City Connections 

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Julie Vornholt is a full-time Madison-based muralist specializing in floral and nature-inspired work. Her artistic projects feature painted walls throughout Madison, Middleton, Chicago, Sparta, Cashton, New Glarus, Indianapolis, and Nashville. As a floral artist, her designs feature flowing elements that, much like nature itself, adapt and grow around windows, doors, and building utilities. Vornholt creates her work freehand which, she says, allows her art to grow organically.

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Vornholt was interested to express the Indigenous agricultural planting technique called the "Three Sisters” that includes planting corn stalks, squash, and beans all together. You can see this trio featured in snippets on the right of the mural with a corn stalk and squash flowers at the bottom, and beans with their flowers growing at the top. The other flowers include, from left side to right, the bright orange Butterfly Milkweed, Purple Prince Crabapple flowers, White Snapdragon, Common Blue Violet (the State Flower of Wisconsin), and Red Chokeberries which flourish with the Corn, Squash and Bean flowers.

The flora represented are species that attract pollinators; there is even a bumblebee pollinating one of the flowers. The Black-capped Chickadee is a nod to Monona’s Bird City status and further brings this wall to life, inspiring the title of the wall, Bloom In Flight. The artist wanted to give a special nod to the native land we occupy, mixing the both the wildness of nature with traditional practices of farming that the Ho-Chunk Nation practiced. The composition uses warm and bold contrasting colors to draw the eye upwards as flowers climb alongside a deep yellow strip and are blooming against a bright blue sky in this beautiful garden flora expression.

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This project is commissioned by Noel Development and managed by the Madison Public Art Project. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​