Local artist happy to hit the wall

By Jean Reid Norman

Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009 | 1:59 a.m.

At 5 a.m., Connie Burnett Ferraro begins her day, racing the sun as she paints a wall outside the old Nevada Pharmacy on Arizona Street.

She starts at the top of the mural while there is shade available, and she works her way down the scaffolding with her acrylic paints, which dry seconds after she applies them.

By 7:30 a.m. on most days, the sun has won, and she has to pack up her paints and brushes until the middle of the afternoon, when the sun has shifted again so the building provides its own shade.

Bret Runion, the building's owner, has commissioned Burnett Ferraro to paint the artwork on the side of his new offices for Desert Sun Realty.

It's the latest of her pieces to decorate downtown Boulder City, where one does not have to walk far to see her handiwork — on the side of Edie's Flowers at Nevada Way and Arizona Street, at the Boulder Bowl and American Legion Hall on California Street, on the Goatfeathers Emporium building on Wyoming Street, inside the Boulder Dam Hotel and on Avenue B across from the Back Stop bar.

Her murals help define the look of downtown in an understated way, Boulder City Art Guild Director Darrell McGarvey said.

"They're around corners and that sort of thing," he said — like little surprises. The current work-in-progress is in an alleyway, he noted, visible only if you let your eye wander a little.

The mural work is a third career and a fourth identity for Burnett Ferraro.

The former chorus line dancer, who at 71 looks more like 41, worked on Broadway and in vaudeville for 25 years in New York City. She studied art at the Art Students League and grew to love painting, which she did on the side. She showed her work at the Salmagundi Club and Greenwich Village Art Show.

In 1988, at the age of 50, she decided it was time to leave New York. She came to Southern Nevada to visit her mother and earn her driver's license, preparing for a future move.

She found secretarial work quickly at Lockheed Environmental Laboratories on Sunset Road, and they sent her on a temporary assignment to American Pacific Corp., where she initially met Boulder City Mayor Bob Ferraro. She was dating an engineer at the time and found herself transferring to Denver. When the relationship ended, she returned to Southern Nevada in 1993.

Ferraro, recently divorced, called her shortly after her return. They began dating and married a year later.

For most of her time in Boulder City, Burnett Ferraro has been known as the mayor's wife, but the murals have helped her come out of his shadow. And now that he's retired, she said, she's not the mayor's wife anymore.

She began work on the new mural the second week in July and hoped to have it completed by July 31, so it would be ready when Runion opens the new office.

The design is a postcard of Boulder City with a different historical scene in each letter. The scenes range from construction at the dam to the first business building in town and the commercial TWA Constellation aircraft (Connie for short, she points out) taking off from Boulder City Airport.

Runion may find a resemblance of himself in the I, which is the portrait of an architect. He posed for the image, Burnett Ferraro said.