Mural at Boise Co-op’s Meridian store has a ‘cool’ story. Local artist happy to share it

A new mural at the Boise Co-op at The Village at Meridian invites shoppers to consider where their food comes from and the people who work to produce it.

For local artist Bobby Gaytan, who created the large work in partnership with the Co-op and the nonprofit Fairtrade America, selecting the subjects for the piece wound up being easy.

Gaytan said Fairtrade America presented him with information about some of the farmers the group works with as it prioritizes fair pay and workers’ rights in the food production industry. One set of siblings — Francisco Contreras and Carlixta Contreras Martínez, cacao farmers from Yamasá in the Dominican Republic — stood out to the artist, who comes from a large family of farmworkers.

“I felt very connected to them,” Gaytan said. “They were speaking to me.”

Now the brother and sister have a towering presence in Meridian, their likenesses smiling on the side of the Co-op building facing E. River Valley Street. They are holding cacao pods, the fruit containing cocoa beans, which eventually become dried, roasted and ground into chocolate.

The mural is part of Fairtrade America’s We Are Fairtrade campaign to create public art in cities across the country, with a goal of highlighting the importance of wages, equality and working conditions for those who grow and produce our food.

Gaytan, who sits on the Meridian Arts Commission, is known for public art installations throughout the Treasure Valley. At almost 30 feet tall, this mural is one of the larger “passion projects” he’s worked on, he said.

“It’s one of those things that I felt very strongly about because it was highlighting farmers,” Gaytan told the Idaho Statesman as he discussed being chosen for the project. “As a former migrant farmworker, I thought that was pretty cool — being selected and being able to represent a little bit of that through my art.”

Creating the mural took Gaytan about two months from the time Fairtrade America first reached out. For the painting work, Gaytan budgeted himself three weeks. He chose to use spray paint, in part because of the wall’s rough texture, which soaks up more paint. Spray paint, he explained, was “a good way to kind of get in there, in those peaks and valleys that this wall has.”

Gaytan said he primed the wall with a white base, sketched his illustration by sections, and finally filled in highlights and shadows. His approach to tackling a mural of this size? Top to bottom.

“Anytime you work on a big-scale project like this, you always gotta account for the perspective,” he said.

The top, he explained, is more challenging, “perspective-wise.”

“I’ll keep coming down and going across the street, seeing if it’s lined up right,” said Gaytan.

With the mural easily visible from the street while even a work in progress, Gaytan said passers-by would often honk and give him a thumbs-up.

“One of the fun things I enjoy about painting public art is the interaction with the community,” said Gaytan. “When somebody stops and asks about the project, wants to know more ... it’s just an opportunity to share what’s going on, you know. It’s pretty cool, because you’re using your art to educate and kind of bring attention.”

Gaytan’s other favorite part of the mural are its colors. “I’m trying to work with some very colorful, bright colors to add to this neighborhood,” he said.

A big, bright mural for Meridian

Gaytan said he also learned a lot about cacao through the project, and he encouraged others to do the same.

The point of the project, he said, is to give people “a choice” when shopping for food. “When you learn a little bit about the stories, about where your food comes from, you know, it makes people think twice about ... how they consume their food and where they buy it,” said Gaytan.

The Boise Co-op marketing team hopes the mural will help the Village location, which opened in 2015, continue to make a name for itself in fast-growing Meridian.

“I feel like the North End and the Boise area in particular always get a large focus on mural installations and local artists,” Tyler Schnur, the Co-op’s director of marketing, told the Statesman. “When this project came up, we thought that the Village would be a fun opportunity, because we don’t really have a lot of that going on out there.”

Schnur said Co-op products have to adhere to strict standards, pertaining to locality, fair trade standards and other vetting processes. The Co-op features products certified with Fairtrade America’s standards, which include nondiscriminatory working conditions and employment practices for those involved in food production, according to the nonprofit’s website.

“We want shoppers, when they come in through the front door, to not have to worry about ... reading the back label of something, and if it’s OK for their kids to eat, if it has certain ingredients in it,” Schnur said.

An official unveiling for the mural will be held Oct. 19 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Co-op on Eagle Road in Meridian. Schnur said there will be samples of Navitas Organics products — the main buyer of the cacao pods farmed by Carlixta and Francisco — that are prepared using Navitas recipes.

Gaytan, who said he has yet to try Navitas chocolate, will attend the unveiling, which will take place during Fairtrade Month and just at the close of National Hispanic Heritage Month.