NYC artist uses boarded up city stores as his plywood canvas - NY Daily News
For Mitchell Schorr, an artist known for his energetic street murals, COVID-19 has presented an infinite landscape of plywood canvases.
Though he began his signature paintings long before the pandemic hit, the shuttered shops and restaurants have offered a unique opportunity for him give a bit of brightness and hope to the city.
Schorr, 47, whose work is featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts, began his newest artistic journey when chef David Burke asked him to spice up his restaurant’s new, rather bleak outdoor seating area.
“When the pandemic began and everything was boarded up and they gave them permission to open up in the street, he was like, ‘Hey, I can’t run a business like this. Who wants to eat like this, in the street?’” Schorr told the Daily News. “So I painted the one at 62nd and Lexington.”
Schorr’s best known series of murals, titled “Da Race,” appears all around New York on park walls, public pools and even skyscrapers. Though each one is unique, they all chronicle a high-speed race between several race cars and, curiously, an ice cream truck.
“Every time you saw it, it seemed to be the same, but a different car or ice cream truck was in the lead,” Schorr explained. “Kids always want the ice cream truck to win. The underdog. They have this wonderful belief that the ice cream truck’s going to win the race.”
Schorr has always had a love for sports cars, but incorporated his signature ice cream truck into his murals to invoke a childlike innocence and simplicity.
“The ice cream trucks started as these memories of something happy,” he reminisced. “When this truck came around, I was just happy and got what appeared to be free ice cream, even though it was my parents paying for it.”
As native New Yorker, Schorr has watched his hometown weather every struggle imaginable. In the age of COVID, he understands that the city needs every speck of joy it can get.
“It’s difficult, especially now with the way things are going,” he said. “How can you be happy if you lost your job or had a loved one die from the coronavirus or are arrested?”
Schorr isn’t used to receiving responses to his street art, but in the past few months he has amassed a collection of thank-you letters and emails from New Yorkers.
Street artist Mitchell Schorr in his Midtown art studio. (Anna Choi/New York Daily News)
“That was the best thing — to have someone write that to you and say, ‘You changed my life. You’ve given me a smile when the world seems to be dumping on everything.’”
Times may be bleak, but Schorr is confident New York will be able to bounce back.
“I do think the city will return,” he said. “How long it will take, I don’t know. When it does, it will be a different city for sure.”
