, a cow, and a zebra longwing butterfly, all in bright colors. Davie's agricultural roots are represented by a harvest of fresh carrots, broccoli and tomatoes.
It is very clever how Andrew Reid was able to weave the past and present together to tell the story of Davie. Every time I look at the mural I discover something new. To learn even more about the history of Davie be sure and visit the Old Davie School Historical Museum.
