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Comnunity  murals  :  the  people's  art  / 
f  ND2608  ,B36  J?8_4  __  _         18216 


Barnett,  Alan  U. 
NEW  COLLEGE  OF  CALIFORNIA  (SF) 


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ND  Barnettff    Alan    W. 

2608  Coamunlty   murals    :     the    people's    art    / 

B36  Alan    W.    Barnett.    —    Philadelphia    :    Art 

1884  Alliance    Press    ;     Now    York    :    Cornwall 

Books*    cl984. 

516    p.,    [24]    p.    o±    plates    :     111. 
(  some    col. I    ;     32    cm. 

Bibliography:    p.    497-503. 

Includes    Index. 

«S417    Ballen    $60.00. 

ISBN    0-87982-030-6 


1.  Street  art — United  States.  2. 
Mural  painting  and  decoration — 20th 
century — United    States.       I.    Title 


10  APK  90 


8451886   NEWlxc   82-45464r85 


DATE 

DUE 

45230 

In  USA 

THE  USKAItY 

NIW  COU.EOC  or  CAuroWNJA 

so  rciX  STRKCT 

SAN  ritANCtSCO.  CAUPXMNiA  94108 

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The  Art  Alliance  Press  Award: 
Community  Murals:  The  People's  Art  (Alan  W.  Barnett) 


COMMUNITY 
MURALS 


THE  PEOPLES 
ART 


Alan  W.  Burnett 


Philadelphia:  The  Art  Alliance  Press 
New  York  and  London:  Cornwall  Books 


1984  by  Associated  University  Presses,  Inc. 


Associated  University  Presses,  Inc. 

Cornwall  Books 

440  Forsgate  Drive 

Cranbury,  New  Jersey  08512 

Associated  University  Presses  Ltd 

Cornwall  Books 

25  Sicilian  Avenue 

London  WClA  2QH,  England 


Library  of  Congress  Cataloging  in  Publication  Data 

Barnett,  Alan  W 
Community  Murals. 

Bibliography:  p. 

Includes  index. 

1.  Street  art — United  States.  2.  Mural 
painting  and  decoration — 20th  century — United 
States.  I.  Title. 

ND2608.B3         751.7'3'0973         79-21552 
ISBN  0-87982-030-6  (Art  Alliance  Press) 
ISBN  0-8453-4731-4  (Cornwall  Books) 


Despite  the  similarity  in  titles,  this  book 
is  not  affiliated  with  or  sponsored  by 
Community  Murals  magazine. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


CONTENTS 


Preface  7 

Acknowledgments  9 

Introduction  1 1 

Part  I:  History 

1  Prehistory  23 

2  Invention  (1967-69/70)  48 

3  Development  (1969/70-72)  78 

4  Scale  (1973-75)  133 

5  Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  240 

Part  II:  Means 

6  Process  351 

7  Aesthetics  and  Style  382 

8  Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  408 

Part  III:  The  Wider  Perspective 

9  The  Contemporary  Crisis  445 
10     People's  Art  464 

Appendix:  Connecting  with  People's  Muralists 

Abroad  473 

Glossary  496 

Bibliography  497 

Mural  Workshops,  Resource  Centers,  and 

Contacts  Active  in  1980  504 

Index  506 


,  5 


PREFACE 


This  book  is  about  the  first  fourteen  years  of  the 
current  community-based  mural  movement.  It  is  an  at- 
tempt at  its  history  and  an  effort  to  learn  from  the 
muralists'  bid  to  restore  art  and  its  making  to  the  com- 
mon life. 

The  number  of  murals  that  have  been  done  in  these 
years  is  enormous.  It  has  been  estimated  that  by  1979  in 
Los  Angeles  alone  there  were  over  one  thousand.  While 
the  murals  have  been  painted  mainly  in  major  cities 
across  the  country,  they  have  increasingly  appeared  in 
the  suburbs,  small  towns,  and  countryside.  Therefore,  I 
have  had  to  make  a  selection  and  have  concentrated  on 
those  in  the  San  Francisco  Bay  Area,  Sacramento,  Los 
Angeles,  San  Diego,  Seattle,  Portland,  Denver,  Santa 
Fe,  Chicago,  Boston,  New  York,  Philadelphia,  Balti- 
more, and  Washington.  A  few  other  areas  are  touched 
on,  but  many  are  neglected,  not  because  of  any  lack  of 
interest,  but  to  be  able  to  go  into  some  depth  in  repre- 
sentative localities.  Nor  have  I  sought  to  give  a  definitive 
historical  account  of  murals  in  any  one  area.  This  and 
their  careful  documentation  need  to  be  done  by  local 
people. 

The  history  of  the  murals  is  marked  by  a  sudden  and 
continuing  release  of  creativity  that,  from  a  perspective 
still  close  at  hand,  exhibits  shape  and  direction.  There 
has  been  a  clear  sequence  of  purposes,  themes,  and 
styles.  Increasingly  varied  groups  of  people  have  found 
in  this  wall  art  a  means  of  meeting  their  needs.  Innova- 
tive ways  of  working,  organizing,  and  funding  have 
emerged.  Although  artists  and  communities  have  dealt 
with  local  issues  and  worked  out  particular  methods  of 
painting  and  organizing,  their  larger  concerns  have  been 
similar  across  the  country,  which  makes  it  possible  to 
distinguish  stages  of  a  nationwide  development.  I  have 


generalized  these  to  four  periods,  each  about  three  years 
in  length.  This,  like  all  periodization,  has  about  it  some 
arbitrariness  determined  by  the  convenience  of  exposi- 
tion; but  it  is  not  possible  to  conceal  the  untidiness  of 
reality. 

