Lite-Brite from Ta-coumba, at Ten Years! (02.09.23)

Our stately Union Depot in downtown Saint Paul includes a goodly amount of public art, works with glass and light and ceramics, and transportation themes. But there is really nothing like Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s Forever Saint Paul Lite-Brite Mural. What a show! Lighting up the concourse in swirls of color and form, secret shapes in plain bold sight, made of 596,897 little plastic pegs, the much-loved artwork turns ten this month. Part cityscape, part Georges Seurat, all brilliance and power. Go take a look. 

After the piece was commissioned by the Saint Paul Foundation as part of a campaign encouraging good ideas for the city (bright ideas, get it?), Ta-coumba made a design based on the eight available Lite-Brite colors (four darks, four lights) and started to consider a method for turning his idea into a mural twenty-four feet long and nine feet tall. How could it be done? The Lite-Brite pegs came in boxes of 25,000 with the colors mixed together. Yes, that’s right, mixed together, so that, first, they had to be sorted by color. And then, eventually, they had to be, well, pegged. 

Ta-coumba, who is deeply committed to community, and who says his work funnels the creativity of others, as well as his own, had worked with volunteers before. More than 600 people had a hand in Forever Saint Paul, everyone from downtown workers to federal court judges, to other artists and, occasionally, travelers who happened to be waiting for a late train. It was a cold winter in 2013, and one of the best outcomes happened when Ta-coumba sent word to some of the homeless people in the neighborhood. Union Depot was warm. “If you can’t get in the library”, he said, “come down to the Depot and say you’re there to work on the mural.” An accidental and momentary community formed around the mural-in-the-making.

“Imagine you’re going to the park,” Ta-coumba would say to the sets of workers with their bowls of color. “What could be in the park?” He encouraged them to look around the big worktables at the other volunteers and their ideas…and then to steal them. “People were talking and showing each other things. People were communicating, all different kinds of people.”

“It was just wonderful to see people come together. It was like having a big palette, but the palette was the people, not the pegs anymore.” Ta-coumba had indicated shapes like the skyline, the capitol, Sparky the Como Zoo seal, and others, but the volunteers had agency to create. It’s a little dizzying to take a really close look — something about the tiny scale of the pegs and the monumental size of the overall light box — but there are many swirls and flourishes and shapes and special dots of color that were set in place by volunteers. Many retain a sense of ownership about their part in Forever Saint Paul. 5000 people attended its unveiling. 

There are wedding pictures and graduation pictures and family photos taken in front of the mural and, in some, people are pointing happily to a particular spot in the color. “I did this part”, they are thinking. “This is mine.” And it is. It is.

If there’s nothing like Forever Saint Paul, the same could be said about Ta-coumba himself. He’s lived in Lowertown so long – through the eighties and the forward-looking nineties and the gentrifying two thousands — that he is frequently referred to as its mayor. He made the mural high on the west-facing wall of the old Jax building, just across from the Depot, and the etched glass and inlaid walls on the parking ramp at 7th and Robert. There’s a mural on the long wall of the Union Gospel Mission Child Care Center (see it best from Minnesota Street). And, a little up the hill, the dazzling installation at the Walker/West Music Academy on Selby is his. There really should be a downtown bus tour. Ta-coumba could narrate; he has stories to tell.

If you can get a bus tour on his schedule. Being a muralist is far more than a full-time effort, even (or especially) when one receives a Guggenheim fellowship, as he did in 2022. Much-awarded, much-celebrated, hard-working, and much-welcomed in the restaurants and bars of Lowertown, Ta-coumba is a presence.

And where does Forever Saint Paul fit into his body of work? “This piece is like the center insert; it’s a highlight piece. Because it’s an historic building, and a federal building, and a county building, and an iconic building. And it’s historic because of me.  Because I’m the icon now.” 

True that. 

Someone please organize that bus tour. I’ll help. 

(The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Forever Saint Paul as the largest Lite-Brite mural ever created.  Photos by the author. See more of his work at ta-coumba.com.)