This past week, a mural in Utica representing the community and history of the town was completed by artist Seth Boggs of Seward.
Boggs, who goes by the alias of Bogzilla, was contacted by the Utica Community Foundation to paint a mural on a large white building on the corner of Second and D streets.
“The idea behind the mural is that it’s representative of the community, bridging the history and the present,” Boggs said.
The mural was completed in just over a month and stuck very true to the original concept of what it was planned to look like.
“There were no changes to it since his own original plan,” said Preston Stuhr, president of the Utica Community Foundation. “The ball was in his court, and he took it and ran.”
The community of Utica has supported the project from start to finish, but with its completion, the support has increased.
“We've gotten a lot of compliments from people in person and have definitely seen a lot of excitement online, on Facebook, with people sharing pictures of the mural,” Stuhr said.
Boggs included many pieces of Utica’s culture, including some hidden features some people may not initially notice.
“Some of the features that make that happen would be the horizontal graphic elements,” Boggs said. “I was thinking about those as timelines and how a generation of people or a family line could be represented in a linear way and how those then stack into one another to build the overall aesthetic of the mural itself.”
Boggs is not slowing down his work after the completion of this mural, though, as he is in talks with a few other people about projects later this summer and will be helping artist Leslie Lwai with a project in Kearney later this summer as well.