As  the  reader  will  quickly  discover,  this  is  not  only  an 
effort  at  reporting;  it  is  also  advocacy.  While  my  par- 
tisanship extends  to  the  socially  conscious  muralists,  they 
are  not  to  be  lumped  together  indiscriminately;  there  is  a 
considerable  variety  in  their  concerns  and  proposals.  In 
trying  to  put  into  words  what  it  seems  to  me  they  have 
been  reaching  toward  in  their  images  and  by  their  work 
with  communities,  I  have  sometimes  gone  beyond  what 
they  have  explicitly  spoken  about.  And,  while  trying  to 
present  their  intentions  accurately,  I  have  not  hesitated 
to  add  my  interpretation.  However,  I  have  tried  to  make 
the  difference  clear.  This  book  is  addressed  to  the 
muralists  as  well  as  the  general  reader.  The  thinking  of 
particular  painters  has  been  identified  as  such.  When  my 
restatements  of  it  are  accompanied  by  notes,  this  in- 
dicates of  course  that  I  have  depended  on  printed  ac- 
counts of  their  words.  Where  there  are  no  notes,  I  am 
reporting  the  ideas,  if  not  the  exact  words,  of  muralists 
that  I  have  talked  with.  I  must  take  responsibility  there- 
fore for  whatever  inaccuracies  occur.  Most  of  the  photos 
have  been  taken  by  me;  where  those  shot  by  others  have 
been  used,  this  is  indicated. 

Several  books  on  the  community  murals  have  already 
appeared.  Some  of  these  are  primarily  pictorial  works 
like  the  first  publication  about  them.  Cry  for  Justice, 
which  was  released  in  1972  by  the  Amalgamated  Meat 
Cutters  and  Butcher  Workmen  in  Chicago,  a  union  that 
has  also  sponsored  an  impressive  mural  at  its  South  Side 
local  by  William  Walker.  This  book  was  followed  in  1973 


8  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

by  another  album,  Die  bemalte  Stadt  (The  Painted  City),  by 
Horst  Schmidt-Brummer  and  Feelie  Lee,  which  was 
pubHshed  in  West  Germany.  Robert  Sommers  Street  Art 
(1975)  offers  another  collection  of  photos  introduced  by  a 
brief  essay.  The  most  recent  picture  book  on  U.S.  and 
Canadian  murals  is  Big  Art,  done  by  David  Greenberg, 
Kathryn  Smith,  and  Stuart  Teacher  of  Environmental 
Communications  in  1977.  In  1979  Graham  Cooper  and 
Doug  Sargent  produced  an  extensive  volume  of  photos  of 
current  British  work,  Painting  the  Town.  The  only  com- 
prehensive how-to-do-it  handbook  is  the  Mural  Manual 
(1973),  prepared  by  Mark  Rogovin,  Marie  Burton,  and 
Holly  Highfill  and  edited  by  Tim  Drescher,  which  is 
valuable  also  as  a  detailed  account  of  the  social  process 
involved. 

The  growing  interest  in  community  murals  is  indi- 
cated by  Wandmalereien  in  West  Berlin  &  West  Deutschland 
published  by  Karin  Kramer  Verlag  in  1979,  UArt  Public, 
a  collection  of  essays  and  photos  of  work  in  the  U.S.  and 
the  Eastern  Hemisphere  done  by  Jacques  Damase  and 
Francoise  Chatel  in  1981,  and  Horst  Schmidt-Brummer's 
Wandmalerei  zwischen  Reklamekunst ,  Phantasie  and  Protest  of 
1982.  Volker  Barthelmeh's  Street  Murals  that  also  ap- 
peared in  1982  is  a  handsome  album  of  work  on  both 


sides  of  the  Atlantic. 

Of  great  importance  is  Toward  a  People's  Art  (1976), 
written  by  two  active  muralists,  Eva  Cockcroft  and  John 
Weber,  and  a  professor  of  sociology,  James  Cockcroft. 
Their  book  also  includes  chapters  by  other  muralists 
from  varied  locations  around  the  country.  The  value  of 
the  whole  book  is  its  presentation  of  the  reflections  of 
painters  about  their  experience.  I  have  had  the  good 
fortune  of  having  talked  extensively  with  the  two  artist- 
authors  since  1974.  Occasionally  1  make  reference  to 
their  text,  but  in  most  cases  my  mention  of  their  ideas  is 
based  on  these  conversations.  Apart  from  discussing  art 
that  they  have  not  visited  or  was  not  yet  done  when  they 
wrote,  my  approach  differs  from  theirs  by  analyzing  in 
detail  particular  works  in  terms  of  their  form,  meaning, 
and  style.  I  also  go  into  more  detail  with  regard  to  the 
social  and  historical  context  of  this  art  and  seek  to 
identify  an  aesthetic  theory  implicit  in  it.  In  particular  I 
try  to  carry  forward  the  concept  of  a  "people's  art"  to  the 
contribution  the  murals  make  to  the  development  of  the 
culture,  work,  and  technology  appropriate  to  a  demo- 
cratic society,  for  it  seems  to  me  that  the  murals'  broadest 
significance  is  the  light  they  throw  on  the  reintegration  of 
art,  the  ordinary  occupations,  and  community  life. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


