Kuala Lumpur Mural
Ten years after Mindy painted a mural at Bix Supper Club in San Francisco, restauranteur Pat Kuleto asked her to paint a mural for his new restaurant, “Villa Danelli” (named after his son) in Kuala Lumpur in what was going to be a Sheraton Hotel. The restaurant client team lived overseas and never met Mindy, although they spoke via telephone and email. That was Spring of 1996, and Mindy was pregnant with her second child, although she didn’t inform the client of that fact.
Over months, Mindy submitted various potential sketches and sent them to Malaysia. As the length of negotiations drew on (at one point, the client rep explained that he had “a bug” in his computer and he meant it literally!), and a contract was not signed by December, Mindy said that they either had to sign or call it quits. They agreed, and Mindy quickly started to paint a mural with images of everything that could go wrong in a restaurant. In February, after taking two weeks off to give birth, and with baby in tow, she returned to complete the 6′ high X 90′-long mural. She eventually rolled the completed canvases up and shipped them out about a month after her daughter’s birth.
If you look closely at the mural, you will see a happy baby crawling to the balcony edge, chased by a fast-moving mother, and also a woman going into labor, with the contents of her purse spilling into the air. (The images on this website are of the sketch and not the final mural, the latter of which has more details.)