If you want to understand Milwaukee’s greatest challenges and our capacity as a community to come together and change, Tia Richardson’s murals are that education. She makes difficult realities and our collective desire to collaborate and transform the city visible through her work as a muralist. It is no small thing, bringing the stories and expressions of entire groups of people together and producing vivid works of art that will delight and stand the test of time in the public realm, our shared space, for years or generations. In one of the most segregated and polarized cities in the United States, Tia unites people and perspectives. The word liberation comes to mind when we think about her work. A year after the Sherman Park neighborhood experienced unrest in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Sylville Smith, Richardson partnered with the City of Milwaukee and anti-violence nonprofit Safe and Sound to create a new mural on West Center Street with input from 150 community members. “Sherman Park Rising” was an act of belonging and empowerment through mural-making, says Tia. The mural is indeed a significant “cultural landmark,” as Stacey Williams-Ng, an artist, writer and owner of Wallpapered City, put it in an op-ed for Urban Milwaukee recently. Tia, who was named the 2018 Artist of the Year by the city, had been outside and working on a mural when we interviewed her, long before coronavirus-era sheltering set in.