This  book  could  only  have  come  into  being  with  the 
help  of  a  great  many  people.  Most  obviously  there  are  the 
painters  and  their  communities  who  have  created  the 
murals.  I  have  tried  to  talk  with  as  many  of  them  as 
possible  and  have  always  found  them  eager  to  share 
information.  Frequently  they  offered  the  hospitality  of 
their  homes.  Documenters,  arts  management,  and 
community-center  staff  have  also  assisted  me.  Those 
who  have  been  particularly  helpful  include,  in  addition 
to  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  .Monique  Goss,  James  Voshell, 
Bob  Hieronimus,  Don  Kaiser,  Clarence  Wood,  Arnold 
Belkin,  Susan  Caruso-Green,  Alan  Okada,  Tomie  Arai, 
Alfredo  Hernandez,  Kathy  Gupta,  Lucy  Mahler,  Kris- 
tan  Wainwright,  Dana  Chandler,  Gary  Rickson,  Bill 
Walker,  Eugene  Eda,  Caryl  Yasko,  Mark  Rogovin,  Bar- 
bara Russum,  Mario  Castillo,  Astrid  Fuller,  Mario 
Galan,  Don  Mcllvaine,  Mitchell  Caton,  John  Rosenthal, 
Samuel  Leyba,  Jose  and  Malaquias  Montoya,  Esteban 
Villa,  Richard  Favela,  Armando  Cid,  Victor  Ochoa, 
Salvador  Torres,  Guillermo  Aranda,  Judy  Baca,  John 
Outterbridge,  Roderick  Sykes,  Alonzo  Davis,  Charles 
Felix,  Robert  Chavez,  Joe  Gonzalez,  Shifra  Goldman, 
David  Kahn,  Seymore  Rosen,  David  Bradford,  Osha 
Neumann,  O'Brian  Thiele,  Ray  Patlan,  Robert  Sommer, 
Dewey  Grumpier,  Bob  Gayton,  Mike  Rios,  Consuelo 
Mendez,  Patricia  Rodriguez,  Graciela  Carrillo,  Chuy 
Campusano,  Jane  Norling,  Arch  Williams,  Miranda 
Bergman,  Jim  Dong,  Hilaire  Dufresne,  Jim  Buffalow, 
Mike  Nolan,  John  Kreidler,  Arthur  .Monroe,  Peter 
Coyote,  Curtis  and  Royal  Barnes,  Roberto  .Maestas,  Raul 
Salinas,  Joyce  Reyes,  Isaac  Shamsud-Din,  and  Jack 
Eyerly. 

Those  who  gave  special  help  to  my  research  through 
the  West  and  South  in  1980  were  Ernesto  Palomino, 


Armando  Vallejo,  Manuel  Unzueta,  Zarco  Guerrero, 
Gilberto  Guzman,  Linda  Lomahoftewa,  Stan  Steiner, 
Francisca  Herrera,  Fernando  Penaloza,  Mago  Orona, 
Jesse  Trevino,  Anastasio  Torres,  Jr.,  Carlos  Lowry, 
Sister  Tess  Brown,  Leo  Carillo,  Leo  Tanguma,  Carroll 
Simms,  John  Biggers,  Bruce  Brice,  Richard  Thomas, 
E.  Jack  Jordan,  Steven  Seaberg,  Ralph  Waldrop,  Charles 
Davis,  Manuel  Martinez,  and  Pedro  Romero. 

Rupert  Garcia,  who  was  one  of  the  first  to  write  about 
the  origins  of  recent  Raza  murals  and  some  of  whose 
superb  silk  screens  have  served  as  the  basis  of  one,  is 
more  than  anyone  responsible  for  introducing  me  to  the 
idea  of  people's  art.  Rene  Yafiez,  cofounder  of  the 
Galena  de  la  Raza  in  San  Francisco  and  facilitator  of 
many  murals  in  the  city,  has  over  the  years  helped  me 
understand  the  workings  of  a  people's  institution  and  has 
provided  much  practical  assistance. 

Those  abroad  who  have  been  generous  with  their  help 
have  included  Jose  Hernandez  Delgadillo,  Elizabeth 
Catlett  Mora,  Juan  O'Gorman,  and  Pablo  O'Higgins  in 
Mexico,  David  Harding,  Stephen  Lobb,  David  Bin- 
nington,  Desmond  Rochfort,  Brian  Barnes,  Alastair 
Warman,  Graham  Cooper,  and  Dr.  H.  J.  Burns  in  Brit- 
ain, and  Carel  and  Marianne  Vermeer  in  the  Nether- 
lands. 

Much  of  my  sense  of  art  and  certainly  my  continuing 
excitement  about  it  I  owe  to  my  teacher,  Meyer  Scha- 
piro.  To  San  Jose  State  University  and  particularly  Harri- 
son McCreath,  the  Humanities  Department  chairman,  I 
am  grateful  for  the  two  leaves  that  made  possible  the 
researching  and  writing  of  this  book. 

Portions  of  my  manuscript  have  been  read  by  .Mark 
Rogovin,  Victor  Ochoa,  Michael  Schnorr,  Susan  Cer- 
vantes, and  Stephen  Lobb,  each  of  whom  has  provided 


10  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

important  suggestions.  Tim  Drescher,  co-editor  of  what  I  must  also  thank  Thomas  Yoseloff,  for  the  personal 

was  then  the  National  Murals  Newsletter,  has  been  over  the  interest  he  has  taken  in  seeing  my  book  through  publica- 

changing  versions  of  my  book  a  number  of  times  and  has  tion.  And  to  Anne  Hebenstreit,  its  editor,  I  am  very 

offered  invaluable  criticism.  The  Newsletter  has  also  been  grateful  for  the  care  and  respect  with  which  she  treated 

an  important  source  of  information  and  leads.  This  pe-  the  manuscript. 

r'\oA\c3[hec2imt  xht  Community  Muralists' Magazine  ior  the  My  wife,  Ruth,  has  been  closely  involved  with  the 

Spring,  1981,  issue,  and  Co/ww«w>)»  A/«rfl/f  in  the  Fall  of  whole  project  since  it  began  in  1974.  She  has  accom- 

that  year.  It  is  abbreviated  NMN  in  this  book.  panied  me  on  most  of  my  visits  to  muralists  beyond  the 

While  I  am  much  in  the  debt  of  these  muralists  and  Bay  Area  and  helped  gather  information  and  impres- 

writers  about  murals,  I  of  course  must  take  final  respon-  sions.  She  has  typed  innumerable  drafts  of  the  text  and 

sibility  for  what  appears  here.  has  been  its  most  severe  critic.  To  our  children,  Anne, 

The  difficult  task  of  transforming  color  slides  into  Peter,  and  Daniel,  I  am  indebted  for  their  endurance  and 

black-and-white  prints  has  been  accomplished  with  gen-  expectation.  My  mother  and  father  also  have  given  me 

uine  art  by  Gene  Cohn  and  Tak  Kuno.  much  that  is  in  this  book. 


