A quick stroll down Poyntz and you may witness works of art put on by Incite MHK, the passion project of six community members with pride for bringing Manhattan together through the arts. Conducted through the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation’s Deihl Community Grants Program, the group can hire artists to paint murals across town and intends to make Incite MHK an annual celebration with different events every year.
Artist Nick “Sick” Fisher
Courtesy of Incite MHK’s Instagram
Incite originally reached out to Chicago-based artist Nick “Sick” Fisher to commission a mural in the alleyway on the corner of 4th Street between Houston and Poyntz. Going back and forth as to what would fit, the final design would be a giant “Kitty Castle”, which Fisher says has “nothing to do with anything”, and “in other ways it kind of does”.
“There’s really the Wildcat. To be honest, the reason I picked this design was based on two factors, which is one, this pole that’s right here, because I had to incorporate the pole and two is the brick. The brick is like a grid system, so I picked something that would allow me to block things out really easily,” Fisher said. “I basically picked a design that fit the environment, whether it’s the immediate environment, or the kind of broader environment, like the fact that this is Manhattan, there’s a college here, and it’s physically Middle America. You can get away with different things in Los Angeles than you can in Miami, than you can in Kansas, that you can’t in Chicago, and I felt that a Kitty Castle was just enough offbeat, and just enough kind of nice, that it kind of made sense.”
Incorporating scratching posts, and holes for “panther-sized” cats to go in and out of, the mural appears “blocky” in its present state, and will soon get rendered with rope, twine, and carpeting to appear like a traditional giant cat house. Fisher says he is on the second day of the project and has stated “no one knows what it is until I say what it is” and envisions that it should be complete by the end of Sunday, should the weather hold up.
Fisher says his Kitty-Castle project, arose from conversations on Instagram with Incite’s Jeff Sackrider and he was given autonomy over what he would create.
“Well, the project I’m working on right now is put on by Incite MHK, which is a group of people in Manhattan that are trying to get public art up in town. I happened to post something or someone posted something of mine on Instagram, and Jeff Sackrider of Incite, made a comment on their posts,” Fisher said. “I happened to see and I commented on it as well. From there, we just started talking, a couple months go by and we had arranged to do this mural, and here I am. So it literally was just from an offhand comment on Instagram is why I’m here.”
Fisher explains his nickname of “Sick” originally arose in the 7th or 8th grade, when he sat beside a girl he liked and drew red on a piece of Kleenex that was behind him and put it in his ear, faking that he was bleeding out.
“She was scared, and the teacher saw, sent me to the nurses and I told him that I was faking it. A couple of days later, my mom signed up for parent-teacher conferences with a sloppy signature, and the teacher said, “Oh, that’s funny you wrote Nick Fisher, it looks like Sick Fisher, this is what he did last week,” Fisher said. “My mom told me later, and I thought it was funny. I just sort of hung on to it for 20 years or something. So that’s how I got it from a prank in high school.”
Fisher states having never been to Manhattan, it shares certain traits he feels from his upbringing that he feels comfortable with and was not what he expected.
“I’m lucky enough to have been raised and kind of come into my own in a handful of different places. I was raised in a small town in Florida, went to Florida State, then I moved to Chicago, then to LA. I’ve kind of gone every year, it gets a little more city life, so in a way this is really nice to kind of go backwards and just be back in a place where I was kind of raised, I suppose,” Fisher said. “Even though there’s specific things about Kansas that I’m learning the general vibe around, it’s not nearly as small as I was led to believe, but it’s also small enough to have that the small town thing. So that’s something I’m comfortable with.”
Previously Fisher hid a piece of artwork in the Manhattan community, something he does regularly anywhere he goes, painting items that he either found or requires in some way. Fisher states he leaves them for free for anyone who’s paying attention to Instagram, and in this case made a cowhide typewriter out of a typewriter found in Los Angeles.
“Knowing that I was coming to Manhattan, I knew ahead of time that it was gonna get left here. So what little I knew of Kansas, I figured there were cows here. So I was like, Oh, this will be fun. I brought it and left and someone got it within like 15 minutes,” Fisher said. “She came and we took pictures and it was pretty cool. She works right around the corner [from the top of the world}. I left it on a cliff’s edge that Jeff had taken me to because as far as I know, Kansas was super flat, and that is not flat. You know, it’s quite, quite the vista.”
Fisher mentions that he is on his way to Chicago to do more murals, and says his schedule was impacted by COVID, much like everyone else, and in many ways felt that it was very strange for lots of people in both good and bad ways.
“You see people like Jeff Bezos, who made what trillions of dollars in a week or something like that? Then you have people who are losing their job from an incredibly successful business as of like the week before. For me in a weird way, I started finding more work in and around these times, because I guess the people who were doing well enough wanted to start getting a dog portrait or this and that. So I spent most of COVID doing pet portraits,” Fisher said. “Then when things started to loosen up a little bit, that’s when certain businesses that had stuck around asked for a mural here or there. This one was kind of par for the course, very unusual. Someone I’d never met, in a place I’d never been to, to do something that… I’ve never painted a kitty castle before. So it was really just almost a opportunism. There was a chance to take and I took it, even though I know I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I just took the shot and then here I am.”
To find out more about Fisher’s artwork visit @sickfisher on Instagram and to see more of the artwork in the Manhattan sponsored by Incite, visit @inciteMHK on Instagram and Facebook.
The post Incite MHK paints the town purple with new “Kitty Castle” mural appeared first on News Radio KMAN.
