Milpitas Skate Park Mural Recap

The Milpitas Skate Park in a site full of action and community, and what better to add onto the action than a colorful mural? Public art committee decided to plan a mural at the Milpitas Skate park, and while the outcome might be different from anticipated, the process was definitely enriching and a learning experience.

We begin the project by emailing the Milpitas mayor, who invited us to present during the public forum at the Art Commission meeting in January. We met up and practiced speeches and created two trifold of our past projects and pictures of the Skate Park and the Barbara Lee Senior Center (another potential mural location.) When we went to present, we each went up one by one and gave a pitch on what this project was, why we wanted it to happen and why they should choose us based on our past murals. At that point, we were not familiar with Milpitas’ unique mural and public art program.

Milpitas’ mural program has a selective process, and is different from giving pitches and hoping that it will happen. It begins when a project is chosen in the Art Commission’s yearly work plan. Then, a stakeholder committee is formed, and they vote on a artist to paint the mural. The stakeholder group consists of local business affected, people around that area, and important community members who are affected by a mural in that location. Artists are chosen from the Prequalified Muralist List, and the stakeholder group votes on who gets to paint the mural based on proposals submitted. The artist that is selected then gets to work on the mural, with complete funding from Milpitas. There is no pitching for an artist to be able to paint, and the only pitching that happens is to try to get the project onto the work plan for that year.

Sadly, we did not know this information when we were working on the project. We did quite a bit of work, and it was definitely helpful in our pitch to get the skate park on the work plan (which successfully got on there!) To begin, we went to the Milpitas Clean Up event and did a survey on what Milpitas Residents wanted the mural at the Skate Park to look like. We got 70 responses, and here is some of their input:

We asked for what art style they preferred, and a popular choice was Graffiti / Street art

We also asked for what kind of design they preferred, and the most popular option was Nature and Wildlife (which was very surprising with the result from the art style question of Graffiti and Street art)

Next, we went to the Skate Park and did some measurements. Using these measurements, we created proportioned diagrams of what the structures looked like. There were two structures that caught our interest.

We found this structure at the front of the skate park very interesting, and this is the blueprint of what it looks like in 2D form. Really interesting shape with high visibility (as everyone can see it when they walk into the park.)

This is the structure in the center of the skate park. We also thought it would be a great space to paint a mural.

With the information from the surveys, we also created some thumbnails based on using grafiti, nature and Milpitas elements.

Graffiti Milpitas design

We presented these survey results and thumbnails at the Art Commission meeting, and we received a lot of applause and interest. Through this presentation, we successfully got the Skate Park on the mural plan for the 2026 - 2027 year, and became prequalified muralists for Milpitas!