INTRODUCTION 


The  story  is  told  of  a  young  man  who  stood  for  a  long 
time  gazing  at  the  portraits  of  the  leaders  and  artists  of 
Black  people  on  the  Wall  of  Respect  in  Chicago.  When 
asked  what  he  was  doing,  he  replied,  "I'm  getting 
energy."  This  book  is  about  why  I  think  we  all  can. 

A  movement  of  authentic  people's  art  has  sprung  up 
throughout  the  country.  Artists  are  collaborating  with 
local  residents  to  paint  murals  that  assert  the  fundamen- 
tal concerns  of  community  life.  The  movement  de- 
veloped during  the  late  sixties  and  early  seventies  mainly 
in  the  big-city  ghettos  and  barrios  throughout  the  nation 
where  human  creativeness  struggled  against  racism  and 
poverty.  However,  one  of  the  earliest  murals  appeared  in 
a  small  town  amid  farm-worker  camps.  Within  a  few 
years  they  spread  to  churches,  trade-union  halls,  schools, 
and  local  public  agencies,  then  to  White  working-class 
neighborhoods,  prisons,  localities  with  active  counter- 
cultures, and  on  to  college  campuses,  middle-class  streets, 
and  the  suburbs. 

"Break  the  Grip  of  the  Absentee  Landlord,"  urges  a 
three-story  brick  wall  that  shows  a  Black  woman 
screaming  as  she  and  her  flat  go  up  in  flames  while  giant 
slumlords  looming  over  tenements  firmly  clutch  their 
property.  Meanwhile  the  jail-barlike  fingers  of  one  are 
pried  open  by  a  racially  mixed  group  of  tenants  who  have 
organized  to  defend  their  lives.  The  features  of  the  actual 
wall  are  imaginatively  taken  advantage  of  by  the  design: 
the  woman's  hand  claws  the  air  in  the  space  provided  by 
the  real  chimney;  one  landlord's  hand  grips  the  un- 
painted  brick;  and  real  windows  are  made  part  of  a 
painted  building  while  the  ins  and  outs  of  the  actual  wall 
are  treated  as  the  edges  of  imaginary  ones.  The  mural  is  a 
drama  of  walls  and  hands.  Painted  in  1973,  it  is  the  work 
of  Mark  Rogovin,  a  White  artist,  and  local  Black  young 


people  on  the  West  Side  of  Chicago,  a  city  that  claims 
over  three  hundred  murals  completed  since  1967. 

A  few  miles  away  in  an  inner-city  park  in  1974,  a 
Latino  teenage  gang  was  doing  an  unauthorized  painting 
on  the  side  of  a  field  house  that  displayed  a  blue- 
uniformed  figure  offering  drugs  and  a  gun  to  the  young. 
The  painters  were  holding  off  placing  a  star  on  his  chest 
until  everything  else  was  finished  for  fear  that  the  police 
would  have  it  painted  out  before  the  neighborhood  could 
get  a  good  look  at  it.  Everyone  who  had  grown  up  in  that 
barrio  knew  that  it  represented  what  happens  there,  said 
Ray  Patlan,  then  art  director  of  a  nearby  community 
center  whom  the  gang  had  consulted.  But  the  public 
media  were  not  available  for  this  kind  of  indictment,  and 
such  charges  would  never  make  it  to  the  courts  in  a  city 
controlled  by  Mayor  Daley's  political  machine.  The 
mural  was  a  public  statement  and  a  means  of  building 
opposition  in  the  community.  It  was  guerrilla  art.  While 
almost  all  of  the  murals  that  have  been  done  in  the 
current  movement  do  have  the  permission  of  the  owner 
of  the  wall,  they  frequently  challenge  the  social  and 
political  establishment. 

Looking  out  on  a  large  intersection  in  New  York's 
Lower  East  Side,  a  forty-foot  wall  depicts  Chinese- 
American  teenagers  walking  through  their  neighbor- 
hood, gawking  tourists,  a  waiting  hooker,  and  scenes  of 
gambling  and  murder.  "Are  these  the  only  options  open 
to  us?"  the  mural  seems  to  ask.  The  work  was  done  by 
teenagers  guided  by  a  young  artist,  Alan  Okada,  of 
Cityarts  Workshop  in  1973.' 

A  few  blocks  away  a  team  of  mainly  young  women 
was  completing  a  two-story  wall  celebrating  the  work 
and  struggles  of  women  of  all  races  in  America.  The  Wall 
of  Respect  for    Women    displays    among   the   roots    and 


11 


Youth  gang:    Untitled,    1974,   Dvorak  Park,   Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


Local  youth  directed  by  Alan  Okada  (Cityarts  Workshop): 
Chinatown  Today,  1973,  New  York. 


branches  of  a  great  tree  the  roles  women  have  performed 
in  this  country  from  homemaking,  sewing  in  sweatshops, 
seUing  apples  in  the  street,  picketing,  operating  switch- 
boards, and  clerking  to  the  professional  careers,  at  the 
crown  of  the  tree,  that  young  women  were  now  seeking. 
Another  Cityarts  mural,  it  was  done  by  both  young 
women  and  men  under  the  direction  of  Tomie  Arai  in 
1974. 

Further  along  East  Broadway  on  the  side  of  the 
Bialystoker  House  for  elderly  Jewish  people,  you  can  see 
images  of  the  immigration  to  this  country,  the  fight  of  the 
garment  workers  for  the  eight-hour  day,  faces  behind 
Nazi  barbed  wire,  a  scene  of  the  defense  of  Israel,  and  a 
woman  offering  the  blessing  over  the  sabbath  wine  and 
candles.  These  images  emerge  from  behind  a  procession 
of  young  people  and  their  elders  that  is  accompanied  by  a 
small  caption:  "Our  strength  is  our  heritage,  our  heritage 
is  our  life."  This  is  a  1973  work  of  Jewish  teenagers  with 
the  assistance  of  Susan  Caruso-Green  of  Cityarts. 

