Evolving from school murals to a one-woman show

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - On a traffic-signal control box a block from her Ocean City home, Carla Migliaccio painted a brown-haired boy fishing off the bay with a blond dog by his side.

This piece of roadside artwork, created as part of a community arts project, reflects the 59-year-old's life.

"I wanted to pay homage to the neighborhood," Migliaccio said of the 10th Street wharf area. "We all grew up on that dock fishing."

Two years after painting the last of her seven traffic boxes, the Ocean City native - who inherited her family's Palen Avenue home, across from the dock, in 1999 - is preparing for her first one-woman show, at the Ocean City Arts Center. It is part of her expanding portfolio - which can be seen in the town's school walls, on the traffic boxes, and on the side of the VFW hall.

"I'm really excited," Migliaccio said of the January show. She said the president of the arts center told her, " 'I think you're ready, but I'll give you a year,' which I appreciated. I've been working pretty hard at it."

She has completed several beach- and bay-theme paintings for the show. She is working on a series of three larger acrylic paintings of a beach scene - one with three little girls, another with three 20-year-olds, and yet another with three old women. She intends the paintings to represent the continuing friendship of the three characters over the years.

Art, Migliaccio said, has always been a passion. But for a while, it was something she squeezed in on the side.

For 18 years, she worked as a custodian at Ocean City High School, attending classes at Ocean City Arts Center after work and tackling some projects on weekends. She jumped at the opportunity to move to the Ocean City Primary School.

"I had great relationships with the kids at the high school, but after 181/2 years, I was ready for a change," Migliaccio said. At the elementary school, "you get 5-year-olds saying, 'Miss Carla, look at my shoes,' and you got hugged about a dozen times a day. That was a gift."

Another gift: the chance to use her talent to brighten the kids' days.

She painted pink flamingos, hibiscus flowers, and palm trees on the doors to the maintenance room.

The Parent-Teacher Association asked her to fix the murals in the kindergarten atrium. They could not really be fixed, Migliaccio said, and the room needed repainting anyway. So she started from scratch.

Sitting on the couch beside Migliaccio and their dog, Morgan, Edward "Bogey" Bogart beamed when talking about the work of his longtime companion.

"Tell them about your 4- and 5-year-old critics," Bogart said.

Migliaccio laughed.

"Oh, God, it was great. I would go in on the weekends, so the first weekend, I drew out the one [mural], and it was Shrek-themed," she recalled. On Monday, "this kid stands there with his hands on his hips. His teacher says, 'My students have a question for you, Miss Carla.' And [the mural] was just penciled in. And I said, 'OK, what's up, guys?' "

The students had a pressing question: "Where is Dragon?"

So Migliaccio added the fire-breathing character from the films, perched in a top corner.

On the other wall, she drew a scene with the ocean and beach and jetties, as well as sea characters such as The Little Mermaid's Ariel. And one of her paintings of The Wizard of Oz is displayed in the school's main office, said secretary Sue Annarelli. Students and parents "loved them," she said. "They thought they were beautifully done."

When Migliaccio retired five years ago, after seven years at the school, she didn't know the kindergarten atrium would become her "resumé." When leaders of the community arts project were looking for another artist to paint the traffic boxes, they went to the school to see the murals.

Other pieces of her artwork - including a portrait of John Wayne she drew when she was 17 - grace the walls of the home she shares with Bogart, and on a basement wall in her neighbor's house - a Finding Nemo-esque painting to surprise grandchildren when they visited the summer after Hurricane Sandy.

At the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall at 15th Street and Bay Avenue, Migliaccio designed another mural, part of an American flag with an eagle head.

Along 10th, she designed and painted all the boxes, besides the one at 10th and Ocean Avenue. Her box designs include bay birds, a two-masted sailing ship, and funky flowers.

The town, she said, really embraced the project, on which about two dozen people worked. While Migliaccio was doing the boxes, people would drive by and honk their horns, sometimes yelling "great job" or "thank you so much."

"People would stop and talk. ... It was so rewarding. It was a community-service project. We didn't get paid for it, but you couldn't have put a price tag on it," Migliaccio said. "The first one I did was at 10th and Central, and the woman in the apartment downstairs said, 'You don't know how much I appreciate not looking at that gray box.' "