Mentoring
The kid doodling on their
homework has a gift
and deserves to know it.
Since 1997, Tom Christopher has brought younger artists into real projects: murals, virtual reality, museum installations. Times Square, the South Bronx, San Juan, and the Hudson Valley. Not classroom exercises. Real walls. Real audiences. Real deadlines.
The Philosophy
Being an artist doesn’t
mean standing in front of
the easel like Van Gogh.
Everything in our society has been touched by the artist’s hand. Automotive design. Fashion. Hollywood sets. Product packaging. The skyscrapers were imagined by artists before anyone poured concrete.
Lift Trucks Art believes the younger generation deserves to know that. We’d rather see a talented kid working inspirationally within the many fields of art than slogging their youth away wondering whether their skills matter.
“We want to foster the talents of that inattentive child doodling on their homework, drawing race cars or Anime characters, by telling them they have a gift which has great importance for our society.”
Our mentoring isn’t a classroom program. It’s an extension of the studio. Younger artists come into actual projects with professional stakes, public audiences, and working deadlines. They learn by doing the work, alongside artists who do it every day.
The Work
Four projects. Four cities.
Twenty-six years of showing up in person.
Tom Christopher’s mentoring has always been project-based. No syllabi. No credit hours. A wall that needs painting. A virtual world that needs building. Students arrive, and the work begins.
Times Square · 1997
The Roseland Mural
Twenty-three feet high and two hundred twenty-five feet long. Nine panels wrapping the back wall of the Roseland Ballroom on 53rd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Tom Christopher designed and painted the upper portion. Students from Park High School painted the lower six feet using pouncing, a Renaissance-era technique where paper stencils and chalk transfer outlines onto the surface.
The project took four weeks, sponsored by the Times Square Business Improvement District. The finished mural appeared on the opening credits of the David Letterman Show. The building has since been demolished. The mural lives in documentation and in the students who made part of it.
“Everything else around here has been done electronically, digitally and in glaring light. Our process is hundreds of years old — a first for Times Square.”
Tom Christopher
San Juan · 2016
The Working Men and
Women of Puerto Rico
More than four thousand square feet of murals celebrating the working people of Puerto Rico, painted in a public studio on Bahia Plaza in San Juan by Tom Christopher and students from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño. The students were involved in every aspect: ideas, color selection, sketches, painting, format, and printing.
The subjects follow the tradition of Thomas Hart Benton, the WPA artists, and Diego Rivera: sweepers, welders, construction crews, tour guides, architects, musicians. The murals opened October 24, 2016, and are now being transferred to the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. Several of the student artists found FEMA assistance and scholarships to American schools after Hurricane Maria.
“This is a tribute to the everyday Puerto Rican. The murals tell the story of the people who built and sustain the country’s economy.”
Tom Christopher
South Bronx · 2017–2019
Building the Bronx
in Virtual Reality
When Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx needed a way to reduce pain and anxiety in pediatric cancer patients without opioids, Tom Christopher and a team of student interns from the Fashion Institute of Technology built it in virtual reality.
The students spent hours each day on Fordham Road sketching everything: the woman in island regalia, the food truck, the Con Ed truck, the crossing guard, the pigeons. Then they returned to Christopher’s studio in Croton Falls and translated those drawings into navigable virtual worlds using Google Tilt Brush. Two FIT interns, Joseph Irizarry and Stephanie Held, were hired by Montefiore after graduation to continue the work.
“We’re not creating artwork, we’re creating information. Where’s his thumb? What’s he holding onto? This work is revitalizing classical drawing.”
Tom Christopher
Katonah · 2023
13 at 40
For the Katonah Museum of Art’s 40th anniversary, Tom Christopher collaborated with thirteen high school students on a site-specific mural in the museum’s atrium. The project was called “13 at 40.” Each student distilled their vision of life at age forty into a single painted symbol.
A pillow for a restful life. A hammerhead shark for ocean exploration. A compass for architecture. Scales of justice for a career as a detective. The symbols were painted over an expressionistic background in five intensive hours, organized by Margaret Adasko, the museum’s Curator of Education. The mural was free to the public.
The Right Fit
This isn’t for everyone.
Institutional partners
Museums, schools, medical centers, or community organizations with a specific project that could benefit from artistic collaboration.
Serious young artists
Students or emerging practitioners who want to work at professional scale, not workshop scale. If you’re already making things and want to learn how to make them bigger, we want to hear from you.
Applied thinkers
People who understand that art isn’t just canvas and frame. Murals. Public installations. Virtual reality. Stage design. If you see art as something that goes into the world and does work, we’re interested.
Get in Touch
Still mentoring.
Still showing up in person.
If you’re an institution, educator, student, or parent and you think there’s a project worth building together, Lift Trucks Art would like to hear from you.