In  Boston's  Roxbury  the  street-side  walls  of  the  United 
Community  Construction  Workers,  a  Black  union,  were 
brought  to  life  by  murals  in  1973.  Above  the  words 
"Work  to  Unify  African  People"  Nelson  Stevens  painted 
two  monumental  heads  of  workers  who  draw  together  in 
solidarity  and  seem  to  be  looking  into  the  future.  Each 
face  is  made  up  of  patches  of  color  as  if  it  were  animated 
with  ideas  and  energy.  Further  along  the  wall,  above  the 
affirmation  that  "Black  People  Are  Black  Wealth,"  Dana 
Chandler  did  an  image  of  a  worker  with  three  faces 


Introduction  I  1 3 

painted  in  the  colors  of  the  Black  liberation  flag — red, 
black,  and  green.  One  hand  is  a  great  mechanical  shovel 
that  scoops  up  the  slums,  while  the  fingers  of  the  other 
have  become  a  hammer,  drill,  wrench,  saw,  and  chisel, 
as  if  the  worker's  tools  have  become  appendages  of  him, 
rather  than  the  other  way  around.  At  the  side  a  caption 
reads:  "Every  corner  of  this  world  carries  my  imprint — 
The  Black  Worker."  Inside  there  are  more  murals,  in- 
cluding a  jazz  band  painted  at  the  rear  of  a  stage  in  the 
meeting  hall. 

Greater-than-life-sized  portraits  of  Black  heroes  deco- 
rate the  exterior  walls  of  schools  and  recreation  centers  in 
the  ghettos  of  West  Philadelphia  done  by  neighborhood 
kids  with  the  help  of  the  artists  of  the  Philadelphia 
Museum  of  Art's  Department  of  Urban  Outreach. 

In  the  city  of  Washington,  William  Battle  and  Chico 
Hall  painted  in  1972  a  frieze  that  wraps  around  the  two 
street  sides  of  Pride,  Inc.,  a  job-training  center  operated 
by  Black  people.  Along  one  side  in  bold  angular 
silhouettes  are  depicted  the  violence,  drugs,  and  un- 
employment of  ghetto  life,  culminating  in  a  clearly 
marked  "Wall  of  Oppression"  with  the  added  note, 
"Your  Tax  Dollars  at  Work."  Along  the  other  the  caption 
reads,  "The  World  Belongs  to  Those  Who  Prepare  for 
It,"  and  the  silhouettes  show  Black  people  at  study  and  in 
the  professions.  The  idea  is  as  simple  as  that  of  a  morality 
play,  which  is  frequently  the  case  with  murals,  but  it  is 
rendered  with  a  style  and  force  that  are  also  widespread. 

The  walls  embracing  three  sides  of  a  minipark  in  San 


Local  youth  directed  by  Susan  Caruso-Green  (Cityarts): 
Jewish  Ethnic  Mural,  1973,  Bialystoker  House,  Lower 
East  Side,  New  York. 


Dana  Chandler:  The  Black  Worker  (partial  view), 
1973,  United  Community  Construction  Workers  Labor 
Temple,  Roxbury,  Boston. 


Fincher  Jackson,  Alfonso  Mason,  Angela  McGee,  Ber- 
nard Young,  and  young  people,  coordinated  by  Clarence 
Wood  (Department  of  Urban  Outreach,  Philadelphia 
Museum  of  Art):  Untitled,  1973,  Greenway  Recreation 
Center,  Philadelphia. 


Francisco's  Mission  District  celebrate  in  vibrant  colors 
the  traditions  of  the  Latino  community.  On  one  done  in 
1974  by  Mike  Rios,  Tony  Machado,  and  Richard 
Montez,  children  and  their  parents  are  shown  playing 
and  working  among  the  foliagelike  scales  of  the  serpent 
god  of  life  and  culture,  Quetzalcoatl.  Nearby  are  other 
scenes  of  jungle  paradises  and  Latinos  striving  for  better 
lives  in  the  modern  city.  Beneath  these  images  children 
swing  from  the  playground  equipment,  and  their  elders 
relax  on  benches,  occasionally  looking  up  to  take  in  a 
painting.  Down  a  few  streets,  on  the  wall  of  the 
Neighborhood  Legal  Assistance  office,  Rios  with  both 
humor  and  bitterness  depicted  in  1972  IcKal  residents  as 
moles — undergrounders — coming  from  a  factory,  cruis- 
ing the  barrio,  and  hauled  off  to  court  and  Jail.  One  in  a 
beret  and  spectacles  packs  a  portfolio  marked  "Art" 
under  his  arm  and  seems  to  be  smiling  at  the  other 
panels. 

The  walls  of  the  pavilion  on  the  beach  at  Venice, 
California,  that  provides  shelter  for  picnickers  are  cov- 
ered by  paintings  depicting  local  pleasures  along  the 
canals  and  arcades  today  and  decades  ago.  The  work, 
coordinated  by  Judy  Baca,  was  done  in  1973  by  two 
hundred  local  residents — children,  parents,  and  grand- 
parents, some  of  whom  are  artists — who  live  in  this 
community  where  the  counterculture  mixes  amicably 
with  the  straight. 

The  variety  of  these  murals  is  remarkable.  Some  are 
decorative  abstractions,  but  the  greatest  number  have 
social  content — celebrations  of  the  community  and  its 
heritage,  affirmations  that  it  is  working  people  who  have 
built  civilization,  or  efforts  to  speak  out  on  local  issues 


William  Battle  assisted  by  Chico  Hall  and  community 
artists:  Pride  Inc.  (partial  view) ,  1972,  Washington. 


