2025 · mural, community, collaboration
Forward Together
Kenosha, WI
Civic progress is a constant act of imagination and participation.
Case study
- Client
- The Kenosha Murals Project
- The problem
- Kenosha's mural initiative wanted a visiting team who could design a major wall and teach while painting it — building local capacity, not just leaving a picture.
- The approach
- A week-long build with longtime collaborator David Carpenter: part educators, part artists, teaching a workshop and painting shoulder to shoulder with local painters, in a deliberate patchwork of styles that mirrors the collaboration itself.
- Scope
- A major public wall honoring Kenosha's layered history and evolving identity — painted around active construction on the site.
- Participants
- Local Kenosha painters working alongside the Yonder team through the week.
- Timeline
- One week on site, August 2025; revealed in full when the scaffolding came down months later.
- Outcome
- Forward Together — a centerpiece wall for the Kenosha Murals Project, and one of the studio's best.
In August 2025 we were invited to Kenosha to design and lead one of the Kenosha Murals Project’s newest walls — part educators, part artists, working shoulder to shoulder with local painters who welcomed us into their city. We spent the week with longtime collaborator David Carpenter, teaching a workshop and building the mural by many hands. We even worked around the construction crowding the site; months later, when the scaffolding finally came down, she stood revealed in full.
We call her Forward Together. She centers on humanity and hope — one of our best yet.
The mural is a visual symphony of Kenosha’s enduring spirit: an artwork that honors the city’s layered history while casting a gaze toward its evolving identity. It’s executed in a deliberate blend of styles, drawing from bold linocut aesthetics, digital-forward design, and poster-like street art to evoke both reverence and resilience. The shifting visual languages across the composition are intentional. Like a patchwork quilt or a hand-built city, each one contributes to the whole — graphic textures beside clean digital gradients, rustic hatching beside geometric abstraction, each distinct yet part of a unified voice. That layering mirrors the collaborative effort it takes to build community: an homage to the many hands, cultures, and visions that have shaped Kenosha.
On the left, a diverse gathering of faces emerges from beneath the protective arch of a tree. Their expressions range from solemn to radiant, unified by shared presence. These figures are the people of Kenosha — past, present, and future — held together by kinship, memory, and collective will. The tree branch above them extends protectively, sheltering a bird preparing to take flight. It nests near the Kenosha Public Museum and the recognizable shoreline, symbolizing a return to place, a rebuilding of home, and the fragile beauty of civic restoration.
The heart of the mural flows with hopeful color. Bright ochres, sun-washed clouds, and stylized flora wind along the lakefront, connecting neighborhoods and seasons through symbolic design. The architectural elements reference familiar sites while gesturing toward future growth.
On the right, we meet Lady Wisconsin — not in her usual full form, but distilled into an intimate, iconic portrait. Her eyes gaze over the harbor, embodying the state motto, Forward. She is not a passive figure of heritage but an active presence of guardianship and resolve, a reminder that civic progress is a constant act of imagination and participation.
Thank you to the Kenosha Murals Project, to the local artists who painted alongside us, and — as always — to David Carpenter.
Want something like this on your wall? This project is a Participatory Community Mural .
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