Mimi Stocker is Going Public—Well, Kind Of

From social media to murals, creating art for public consumption is both boldly brazen and curiously anonymous.

When you look at an illustration, what do you notice? Many may be enticed by the colors, details or artist’s creative process. But Mimi Stocker, a double Gator and former Community and School Outreach Coordinator at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, takes note of something different: how that illustration could be made into a mural.

“[Making murals] is all about connecting with other people,” says Stocker, who painted her first mural last March of the East Gainesville community. “It’s about creating something that inspires people to action, makes them feel included in their community or gets them curious to learn about something. A lot of times, too, it’s just to make people happy and beautify neighborhoods. It’s connecting to people and evoking emotion.”

Stocker’s work pivoted to a community focus in 2020. COVID was rampant, along with civil and political unrest. “I was feeling super isolated and seeing all this stuff happening in the world and being angry about it,” she recalls. “[Community] was important to me before, but I didn't realize just how important until it was taken away.”

Below is a tour of her recent work. Two city murals—on 5th Avenue and in Cofrin Nature Park— center on the people of Gainesville through community growth and the legacy of members like the late Dr. Hilliard-Nunn, respectively. Stocker also took the plunge into digital illustration, building a portfolio of whimsical, stylized drawings. Some play in the sandbox of pure imagination, like Stocker’s Wild West Alphabet. Other illustrations call for change with text like “invest in communities” balanced by Stocker’s punchy, geometric visual style.

5th Avenue Wall @ Springhill

Stocker created this mural along with local artist Lauren Donnellan in response to a call from the City of Gainesville for murals at the corner of SE 5th Ave and SE 6th Street. Standing at 26’ x 8.5, the piece reflects the community and growth of East Gainesville.

This was Stocker’s first mural. “It’s like a seed being planted and growing into a flower,” she says of the creative process. “It’s an idea and then it transforms into the actual thing.”

Cofrin Nature Park

In another project co-created with Donnellan, Stocker honed in on Gainesville’s history and female educators with a memorial to Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn, adjunct African American Studies associate lecturer, who passed away unexpectedly in early August 2020. “We wanted to get people to be curious about who she is and look into her work. She was a huge activist and gave tours of East Gainesville and areas that were being gentrified,” says Stocker. “We wanted her message and mission to live on. Her PowerPoints had the Sankofa bird on them as a symbol to ‘go back and fetch it’—or, learn from mistakes—which inspired the text on the mural.”

Adobe x Keith Haring

Stocker responded to the Adobe X Keith Haring contest in 2020 with this digital illustration about investing in local communities. It was chosen as one of the winning entries and showcased at Adobe MAX 2020.

Personal Illustration: Excerpts from the Wild West Alphabet

Taking a personal challenge for artistic growth in January 2021, Stocker joined a Skillshare class led by Tom Foese that prompted digital drawings illustrating the alphabet from A-Z. Shown here is Stocker’s “B for Boot” (left) followed by “D for Desert” (right).

On the whole, Stocker’s personal illustration serves a different creative purpose than murals.

“On social media, it's more about getting me recognized and networking and professional connections,” she says. “Everything on Instagram is personal work for me, whereas a mural is for others.” Indeed, in the digital age, social media is more public than the public itself.

Stocker left UF on May 27 to pursue murals full-time with Chalk and Brush in Miami, FL. Follow her work on Instagram at @mimimakesdrawings.

Commissions are open.

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