Pride  Inc.  (partial  view). 


that  often  have  national  and  international  implications. 
The  expressive  means  they  employ  extend  from  portraits 
to  an  elaborate  use  of  ethnic  and  historical  motifs.  They 
use  realism  and  surrealism,  comic-strip  design,  and  a 
breadth  of  visionary,  occult,  and  religious  symbols. 
Some  incorporate  graffiti.  The  forms  and  styles  of  pho- 
tography, posters,  advertising,  TV,  avant-garde  paint- 
ing, and  earlier  murals  are  ransacked.  But  the  commu- 
nity painters  have  adapted  these  materials  and  ideas  to 
the  concerns  of  local  residents  and  have  developed 
unique  processes  of  working  together.  The  quality  of  the 
painting  is  sometimes  high  from  the  point  of  view  of 
mainstream  art;  sometimes  it  may  seem  at  first  glance 
awkward.  But  even  when  the  rendering  is  crude,  these 
paintings  exhibit  a  seriousness  of  purpose  and  frequently 
a  power  of  insight  and  imagination  that  is  impressive. 
The  murals  as  a  whole  compel  us  to  reexamine  our 
concepts  of  quality  and  professionalism. 

What  is  of  profound  importance  about  these  murals  is 
that  they  represent  a  fundamental  change  in  the  relation 
of  culture  to  ordinary  people.  Instead  of  having  "fine  art" 


denied  them  by  a  cultivated  elite  or  imposed  on  them  by 
well-meaning  educators,  instead  of  being  swamped  by 
the  public  relations  of  the  establishment  and  the  com- 
mercial art  of  advertisers,  neighborhood  people  are  de- 
veloping a  community-based  culture  that  gives  them  the 
means  to  represent  their  existence  as  they  know  it,  and,  if 
they  so  decide,  to  act  to  change  it.  These  murals  are 
freeing  ordinary  people  from  ways  of  seeing  that  are  not 
their  own  and  helping  them  take  control  of  their  percep- 
tions, which  is  necessary  to  their  taking  charge  of  their 
own  lives. 

This  painting  is  in  fact  the  most  democratic  art 
America  has  produced.  It  has  become  customary  to  refer 
to  it  as  an  art  of,  by,  and  for  the  people.  "The  people"  is  a 
troublesome  term.  To  some  it  may  seem  jingoistic  and 
embarrassingly  naive.  It  clearly  needs  to  be  examined. 
For  the  time  being,  what  is  intended  is  common  people, 
those  who  neither  claim  nor  enjoy  any  special  privilege. 
Also,  what  is  meant  is  these  people,  not  as  isolated 
individuals,  but  in  their  cooperative  activities,  as  they 
identify  with  organizations,  communities,  trade  unions. 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
MCO  Mural,  7972,  Neighborhood  Legal  Assistance 
office,  (Mission  Coalition  Organization),  San  Francisco. 


Two  hundred  local  people  coordinated  by  Judy  Baca: 
Venice  Pavilion  Murals,  1974,  Venice,  California. 
Scene  shows  Equal  Rights  Amendment  workshop  among 
the  murals. 


Introduction  I  1 7 


ethnic  groups,  or  humanity  as  a  whole.  The  murals  speak 
of  people's  concerns  in  their  language.  This  art  is  for 
them — to  serve  them  as  they  deliberately  choose  to  be 
served.  And  it  is^jy  them:  they  actively  participate  in  the 
production  of  each  work,  not  only  by  selecting  the  artist 
and  approving  his  composition,  but  frequently  by  being 
directly  involved  in  developing  the  theme  and  design  and 
then  carrying  them  out  on  a  neighborhood  wall.  The 
artist  either  is  from  the  community  or  knows  its  issues 
well  because  he  or  she  has  worked  with  local  people  over 
an  extended  period.  The  artists  may  be  professionals  or 
amateurs.  The  murals  reveal  the  extraordinary  number 
of  people  with  artistic  skills  or  interests  that  live  in  every 
neighborhood.  There  are  additional  forms  of  involve- 
ment. Local  shop  owners,  organizations,  and  residents 
often  contribute  funds  or  materials,  or  they  may  store 
supplies  overnight.  As  the  scaffolding  goes  up  and  the 
mural  begins  to  take  shape,  passersby  are  drawn  into 
discussions  with  the  artist  and  his  local  assistants.  Some- 
times changes  in  the  design  result;  sometimes  a  spectator 
will  join  them  in  painting.  The  work  site  on  the  street 
becomes  an  ongoing  town  meeting  that  culminates  in  a 
dedication  to  which  the  whole  neighborhood  and  public 
officials  are  invited.  Afterward  it  may  become  a  gather- 
ing place  for  rallies  and  music.  As  the  images  sink  into 
local  consciousness,  they  cannot  but  affect  people's  sense 
of  themselves  and  their  purposes. 

The  ultimate  test  of  community  support  is  whether  the 
murals  are  defaced,  since  most  of  them  are  outdoors. 
Seldom  do  you  find  graffiti  scrawled  on  them,  and 
sometimes  neighborhood  children,  as  if  they  were 
museum  guards,  warn  visitors  not  to  get  too  close. 
Arnold  Belkin  tells  how  a  street  gang  in  the  section  of 
Manhattan's  Hell's  Kitchen  where  he  was  painting  a 
playground  mural  drove  off  a  gang  from  another  street 
when  it  attempted  to  attack  the  work  with  spray  paint. 
The  most  important  achievement  is  that  local  people 
regard  the  paintings  as  theirs. 

The  significance  of  the  murals  lies  first  of  all  in  what 
they  have  done  for  the  people  of  the  neighborhoods, 
union  locals,  schools,  and  social-service  centers  where 
they  have  been  painted.  But  their  importance  lies  also  in 
the  far-reaching  example  they  and  their  communities 
have  set  for  the  rest  of  us.  The  murals  are  in  fact  mirrors 
that  show  us  what  we  are,  what  we  could  be,  and  how. 
They  have  indicted  the  racism,  sexism,  and  economic 
exploitation  of  our  society  and  helped  bring  people  to- 
gether to  overcome  them.  Furthermore,  the  murals  have 
begun  to  reconnect  art,  ordinary  work,  and  community. 

