Pride of a Region

Every region has its own character; its geography, its people and its industry converge to create a culture and identity. However, it can become so omnipresent to the area’s natives who ignoredor downplay it as routine and unworthy of celebration. I remember a longtime resident of New Richmond, OH, a picturesque burg nestled on the banks of the Ohio, quipping, “This place has got nothing but a river.” Thus, the environmental-graphic designer and sign fabricator enjoy a substantial opportunity to install a sense of community pride.

Walton, KY-based MurphyCatton, an exhibit-fabrication company, and a team of vendors endeavored to celebrate local history for Covington, KY’s Behringer-Crawford Museum. It had been long known as a quaint institution; some of its most popular artifacts included such unorthodox items as a shrunken head and the preserved remains of Dido, a two-headed calf. The museum’s board of trustees chose to modernize and enlisted MurphyCatton to build and install the new environmental-graphic program. Kraemer Design & Production (Cincinnati) concocted conceptual designs, devised the environmental graphics’ layout and composed Behringer-Crawford’s updated color palette.

Mark Catton, one of the firm’s principals, said they’d donated a few piecemeal graphics to the museum in the past, but the Behringer-Crawford’s board was now resolute about a rebranding.

“They raised money to subsidize the program,” he said. “Their mission is to be an artifact-based museum, but their collection of certain types of artifacts was somewhat limited. So, it became a priority for us to create visual graphics that could serve as artifacts unto themselves.”

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With this plan, MurphyCatton’s designers coordinated with a team of local historians to research newspapers and other historical records to unearth past cultural, social and economic trends of the area to retrace the region’s steps (and, in some cases, missteps) through its growth. Though many findings were predictable, such as the massive hog-slaughtering operations that earned the area the nickname “Porkopolis,” but some were unexpected.

“I knew there were lots of German immigrants who migrated here, but I didn’t know churches in Germany and here played a role,” Catton said. “Those wishing to immigrate here were told about what churches to visit in New York City after being processed through Ellis Island, and then many were sent to churches here. It was a kind of Overground Railroad.”

MurphyCatton hired Cincinnati-based Photo Lab Inc. to output the murals, which it produced with an EFI-VUTEk QS3200 UV-ink printer on Ultraflex material. Wonder Cabinet (Boston) developed the graphic content and Robin Imaging (Cincinnati) printed the graphics for the dimensional, miter-fold panels that MurphyCatton designed and fabricated.