A new Wide Open Walls mural at UC Davis Health

As part of Wide Open Walls, the Sacramento mural festival, artist Ana Valentine is painting a mural on the side of the UC Davis Health Comprehensive Cancer Center. The mural festival was conceived as a way to activate spaces throughout Sacramento and to promote diversity through artistic expression.  

This is the third mural at UC Davis Health that is part of Wide Open Walls and the second by Valentine, a self-taught artist. In 2020, she painted a mural on the corner of Parking Structure #1.

For inspiration for her paintings, Valentine shared, “You can take pictures of nature with a camera. Through painting, I have trained myself to look at life differently.” For her current project, Valentine is creating a mural composed of tulips and a daffodil, with each flower having a bird and some flowers having a mother and baby bird. Valentine describes it to The Sacramento Bee as “the birds are leading each other out of the darkness, which is probably what it feels like to be very ill.”

The murals are located throughout Sacramento, reaching a large audience, and becoming part of our daily lives.