Probably  in  no  other  society  have  the  serious  arts  been 
so  completely  separated  from  the  common  life  and  occu- 
pations as  in  our  own.^  Apart  from  the  film,  visual 
culture  of  any  depth  has  shrunk  to  the  fine  arts,  which 
have  been  relegated  to  the  sidelines  of  society's  produc- 
tion as  luxury  goods  and  educated  entertainment.  On  the 
other  hand,  never  before  have  humans  been  subjected  to 
so  many  visual  messages  as  by  advertising  and  styling. 


but  their  aim  is  seducing  rather  than  empowering  people. 
Still,  the  idea  of  serious  artistry  has  a  hold  on  the  way 
people  think  about  their  own  work.  Terms  associated 
with  art  more  than  any  other  vocation  are  frequently 
used  to  describe  deft  and  meaningful  workmanship  and 
the  satisfactions  of  producing  it.  In  popular  estimation  a 
mechanic  may  be  an  artist  with  engines,  a  social  worker 
an  artist  with  people.  People  say  they  want  to  be  "crea- 
tive" in  their  callings,  and  that  lure  is  often  held  out  by 
employers  seeking  bright  young  recruits.  The  arts  pro- 
vide the  measure  of  performance  because  they  appear  to 
preserve  chances  for  loving  skill,  personal  control  and 
expression,  growth,  and  usefulness  that  people  want  in 
their  work.  But  one  of  the  striking  features  of  the  com- 
ments of  a  broad  range  of  individuals  about  their  occupa- 
tions is  their  applying  these  terms  primarily  to  what  they 
miss.  This  is  abundantly  documented  by  the  interviews 
that  Studs  Terkel  records  in  Working.^  This  is  the  case 
not  only  for  blue-collar  workers  and  office  personnel,  but 
also  for  professionals.  And  this  is  particularly  telling 
because  "professionalism"  is  connected  by  many  with  the 
proficiency  of  art.  Terkel's  informants  bear  witness  to 
what  is  widely  observed,  and  in  response  our  society 
appears  to  have  made  the  fine  arts  its  last  refuge  of 
creativity.  They  attract  workers  seeking  to  employ  their 
intelligence  and  dexterity,  and  draw  audiences  hoping 
for  stimulation  that  their  occupations  do  not  provide.  But 
at  the  same  time  the  current  practice  of  the  fine  arts  has 
narrowed  their  relevance  to  the  common  life.  The  in- 
volvement of  middle-class  people  in  the  arts  and  crafts 
during  the  sixties  and  seventies  bears  witness  to  the 
poverty  of  their  daily  work.  Because  ceramics,  weaving, 
jewelry-making,  and  painting  cannot  meet  basic 
economic  needs  and  must  be  relegated  to  leisure  by  most 
who  enjoy  them,  they  serve  at  best  as  compensations. 
Those  who  pursue  them  professionally  find  themselves 
making  luxury  goods.  In  advanced  industrial  society, 
individual  skill  and  expression  are  beyond  what  ordinary 
people  can  afford. 

The  reintegrating  of  work,  art,  and  community  life  has 
been  called  for  by  many  of  the  new  muralists.  Dana 
Chandler,  one  of  the  painters  of  the  United  Community 
Construction  Workers  mural  in  Roxbury,  has  said  that 
the  model  of  present  Black  American  artists  should  be 
the  African  craftsman,  who  serves  also  as  "repository  of 
medical  and  spiritual  information  for  the  whole  tribe." 
Pointing  to  the  bowls  and  effigies  that  the  craftsman 
makes  that  are  essential  to  the  existence  of  his  commu- 
nity. Chandler  observes: 

He  is  just  as  concerned  with  the  esthetics  of  an  object 
as  any  Western  artist,  but  his  concern  goes  deeper. 
How  do  I  make  this  functional?  How  do  I  show 
reverence  for  the  gods?  Where  in  the  households  does 
this  fit  in?  Who  will  wear  it?  What  will  it  conjure  up?* 

Chandler  in  fact  is  describing  the  way  that  most 


18  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

objects  of  human  fabrication  have  served  practical  and 
spiritual  functions  together  at  least  since  the  time  when 
hunters  painted  deer  and  bison  on  the  walls  of  caves. 

Even  after  the  passing  of  magic,  which  linked  art  and 
technology,  art  continued  to  empower  people  by 
expressing  their  ideas  and  values  in  the  visible  forms  of 
things.  Until  hardly  more  than  a  century  ago,  the  term 
embraced  the  workmanship  of  all  products  and  services. 
This  included  both  the  fine  arts  of  the  privileged  and  the 
popular  and  practical  arts  of  ordinary  mortals.  The  latter 
included  modestly  priced  graphics,  so-called  folk  and 
primitive  painting  and  carving,  along  with  vernacular 
architecture,  utensils,  and  garments,  but  also  the  cathe- 
drals built  and  sculpted  by  common  craftsmen  for  the 
whole  society.  Art  was  the  shaping  and  making  of  a 
human  world.  "Art"  implied  technical  skill,  inventive- 
ness, utility,  and  the  setting  forth  of  its  makers'  and 
community's  meanings.  The  practical  and  the  imagina- 
tive were  in  contact.  Art  provided  the  methods  of 
formulating  perceptions  and  transmitting  ideas  to  guide 
action.  It  offered  the  means  by  which  a  community 
celebrated  its  observances  and  maintained  its  heritage 
and  identity.  Art  was  not  a  special  class  of  objects. 
All  products  and  services  exhibited  a  greater  or  lesser 
artistry  if  they  were  useful  and  their  visible  form  ex- 
pressed values  that  heightened  the  experience  of  their 
making  and  use.  Art  thereby  generated  fresh  energy  for 
living.  Under  these  circumstances  a  worker  could  live 
not  only  by  his  work  but  also  for  it.^  A  Samoan  chieftain 
once  told  Margaret  Mead,  "In  Samoa  we  have  no  art;  we 
try  to  do  everything  well." 

