As Amarillo prepares for the Route 66 Centennial Celebration, the outdoor art collective Blank Spaces Murals will unveil a project that translates tales of the Mother Road into a permanent artistic representation of what the highway has meant to Amarillo residents.
66 Stories from Route 66 is a collaborative venture between Blank Spaces and 2892 Miles to Go, a place-based education program supported by the National Geographic Society and named for the 2,892 miles that make up the contiguous United States. The project also was supported by Visit Amarillo, Center City and the City of Amarillo.
For the past 18 months, Blank Spaces has worked to capture stories from 66 volunteers on video. While 2892 Miles to Go translates that into an interactive digital story map, 12 high school and college students from Blank Spaces will transform the stories into a mural totalling more than 420 feet long on both sides of an underpass near Transformation Park, a public and private collaborative effort to provide shelter and resources for the unhoused. The underpass also is a path between downtown Amarillo and the city’s Historic Route 66 area on Sixth Avenue.
I spoke with Blank Spaces founder Shawn Kennedy and Project Director Shanda Fletcher about the enormity of the task, the stories they heard for the first time, and how they hope the project will resonate for generations to come. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
Chip Chandler: What are the origins of this program?
Shawn Kennedy: As you know, most tourists that come through Amarillo end up on Route 66 or on Historic Sixth Street, but they may not explore other parts of the community. So this gives them a reason to get off I-40, to go past the Historic Route 66 and head downtown to enjoy a lot of the offerings that we have down there, as well … 66 Stories from Route 66 had a nice ring to it. Actually, we’re going to complete it today. We’re recording No. 66 today with [Amarillo Mayor] Cole Stanley. We were trying to figure out how to record 66 interviews in a day and, you know, it turned out it took a month. But we did do, like 40, 45 in a day, which was insane. We’ve got some remarkable people that we’ve interviewed. A lot of [the stories] were about the history of Amarillo and about prominent places and people and events that took place here, but a lot of it’s sort of like the lost history, untold stories, things that most of us don’t know or don’t remember or maybe we’re not old enough to know. We wanted a multi-generational, multicultural experience. We worked really hard to find people from all over the community.
Chip: What happens with these 66 stories next? What’s the next step after you finish recording them today?
Shawn: The stories have already been shipped to National Geographic, where they did some editing [in order to] publish a story map, which is a place-based storytelling website, an interactive website where you can click on a pin that’s on Amarillo Boulevard and then, boom, such-and-such person’s story comes up, because that’s where their story takes place. Then what Shanda and I are trying to do with our group, too, is that from these 66 stories, we’re pulling out visual representations of what those stories are, and that’s going to be transformed into the 400-feet-plus mural that’s going to go on that underpass.
Chip: How do you go from this storytelling aspect to your visual medium?
Shanda Fletcher: We assigned [each team member] five interviews. [We told them that] we want you to … become experts on these people … and to draw something that relates to that interview. I think it showed a lot of growth in them because they produced things that we hadn’t seen from some of our kids before. With those pieces, we have basically puzzle-pieced together a montage of things that are relevant to Route 66, not only back in like the ’40s, but also today and how those things have changed. For all of us, it was a huge growing season … We have a huge mission to make sure that this is well represented.
Chip: How did the partnership develop with 2892?
Shanda: When we first talked to 2892, the project looked totally different. It was on a much smaller scale. We were working very hard to figure out how to connect communities and connect neighborhoods. Through our discussions and many Zoom calls … we decided that the Mother Road in our hometown was the best way to translate and to bring those communities together, because it goes through all these different neighborhoods that are kind of separated. It led to the biggest project we’ve ever had.
Shawn: I think this is a first for both of our organizations. 2892 has done story maps in different communities … in different areas of the country, but this is the first time that they’ve ever tried to do this sort of visual representation. And this is the first time that we’ve linked our public art with journalism, to in-depth storytelling.
Shanda: To get to hear [these stories] was a really exciting experience for me and Shawn. These kids, I don’t think that they recognized how exciting it is to be in the same room with these people, but they got to experience a little bit of that. So while me and Kennedy were over here fangirling about our citizens that we really look up to, our kids got to see how excited we were about them getting to have these conversations and ask them questions.
Chip: This is all being translated into the mural under Transformation Park, and that’s going to be unveiled during the Centennial Celebration.
Shawn: So the official unveiling, I believe, will be June 12, the day before the big finale on the 13th. That’s the goal. Cross your fingers. We are doing a documentary with Panhandle PBS on the entire project, and we’ll unveil the story map at that same time. We’re going to invite every fellow that participated, every storyteller, every person that has emotionally or financially backed this, along with the rest of the community.
Shanda: And it’s also, I think, important to note that this is the biggest collaborative piece of art in the Panhandle.
Shawn: It’ll be the largest mural in the Texas Panhandle.
Chip: You also mentioned the largest collaborative project. Is that because of the number of people that are taking part?
Shanda: The other projects that we’ve done, it’s just been inside our program.
Shawn: Sixty-six individuals telling very in-depth stories to help create this visual representation, which is also told in the story map form. I mean, it’s nothing I’ve ever heard of.
Chip: How has your appreciation grown for Route 66? Did you have a relationship with the road necessarily before this project and how has that changed?
Shawn: We knew how important it was to people from abroad that you can travel, you know, the United States on this singular road. But to know it to the degree that we know it now, and to hear the stories about how it directly impacted someone’s grandparents, or great-grandparents, or how it affected their life, or what growing up on Route 66 was like, I mean, it really brings the story to life. It resonates and it gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come to get to where we are today. And I think it’s had that same impact on our kids because it’s opened their eyes to [how] it’s a much different world that we live in today.
Shanda: There’s a lot of things I didn’t know. It’s been nice to get to shake hands with people that own businesses on our stretch of Route 66. And also know that 66 stories is where we had to cap it, but that is not all of them. We could have done this for a year and probably still not gotten all the information that people wanted to say. And just to think that … if everyone [along Route 66] did a project like this, can you imagine what kind of stories would come out of that?
