In 2016, Maggie Keane envisioned a lineup of David Bowie heads. Lynn Trimble Artist Maggie Keane couldn’t remember what year she ran away and joined the circus. She thought it could have been 1992. Related Stories I Support Local Community Journalism Support the independent voice of Phoenix and help keep the future of the New Times free. “I remember it was shortly after I stopped painting billboards,” Keane said, “which is what I’ve been doing since the 1980s. This guy I used to do billboards with got a job at a company that paints buses. I was hired to paint the Phoenix Suns tour buses. And then I heard about some circus wagons that needed painting. ”But the circus moved on, and Keane agreed to take them out on the street and paint the circus wagons along the way. “That’s how I met my husband,” she said on the phone from Holmdel, New Jersey, where she was visiting her mother. “He was an acrobat. Nice guy, also from New Jersey. After a while he made me his assistant on this aerial photograph he was taking. But not like Vanna White. I was actually part of the action. ”Keane traveled the world doing handstands on chairs with her husband for six years. “We went everywhere. Colombia, Germany, England, Japan. But his back started to hurt and he pulled back and had his hips replaced. ”Born in Brooklyn and raised in Holmdel, Keane moved to Arizona in the mid-1970s. “I had a friend who wanted to get out of New Jersey as much as I did,” she recalls. “I was 19 and applied to the University of Arizona. I studied painting and drawing, and my mother kept saying I had to become a teacher. ”Keane always replied,“ I’m not going to teach, I’ll do it ”. After college, she found work as an illustrator, mostly pencil drawings by women for newspaper ads. She took a job illustrating a plumber’s catalog. “Nuts and bolts and pistons,” she said, then laughed. “Everything that belongs to a toilet. Things to do with sink faucets. I made a lot of flanges. ”Keane made extra money sketching portraits of people in Old Tucson. “That’s how I got into carousel restoration,” she said. “They had one in Old Tucson that was falling apart and I reached out to the owner to fix it. He let me, but he said, ‘Why do you want to save this piece of junk?’ It was a Herschell-Spillman carousel made entirely of wood. A work of art. “She went on to restore other carousels, including the one in Encanto Park.” But then I got carousel burnout, “sighed Keane. she said. “When I was a teenager and the Son of Sam trial was on TV every night, the news showed court sketches of this woman, Ida Libby Dengrove. She did these beautiful pastel portraits. One evening my mother said to me,” ‘You could make a living from it.’ “After college, Keane called local TV stations and asked if they needed a court draftsman.” One day this guy from KVOA in Tucson wanted to see my sketches. He liked them, and right after that, Don became Bolles was blown up and the case moved to Tucson and that was my first sketch work in the courtroom. ”One of her favorite subjects in the courtroom was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sister’s wife by Warren Jeffs, and death row inmate Debra Milke. Keane sketched singer Wendy O. Williams of punk band The Plasmatics when Williams sued the Milwaukee police for assault. Keane still gets the occasional request for one of her Williams portraits. Eventually, Keane began to fall apart as a wall painter. “Downtown Phoenix has been dead for a really long time,” she said. “There was no public art anywhere. But about 15 years ago people started doing murals and this neighbor of mine who ran a Montessori school asked for a mural for the students. It kind of started from there. ”Keane is perhaps best known these days for her David Bowie mural on North Seventh Street, north of McDowell Road. The owner of the collapsed log wall told her she could paint whatever she wanted. “That always knocks me out,” said Keane. “I would drive by and think, what should I do there? Then David Bowie died, and I imagined all these David Bowie heads so I did that. ”When she returns to town next week, Keane plans to have another rock music memorial near Grand Avenue employ. “The guy has a boxing hall and gave me a list of all these musicians that I should paint around a portrait of Prince. And one of them was Madonna. I said to him, ‘You know she’s still alive, don’t you?’ ”Keane got the client to let Selena and Amy Winehouse do it instead. “I was afraid Madonna would see it and come after me for surrounding her with all of these dead,” Keane said.
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