A huge new mural celebrating “The Office” just debuted in Scranton, the northeastern Pa. city where the fictional workplace of Michael Scott, Dwight Schrute, Pam Beesly and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin crew was located.
Hand-painted in West Philly by artist Kala Hagopian before being installed on Scranton’s Lackawanna Avenue, the 86-foot-wide, 27-foot-high mural includes giant portraits of 17 of the show’s characters, along with images and catch-phrases from the popular NBC mockumentary. It also features a depiction of the “Electric City” sign, a local landmark.
Organizers spent months obtaining individual permission from Steve Carell and the other 16 actors to include their images, according to Rose Randazzo, chair of Scranton Tomorrow’s Mural Arts Program.
Hagopian and her team then spent a year painting the mural in sections on 90 sheets of Polytab, or parachute cloth, often using tiny brushes to achieve the subtle shadings needed to create lifelike faces, she said.
They were aiming for “a fine art aesthetic,” Hagopian told Billy Penn, “capturing all the details and all the subtleties of each character’s portrait.”
While the mural was created to boost tourism in Scranton, where Office-related tours are a top draw, Philadelphia also played a key role.
“We wouldn’t have this ‘Office’ mural if it wasn’t for the great city of Philadelphia,” said Randazzo, a Villanova law school grad who had an office in Philly in the 1980s and 90s. The city “was an inspiration for the program and it was the way I found Kala.”
In 1984, Randazzo was crossing the Spring Garden Street bridge and saw the first big artwork that gave rise to Mural Arts. Mayor Wilson Goode had hired artist Jane Golden — who subsequently founded Mural Arts Philadelphia and continues to lead the organization — to paint a Mexican modernism-inspired mural as part of an anti-graffiti program.
Years later, Randazzo happened to see one of Hagopian’s murals at the former Mercantile Library on Chestnut Street and hatched a plan to have the artist paint one for Scranton, obtaining funding from the Lackawanna County Convention and Visitors Bureau, NBC/Peacock, and other donors.
Hagopian has painted many murals around Philly, including a similarly large and detailed Philadelphia Marathon mural in Manayunk. But “The Office” project was the “most intense and realism-heavy,” she said.
Her team was in the studio seven days a week this summer, finishing the piece and preparing for it to be affixed to a wall in Scranton. Hagopian then spent about a week up on a scaffold, painting over the edges of the individual sheets to make a seamless image.
Word of the mural got out via The Office Memes Facebook page, where a photo of the project quickly got more than 60,000 likes and helped attract visitors from around the world to watch her working.
It was also the subject of a TV piece by a local NBC affiliate, which was picked up by other stations around the country.
“It was kind of wild,” Hagopian said. “There were people from all over, already coming to Scranton to see the mural. There was a couple that came by that were from Ecuador, who had seen some press about the mural and wanted to see it in person.”
An official unveiling is set for Oct. 6. per Randazzo, and NBC/Peacock is helping set up the event to promote “Office” reruns. The ongoing actors’ strike could complicate the arrangements, but some of the stars from the show may still be on hand for the celebration.
