A local community project is searching for an artist to paint a mural that celebrates the resilience of the communities that were flooded in 2020 by the four lakes system dam failure.
The Sanford Dam Mural Project is raising money to put an 80-foot mural on the newly built dam’s powerhouse wall, along with a community gathering space and a trail that connects the dam to the Sanford Village Park.
The leader of the project, Stacey Trapani, said Midland County approved the project in September 2025 and the mural will be painted in June of this year.
Trapani said the project hopes to memorialize the history of the dams and recognize what it has taken for Sanford, Edenville, Smallwood and Secord dams and surrounding areas to recover.
“It’s going to include all of those communities because everybody did really have a role to play in helping bring back the dams,” Trapani said. “And they were all impacted by these dam failures in their own ways.”
After community input and help from Dacia Parker, a local artist and business owner, the group decided the mural should evoke feelings of unity, hopefulness and resilience. Parker is responsible for recruiting a muralist for the project. She said there are two rounds in the application process.
For the first round, artists will send in their portfolio, cover letter and resume. Then, Parker said, a handful of artists will be picked and given a budget to create a project proposal for the mural.
“We are specifically hoping for a great number of regional artists [to apply] who have specific knowledge and have been affected by this,” Parker said.
Parker said artists can apply on the project’s website. The deadline is April 3.
“We are really excited about the creativity that we're going to see and how we're going to be able to use that to the benefit of the community,” Trapani said.
The project plans to commission the selected artist $30,000 to complete the job. Trapani said the project is still raising money towards its $200,000 goal.
She said donations are accepted at the Sanford Dam Mural website.
