Lots of locals turned out over the weekend to start to restore a mural on the Texas Woman’s University campus that was vandalized with hate speech late last month.
A university spokesman said there hasn’t been an arrest in the case.
“I spoke to the chief about it earlier and I know that there have been no arrests made,” said Matthew Flores, assistant vice president of communications at TWU, on Monday. “It remains an open case but there is no new information about it right now.”
About 70 people gathered on Oakland Street on Saturday to paint over the blocks of color that blotted out what university officials would only call hate speech. TWU officials said it was a family event, including a stone painting activity for kids and adults.
Flores said the restoration will be finished when an anti-graffiti sealant is added.
The mural, located on the north-facing wall of the former Marketing and Communications building on Oakland Street, was a project by students in the TWU public art class in 2023. Professor Giovanni Valderas, led the project.
The mural includes iconic TWU images: Minerva, the Pioneer Woman statue; the fountain in front of the Blagg-Huey Library; the Little Chapel in the Woods; Oakley the Owl, the school mascot; books that turned into birds; and a heart rhythm pattern that signifies the school’s nationally-renowned nursing program. The mural pays homage to Denton with the historic downtown Courthouse on the Square.
Art students also included images that reflect the diversity on campus. A Kente cloth for African and African-American students, staff and faculty; a milagro for the school’s growing Hispanic student body; and the LGBTQ Pride rainbow.
Campus officials discovered a hateful message scrawled across the mural on June 28.
“We’re not providing information on what the contents of the graffiti was, but we will say that it was hate-speech related,” Flores said. “Our feeling is we don’t want to give a platform to the perpetrators of the crime. Clearly, they were intending to try to make some kind of a statement. We feel that by repeating whatever it was that was written, it gives them a forum and we simply don’t want to do that.”
Some of the students who originally painted the mural returned for the restoration, and were joined by community members who helped.
The mural isn’t the first piece of public art to be defaced in Denton. A mural honoring the Black women of Southeast Denton who led the push for civil rights in Denton was vandalized in 2021. A stained glass rendering of Pops Carter, the late beloved Denton blues artist, who was Black, was damaged when a vandal bashed it with an object in 2017. The Pops Carter glass art was repaired and moved to the Patterson-Appleton Arts Center in 2019.
The Denton County Confederate Veteran’s Memorial that once stood on the south lawn of the downtown Denton Courthouse on the Square was vandalized with the words “this is racist” in 2015 before the county moved the artifact inside the courthouse museum.