Turner Street Mural: Michael Scoggins

Six drawings by artist Michael Scoggins take over the Turner Street entrance of the Center for the Arts. Words that imitate sounds — BIG!, BOOM!, KA-POW! — share the wall with words that imitate what art is supposed to make us feel — Fun!, Excitement!, Luxurious. — popping off in the same starburst framing. A smiley face sticks out its tongue above the handwritten You're my Star.; a stick-figure family beams under a rainbow; and the mural's title, Wall Candy (2026), lands in fat bubble letters, the panels connected by the blue rules of the notebook page backdrop.

Scoggins works where childlike directness and adult sincerity collide. His drawings begin as sculpture, each a monumental replica of the first canvas most of us ever drew on: the torn page of a spiral notebook, crafted by hand, every blue rule drawn and punch-hole cut. The voice is borrowed from his own childhood drawings, which he found more honest than the paintings he was making as an adult. He signs each work "Michael S.," a childhood alter ego grown into an extension of his adult self. The borrowed innocence lets him say what most adults have been trained to silence: declarations of love, boasts, wants, and worries. It also lets him ask whether the promises words make still hold.

"A literal explosion of colors in all their cartoon glory creates a feast for the eye," Scoggins writes. "Is it simply visual Wall Candy, or does it reflect and respond to the contemporary world around us? Maybe all of the above? Can we all be stars?"

About the Artist

Michael Scoggins (b. 1973, Washington, D.C.) was raised in Virginia and is best known for drawings on monumental notebook paper, which he fabricates. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2003 and received an M.F.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006. His residencies include Skowhegan, MacDowell, and Fountainhead, and his work has appeared in more than 20 solo exhibitions and 50 group exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, Seoul, and Vienna. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, among others. He lives and works in Kerhonkson, New York.