Alexandra Hall is not one to sit idly by.

“I don’t have the ability to not get involved in a community when I’m in the community,” the Fort Wayne artist said.

That drive has been instrumental in Fort Wayne’s rejuvenated downtown, where she has painted murals and has spearheaded 22 others as manager of Art This Way, a program of Downtown Fort Wayne.

“Murals were a great way to inject our community with creative energy and give us a bit of an education,” she said. “We were needing a little bit of that. And accepting, too — like, ‘We can be cool here.’ We as a community didn’t realize that what we saw in New York and London could happen in Fort Wayne.”

Hall has even bigger plans for the city. It’s that kind of desire that made the 37-year-old the youngest recipient of Whatzup’s H. Stanley Liddell Award, presented to those “who have made a uniquely significant contribution to the arts and culture of Fort Wayne and surrounding communities.”

Brotherly push

As creative as she is, it’s difficult to believe the Bishop Dwenger graduate’s journey into the arts scene came about, as she describes, “by accident.”

Earning degrees in political science and Slavik literature and languages at Indiana University in 2010, Hall found herself at a crossroads.

“I was actually doing all the pre-medical prerequisites, because I kind of wanted to keep my options open,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe if I do OK in these classes, I can apply for medical school. I don’t know what I want to be.’ I genuinely, to this day, wonder, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ ”

Throughout college, Hall said she dealt with stress by painting. Luckily, that therapeutic hobby led to something much bigger for her, and ultimately for Fort Wayne.

“When I was debating, after college, whether I wanted to go into grad school, I started to casually sell my work,” she said. “It slowly turned into, ‘This is something I could actually do for work if I wanted to.’ ” 

She said her first taste of selling her work came by quite fortuitously while working a summer job at The Deck.

“I was creating these frog drawings on the chalkboard,” she said. “I was kind of just doing one every couple of weeks when we had a down day or a rainy day, when you had time but still had to be at work. 

“It was just fun for me, but we had a patron who wanted to buy the chalkboard.

“I was like, ‘I’m not going have you buy a chalkboard. I don’t know anything about art. I mean, one brush up against it, and your art goes away.’ I had no idea you could spray paint over it and save it.”

She made a separate piece for the patron, but her obsession with drawing frogs did not fade. After creating so many of them, her brother took some initiative. 

“I created all these frogs throughout that summer and fall, and my brother signed me up for an art show without my knowledge,” she said of her first show at Dash-In in 2013. “That was the first time that I really had to show people what I was doing.

“It was something like, ‘What do you mean? I’m not an artist.’ I felt like a con. I was like, ‘I shouldn’t show this stuff. This is just what I dabble in when I have free time. And, it’s just a bunch of … drunk frogs. Why would anyone like this?’ ”

Well, people did like them, and it’s because they were much more than “drunk frogs.” They have personalities that Hall infused into them thanks to her keen observational skills.

“People inspired the frogs, so it was typically a fun hat or a fun personality or someone wearing cool patterns together,” she said. “I would see them as, ‘Wow, they’re a cool soul.’ You want to capture that.”

Pulling the thread

Realizing she had a talent people were interested in, Hall got to work transferring that into a career, leading to Art of Alexandra Hall.

“I do kind of have that personality that is organized, I guess you could say,” she said. “I have a strange left-right brain they might say. But, in general, I have more of a business head based on the fact that I come from a family where everyone is pretty much an entrepreneur. I have an understanding of what it would take to do (create a business). 

“Then, I did a lot of research, made a lot of mistakes, asked a lot of questions. I got to a place where I wasn’t mimicking any one model. I figured out what business model worked for me. For me, what worked was getting a nice-sized portfolio put together, having a couple shows, then also looking into the art festival circuit.”

Her art continues to feature a lot of anthropomorphic caricatures, where, according to her website, “her large-scale acrylic paintings display a healthy mixture of whimsical and surrealistic tones.”

Along with shows and getting on the festival circuit, Hall took a plunge into setting up a gallery in the former City Exchange downtown.

“Back when I first started, I wanted to see what it was like to have a gallery,” she said. “I heard brick and mortar was good for some people, bad for others. I just wanted to try. I tried, and that’s how I met the Downtown Improvement District director, Bill Brown at the time. He had consistently mentioned interest in seeing more public art in town, but there was not really a clear or easy route to that end. I just kind of pulled at that thread, to be honest.”

That thread led to Art This Way.

Art This Way began as an alley activation project with a goal of creating five murals through funds raised by Lincoln Financial Group employees who wanted to keep the memory of downtown advocate Christy Landrigan alive, who died at age 29 in 2016. 

Through a collaboration between Fort Wayne Downtown Improvement District (now known as Downtown Fort Wayne), property owners, artists, and Friends of Lincoln Financial, the project was finished. 

However, Hall was not.

“From there, I asked, ‘What’s next? Are we going to do more? Obviously, this is cool. I want to see more of this,’ ” she said. “There wasn’t a simple mechanism. That’s where the bigger conversation happened, and Art This Way blossomed from that.”

Bigger plans

Art This Way has spawned numerous murals and a pair of sculptures and helped rejuvenate downtown with events like the Art Crawl, which melds music, art, and other entertainment.

Now, on top of keeping busy with her Art by Alexandra Hall studio and work with Art This Way, Hall is on the Downtown Public Realm Committee, part of the Fort Wayne Artist Guild, and consults with projects across the world. She was also hired to consult in the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership’s “Make It Your Own Mural Fest,” which brought 11 murals to 11 counties in the region.

It might be a lot of work, but it’s worthwhile to her.

“I think arts and culture having a visible presence is what is going to make a city,” she said. “So, there’s a lot of investment coming into Fort Wayne. There’s a lot of really big things happening that are totally separate from the arts and cultural scene. But, I think, without journalists, without musicians, and without creatives getting opportunities and galleries being able to run a successful brick and mortar, you’re really going to fall short of the full possibility of where we can be as a city.”

And she’s not finished.

“I think we’re on the right path, but I would like to see even more sculpture, more interactive stuff,” she said. “There’s a lot in the digital word when it comes to what’s possible with public art now.”