Community partnerships are important to any active public art program. Public art has a place not just in residential neighborhoods or central business districts, but in commercial corridors as well.

Given the opportunity to paint whatever she liked on the wall of this Jiffy Lube store, the artist chose to depict the importance of bees and their drastic drop in population because of herbicides, pesticides, deforestation, and urbanization. When bees are gone, everything in the world, including humans, will cease to exist. True to her style, the artist depicted an illusion of the wall breaking open to reveal a honeycomb, with several bees in various states of maturity flying out from it. The final “bee” is a baby in a bee costume holding a heart balloon, to indicate the importance of bees to human life. The bees appear to be flying towards a giant sunflower, with a world globe in its center.

The three figures in the mural represent the fact that this Jiffy Lube location was the third one opened in Indiana, nearly thirty years ago. The idea of “kings” was developed by the mural’s artists, a team of one master artist and two apprentices. In the African American community, friends often refer to each other as “kings” and “queens” in order to convey appreciation, pride, and support. As a mentorship project, the love and support is directed towards the new artists who deserve to have the confidence and stature of a king. A “king” is also graffiti slang for a highly accomplished writer: all three of the artists who created this mural have street art backgrounds.