DELAND / ART & PARTICIPATION / INSPIRATION
Erica Group
Left room
for you.
By Rob Urban
The DeLand Wings leave the most important part of the picture unfinished. You supply the person in the middle.
It is an unusually generous arrangement between an artist and an audience. Erica Group paints the wings; visitors bring their children, their friends, their awkward poses, and occasionally the confidence of someone who has been waiting years for this exact photo opportunity. An alley becomes somewhere people deliberately go.
Group’s account of Wings of the West traces what happened after her original DeLand mural became popular. The West Volusia Tourism Advertising Authority invited her to become its artist in residence, and the idea expanded into five additional sets of wings, each connected to its location. The project reached beyond downtown to places including Cassadaga, Barberville, Deltona, and DeLeon Springs.
The invitation built on something she already understood: people enjoy finding a place for themselves in a piece of art. Give them that opening, and they may pay closer attention to the place around it.
An idea
people wanted
to keep.
What became a familiar landmark began with something that could have washed away. In a 2019 interview with Flamingo, Group recalled drawing chalk wings beside a dress shop during a photo shoot in September 2014. She expected Florida’s rain to take care of them. People started asking where to find them instead. That December, she replaced the fading chalk with paint.
I like the room for discovery in that sequence. She made something, watched what people did with it, and gave their response somewhere to continue. The permanent work followed the invitation people had already accepted.
A town has
an everyday visual life.
Group grew up in DeLand, studied interior design at Cazenovia College in upstate New York, and returned home after graduation. Her biographical account describes combining that training with graphic design to establish Erica Group Designs.
Her local work includes logos, menus, promotional design, and murals for businesses such as Dressed Boutique, Bake Chop, and Persimmon Hollow Brewing. That is a different kind of familiarity from having one signature artwork. People encounter your decisions while ordering lunch, recognizing a storefront, or finding an event they want to attend.
I find that part of her career appealing. A designer who works locally gets to contribute to the ordinary visual life of a town. The work has to function, often in a small space and without a patient audience. A menu does not get to ask everyone to come back after reading a curatorial essay.
The wings gave her a larger canvas, but her connection to DeLand was already present in smaller, useful pieces all over town.
A fairy needs
somewhere to stand.
Public art is wonderfully romantic until someone asks how it will stay upright.
Group’s description of the Cassadaga fairy wings gets into precisely that problem. There was no wall in the chosen woodland setting. She designed freestanding wings using marine-grade plywood, which her husband, Jeff, cut to shape. Her father, a welder and metal fabricator, made the scroll details and supporting pieces. A local carpenter prepared the posts.
The finished illusion depended on people solving practical problems together. Weather resistance mattered. So did transport, mounting, and leaving time before the unveiling to handle surprises.
There was a personal memory inside the project, too. Group connected the wings with Joan Powis, an English artist who had lived next door during her childhood. She remembered Powis encouraging her to notice small things and remain open to learning and imagination. That gives the glitter and metalwork another layer: an adult artist carrying forward something a neighbor once made possible for her.
The people
behind
the wings.
At Lyonia Preserve in Deltona, another location called for a different approach. The scrub jay wings were destined for a wall with deep stucco ridges above and textured concrete below. Group again worked on prepared plywood panels, using bird photographs supplied by the environmental center to guide the painting.
Her account includes a detail I appreciate: after the first burst of painting, she stopped to rest and returned with fresh eyes before adding shading and highlights. The artwork improved because the artist stepped away from it.
Volusia County Library team members Rusty and Chad helped transport and install the pieces, taking care with the visible hardware. Nearby, a pollinator garden supplied a living setting for the painted bird. Group’s story gives the helpers names and credit. The finished photo may show one visitor between two wings, but getting there involved a considerably larger cast.
A little room
for every generation.
At Barberville’s Pioneer Settlement, peacocks already lived on the grounds. Group used them as the starting point for a mural on an old wooden building.
In her account of finishing the peacock wings, she explains that the scale sits between adult and child size, accommodating the generations who visit. Metallic paint brought out the feather details, while the uneven wood remained part of the character of the work. Her mother kept her company during the final long day of painting.
Those are small choices with consequences for the person who eventually stands there. How high should the wings sit? How wide should they spread? Who is likely to visit? A successful interactive piece anticipates the body that will complete it.
Group also used that post to explain that, following her marriage, she would continue signing her artwork with her maiden name. Readers may encounter her as Erica Group Kiel in community roles and Erica Group on the work itself.
Your choice
of crayons.
There are quieter ways into her art as well. Her West Volusia coloring book turns area landmarks into illustrations that someone else can finish with their own colors. The scale changes completely: a mural requires a trip, while a book can open on a kitchen table. Both leave room for participation.
That matters to me because the first encounter with art does not have to feel like a test. A child coloring a familiar place can spend time with its shape before worrying about the right terminology. An adult can do exactly the same thing. Nobody has to justify the crayon selection to a committee.
The child at art camp.
The artist who came back.
Group’s involvement in local cultural life also extends to the Museum of Art DeLand’s board of trustees, which lists her among its members. The museum brings exhibitions, education, and public programs into the same downtown where her work is already part of the streetscape. Making art and helping sustain a place for art are related forms of participation, even when one is much more likely to produce a photograph.
The connection reaches back further than a board appointment. Artistry’s September/October 2026 account of the museum’s seventy-fifth anniversary notes that Group attended its summer camp as a child. She designed the anniversary logo as an adult.
A town cannot know exactly what a child will carry out of an art class. Years later, the child may help give the institution a face. I admire the continuity in Group’s work: the place that gave her opportunities keeps receiving something back, in forms that other people can use and enjoy.
The space between the wings is a small but consequential decision. An artist can make that space available, while allowing the person who steps into it to choose the pose, the company and the meaning of the photograph. The work stays hers. The moment belongs to them.
For another view of contemporary art in DeLand, Matt Roberts’s work takes familiar objects and environments in more experimental directions. Group’s public work offers its invitation immediately. Stand here. Bring somebody you love. Let a place you might otherwise have passed become part of your own picture.
About Erica Group and the wings
Who is Erica Group?
Erica Group is a DeLand artist and designer known for the DeLand Wings and Wings of the West. She also creates illustrations, logos, menus and other design work. She uses Erica Group for her artwork and is also known as Erica Group Kiel.
How did the DeLand Wings begin?
Group described drawing the original wings in chalk during a dress-shop photo shoot in September 2014. After visitors began seeking them out, she replaced the fading chalk with paint that December.
What is Wings of the West?
Wings of the West expanded the original DeLand mural into five additional wing artworks commissioned through the West Volusia Tourism Advertising Authority. Each set reflects its location, including peacocks at Barberville and scrub jay wings in Deltona.
Sources: Erica Group’s biography and project accounts, Flamingo’s 2019 interview, the Museum of Art DeLand and Artistry’s September/October 2026 anniversary coverage. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
Much of my work begins with how people find their place in an idea. To read more of my writing or talk about something you’re making, meet Rob.