2007 · Walldog Wave 2007
Big Jim
- Painted
- 2007
- Artist
- David Petri, Green Bay, Wisconsin (Walldogs)
- Series
- Walldog Wave 2007
- Condition
- Extant
Most of Algoma’s Walldog murals were painted where they hang, brush on brick, scaffold by scaffold. Big Jim came to its wall a different way: because of its size and the height it was destined for, it was painted flat on the ground and then set into place, the one mural in the set that was finished before it was mounted.
The steam heritage wall
Big Jim honors Algoma’s steam heritage, the working machinery era that powered the town’s mills, factories, and waterfront. And the register will admit what it does not know: who or what “Big Jim” actually was. A locomotive’s nickname, an engine, a boiler, a man? The name clearly meant something to the people who painted it, and someone in town still knows. This is currently the register’s favorite unanswered question; if you can settle it, tell us.
The mounted-panel construction is likely what the Main Street Program’s brochure means by the set’s “one panel install,” among the ten murals of 2007: two ghost sign restorations, one panel install, seven painted straight onto brick.
Who painted it
The project leading artist was David Petri of Green Bay, the local Walldog who coordinated the entire Walldog Wave and led more walls than anyone: this one, the Reinhart Brothers Shoe Store, and the Native American mural near the waterfront.
A note on the record: like the Native American mural, Big Jim does not appear in the brochure’s lettered A-through-K key, though the 2018 Door County Pulse feature documents it with Petri as project leading artist. Where the two unlettered walls sit in the official ten is one of the register’s open questions.
The Walldog Wave
Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings, under Petri’s direction and with the Algoma Main Street Program organizing. This register documents every wall in the set.
If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, or if you knew Big Jim, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Sources
- Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
- Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (the “one panel install” count)
- The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)