Shafer’s Ace Hardware in Eureka, California, has a colorful mural that spans an exterior wall of its building and catches the eyes of passersby.
The city of Eureka hosts an art festival every year and chooses an area of the community to improve as part of the event. For the 2020 art fair, the city art council selected the Henderson Center shopping center as the area to spruce up, so Shafer’s Ace owner Jack Rieke hired an artist to paint the large mural on the side of the hardware store. Shafer’s Ace is the largest retail store in Henderson Center.
The project also required Rieke to hire a construction company to replace a whole exterior wall of aluminum siding with boards the muralist could paint more easily.
Eureka is home to a large number of artists, so supporting community creativity is important to Rieke.
He paid local artist Ben Goulart to paint the mural, which is 12 feet tall and 60 feet long.
The hardware store is 60 years old, and the mural shows what the store would have looked like in its early days, but it features current people, including Rieke and his two grandchildren, and products representing other present-day local businesses.
Rieke contributed paint and any other supplies Goulart needed for the project, which took more than two months of full-time work for the artist
to complete.
Customers frequently pose for photos with the finished mural and mention it daily to store employees.
“I think it gives back to the community,” Rieke says. “People really like it. They really appreciate the time, energy and money we put into it.”
