A new public art piece is coming to downtown Vienna this year.
Rustic Love, a Vienna-based nonprofit focused on food insecurity, is partnering with local artist Teresa L.C. Ahmad to create a mural on the Greenheart Juice building at 208 Dominion Road NE. Owned by Commonwealth Home Design, the building is across the street from the Washington & Old Dominion Trail and the Red Caboose.
Ahmad and a team of volunteers will paint the mural this year once Rustic Love hits a fundraising goal of $70,000. Proceeds from the sponsorships will be used to address food insecurity in the community, particularly by stocking food pantries at local schools, according to the project website.
“The Rustic Love Hearts and Home mural…will be an extension of the genuine concern and generosity expressed by our local community during and proceeding the COVID-19 pandemic,” Michelle Connors, founder and executive director of Rustic Love, said in a press release.
Rustic Love was born out of the pandemic. The idea for the nonprofit came from eight children who sought to “spread love” in the Vienna community by selling wooden signs with painted hearts to benefit the Vienna VA Foodies Facebook group, which began organizing support for local restaurants, frontline workers and families experiencing food insecurity.
In the summer of 2020, the group raised more than $6,000 and created more than 250 signs for the community. To date, Rustic Love has raised nearly $500,000, which has benefited 21 Northern Virginia nonprofits, the press release said.
Featuring hearts of different colors and sizes, the design for the planned Dominion Road mural expands on the theme of Rustic Love’s trademark signs.
Mostly a pen and ink artist, Ahmad has worked up and down the East Coast, in Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Indiana, Hawaii, Dubai and Gaum, her website states. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a bachelor’s degree in communication arts and design.
“We are excited to bring a vibrant public art piece to life that incorporates our open-heart design and raises money for the food-insecure in our community in the process,” Connors said in the release.
