For the past few weeks, the hustle and bustle of Syracuse’s Armory square has been conducted beneath the vivid colors of a colossal mural in the process of being painted the first three weeks of October. The 50 by 40 foot work of art unveiled Saturday is a tribute to an equally colossal figure in Syracuse’s collective lore, national champion and Olympic Gold Medalist head coach of the Syracuse University Men’s Basketball team for 47 years, Jim Boeheim.
The eclectic mural prompts people to stop and snap a picture and revel in the sheer size of it. But others stop to share aghast and transfixed comments on something else: the man painting it who stands in the basket of a rickety cherry picker 40 feet overhead.
This is Chris Murray’s office.
Everyday, at 9:30 in the morning he clocked in until 7 at night to toil in his office, accompanied only by the music of Beck in his headphones and the occasional call of encouragement from a passerby below. Bees and wasps carried by gusts of cold air between the buildings were his constant companions. Painting at 30 feet aloft, the roar of an engine or the scream of an ambulance were jarring enough at times to spark true fear. The lift was not always obedient, it lurched, it creaked, and played tricks.
“These lifts… each of them has their own sort of personality.” Murray said wryly, “This one's janky. Janky as hell. It's broken down on me twice… Both times leaving me three stories up stranded for half an hour or more.”
Focusing on those trials overlooks the obvious danger entirely: the height. It’s high enough that looking down is not advisable to keep one's nerves. Murray knows this intimately.
“It's funny, I was and am still very afraid of heights. It's something that I've somewhat overcome. But there are moments up there where I still have to catch myself and take a breath and kind of walk myself through it and talk myself through it,” he said with a chuckle, “when you're looking eye to eye with a bird on the ledge, it kind of puts everything into perspective how high up you are.”
Chris Murray, or Chris B. Murray, if you're going by his artist name, is based in Philadelphia, but his roots are firmly in central New York. He grew up in Norfolk, New York, two and a half hours outside Syracuse. In his art and in his life, hip hop, basketball, and shoe culture have influenced and inspired him.
His mural is a celebration of Jim Boeheim, and everything that endeared him to the city of Syracuse. It’s not just the Final Four’s, the many great players and teams shepherded by Boeheim or the 03’ National Championship. It’s the press conference jabs at reporters, the sarcastic looks, the quips, and most of all the raging fire to win that drove Boeheim to spend nearly half a century dedicated to SU basketball and its success. Murray spent his childhood watching those teams.
“I love art. It's what I was meant to do. But some of my best memories as a kid… were playing basketball. And I used to go to the basketball camps here at Syracuse, Jim's basketball camps a couple of times. It was just Cuse’ basketball in that era of sports and music and art and everything,” Murray said, “it was just everything to me as a kid. So this is kind of like a full circle moment for me. It kind of encapsulates everything into one piece, everything that I grew up loving.”
Murray needed passion for this project in both quality and quantity to get this mural on the wall. Aside from the physical demands of painting it, the nearly two year approval and funding process was even harder. Chris had to get the word out to drum up local support, then it was finding the right wall, then it was getting the building to approve the mural, then it was getting the parking lot owner to allow him to park his cherry picker for weeks on end, then it was getting the city's approval.
“Two years of just grueling nonstop, phone calls, Zoom calls, emails, just back and forth visits to Syracuse. Very, very, very exhausting,”Murray sighed as he painted, reminiscing on the approval process. But he wasn’t done, then he had to fundraise, a part of the process that the Philly artist said he truly detested.
“I hate asking people for money, and that's what I had to do. I had to basically swallow my pride… and ask people for money. I've never had to do that. I don't like to do that, but for this, I did do that.” he said as he shaded Boeheim's famous glasses.
From conception to reveal, it took Murray two years to complete the mural that was four hours from his home. So, why would someone do it? As the sun began to set for another day casting glints of light at the artists eyes, he explained the inexplicable.
“This mural idea just would not go away," he lamented. "It was with me morning, noon, and night. It was in my sleep. It was something I just had to do. I don't know why. It was just very important to me. And for reasons that I probably won't even tell anybody, it's just very, very important to me on a number of levels.”
Murray recognizes that a mural of this scale and permanence lends to an artist's legacy in a way that few other projects can. As he lowered the lift wrapping up another day's work, he summed up his hopes for the piece neatly.
“This is obviously an honor to paint this for Jim, but it's also just for the everyday person that's walking to work in the city of Syracuse. It is a sports mural, but I believe that it's still a piece of art that you can look at and appreciate even if you're not like a big sports basketball fan.” he said proudly “This is part of Jim's legacy, but it's also part of my legacy, you know, for my daughter and for my family. Once I'm gone, hopefully this will still be standing. And that means a lot to me.”
As he puts the final touches on his masterpiece, Murray places his signature at the bottom with a personal tribute of its own to his daughter that reads "4 Viv!" Because, to Murray, a mural painting without a signature is just graffiti.
