Mandy Teig Grotewold and her mother, Sandy Teig, partnered on the large mural that sprang to life on a building at the corner of Willson Avenue and Second Street. The two women worked for several days in July 2021 to recreate their design on the brick wall.

Grotewold, who now lives in the Minneapolis area, grew up in Jewell and graduated from South Hamilton High School.

“I’ve always loved art and a few months ago I just felt the urge to start painting,” she said.

She started out creating smaller canvases in her home, but soon told her husband that she needed a larger format.

-Messenger file photo
Mandy Teig Grotewold fills in a large purple coneflower on the mural she and her mother, Sandy Teig, created in downtown Webster City.

“A couple weeks later, Mom reached out and said she was in contact with Kevin Rubash of Interior Spaces and he opened up the opportunity to paint the mural.”

The mural was created through support of the Downtown Webster City Self-Supported Municipal Improvement District or SSMID, which encompasses the 500, 600 and 700 blocks of Second Street, one block south on Wilson Avenue, Seneca and Des Moines streets, and a half block north on Willson, Seneca and Des Moines, Rubash said.

For the design of the mural, Grotewold and Teig said they wanted to be sure it was something that would connect with the community and to make a positive statement. They opted for bold colors — purples, pinks, dark greens, golds and others.

“We hope this will attract tourists and visitors — like the RAGBRAI riders — to stop and take photos in front of the mural,” Grotewold said. “The design incorporates really beautiful, colorful flowers.”

They chose the native coneflower and milkweed plants, familiar to many Iowans and a favorite of butterflies and bees, as well.

“We’re in the monarch butterfly highway path, which spans all the way from Canada down to Texas,” Teig said. “We remember when Mandy was a little girl over at Grandma’s place, we would catch the migration of the monarch. They would just layer the trees.

“So, we wanted to celebrate that,” she said.

Teig said the design also speaks to transformation.

“It can also be looked at as a transformation inside the individual, that you are gathering and gathering, and then you go into a period of transformation,” Teig said. “And you come out as something different.”

She said the transformation can also relate to communities.

“As they gather resources of people and skill, experience and money and then put it all together, then out comes a butterfly — something that can soar and bring great joy,” she said.

Grotewold said the painting will also include some interactive elements, like a large caterpillar that children could pose with for photos. “We wanted this to be fun and beautiful,” she said.

The design of the mural took the two artists a couple of weeks to develop. The finished mural extends more than 30 feet across the wall.

And the large painting is already capturing a lot of attention from passersby. Grotewold said people stopped by to check out the mural as they were working.

The two artists also collaborated on a mural in the city of Jewell. They created a large geode mural on one of the downtown buildings, using many of the same techniques used in the Webster City mural.

Before they began to work on the Webster City mural, the two artists primed the wall and painted a series of positive phrases on the bricks, sayings like, “Always give love, always give kindness; Love thy neighbor and You are good.” Grotewold said that the phrases served as their grid to scale the drawing to the wall. “It’s kind of cool that the words are the foundation behind this story of the wall,” Teig said.