In  various  eras  and  societies,  it  is  true,  the  arts  of  the 
privileged  differed  from  the  popular  and  practical  arts  of 
daily  life.  But  during  the  Renaissance  and  Baroque  eras 
the  appropriation  of  vast  wealth  by  the  new  imperial 
courts  and  emerging  merchant  class  produced  a  self- 
conscious  cultivation  of  luxury  goods  and  leisure  that 
since  then  increasingly  has  separated  the  fine  arts  from 
the  practical.  In  the  centuries  that  followed,  indus- 
trialization and  merchandising  brought  a  vast  array  of 
commodities  of  varying  need  and  meaningfulness  within 
the  reach  first  of  the  middle  and  then  of  the  working 
classes,  both  of  which  were  induced  to  adopt  the  patterns 
of  consumption  of  their  "betters."  There  is  a  direct  line 
from  the  ostentatious  nouveau  riche  objets  d'art  of  the 
High  Renaissance  to  their  more  tawdry  imitations  by  the 
Victorians  and  then  Woolworth's.®  The  designs  of  the 
elitist  fine  arts  were  "applied"  to  the  styling  of  mass- 
produced  consumer  goods,  and  the  visual  arts  in  general 
were  turned  to  manipulating  fashion  and  advertising.  All 
of  this  was  accompanied  by  the  reducing  of  artisan 
craftsmanship  to  a  regimented  division  of  labor.  The 
actual  producers  and  most  purchasers  were  cut  off  from 
the  skilled  use  of  their  hands,  serious  expression,  and 
control  over  production.  As  to  the  fine  arts  themselves 
during  the  early  era  of  industrialism,  they  became  locked 


into  an  academicism  to  reassure  and  entertain  the  new 
employers  and  professionals. 

In  response,  during  the  nineteenth  century  indepen- 
dent spirits,  initially  from  the  artisan  and  middle  classes, 
became  artists  to  preserve  their  control  over  their  voca- 
tions. Some  sought  to  protect  their  creativity  by  detach- 
ing art  from  what  seemed  to  them  irremediable  public 
concerns.  Others  undertook  to  bring  it  back  into  the 
common  life  by  socially  conscious  expression.  These 
divisions  between  the  functions  of  art  and  between  art 
and  ordinary  labor  have  often  been  attributed  to  the  new 
technology.  But  the  causes  lie  rather  with  what  purposes 
and  whose  benefit  the  new  machinery  served  and  hence 
how  it  was  designed  and  managed.  Moreover,  the  new 
class  structure  brought  with  it  social  conformities  from 
which  many  artists  sought  freedom  as  they  did  from 
academicism.  They  fell  in  with  the  other  uprooted  whom 
the  new  society  set  adrift  and  together  created  two 
centuries  of  bohemias  and  countercultures.  This  too  has 
cut  art  off  from  the  common  life. 

While  attempts  to  restore  the  connections  of  art  and 
daily  existence  have  been  a  continuing  aim  of  socially 
conscious  artists  since  the  last  century,  the  efforts  that 
most  completely  involve  common  people  in  the  making 
of  their  own  art,  not  as  recreation  but  as  urgent  work, 
have  now  been  begun  by  those  whom  our  culture  and 
technology  have  served  least — the  residents  of  the  inner 
city  and  farm  labor  camps.  Denied  access  to  the  public 
media  and  arts  to  express  their  view  of  the  world  and 
their  grievances,  they  have  had  to  improvise  their  own 
instruments  of  communication  by  a  unique  collaboration 
of  the  trained  and  untrained.  Their  murals  are  a  technol- 
ogy of  information  and  education,  but  they  are  also  art, 
for  local  people  have  brought  to  them  a  sense  of  culture 
and  its  importance  to  the  common  life  that  has  long  been 
absent  from  the  mainstream. 

Rejecting  the  notion  that  artists  are  a  special  breed, 
most  of  the  community  muralists  think  of  themselves  as 
simply  performing  some  of  the  necessary  work  of  soci- 
ety. .Muralist  Mark  Rogovin  has  observed  that  he  and  his 
colleagues  by  painting  in  the  streets  demonstrate  to 
passersby  that  there  is  nothing  mysterious  about  the 
artist's  skills  and  that  art,  while  certainly  involving  im- 
agination, is  a  form  of  ordered  and  careful  work.  Some  of 
the  professional  muralists,  wanting  to  identify  with  all 
who  labor,  have  revived  an  old  idea  and  speak  of  them- 
selves as  "cultural  workers."^  At  the  same  time  they  are 
showing  that  ordinary  work  can  and  should  be 
"cultural" — that  is,  that  it  should  express  the  values  and 
insights  of  its  producers.  This  has  been  aptly  put  by 
Rene  Yaiiez,  who  coordinated  murals  in  the  Mission 
District  of  San  Francisco  for  years.  He  has  said  that  "if 
something  has  good  craftsmanship  and  a  little  soul,  it 
shows.  I  believe  that  anything  that  is  done  well  and  with 
love,  honesty,  and  skill  is  art."*  The  muralists,  contrary 
to  most  contemporary  artists,  are  showing  that  art  in  the 


present  age  can  serve  the  most  serious  practical  uses. 
They  are  also  demonstrating  that  ordinary  work  can  be 
creative  as  well  as  cooperative  and  that  it  can  respond 
directly  to  the  needs  that  users  identify.  The  muralists 
are  offering  examples  of  the  reintegration  of  art  and  work 
as  a  single  process  by  which  a  community  maintains  its 
Ufe. 

This  union  is  more  fundamental  than  current  estab- 
lishment efforts  to  popularize  the  passive  consumption  of 
the  arts  by  an  expansion  of  museums,  the  mounting  of 
exhibition  spectaculars,  and  the  spread  of  monumental 
downtown  sculpture  and  paintings  in  corporate  offices. 
While  increasing  amounts  of  private  and  public  money 
are  going  to  the  arts  today,  the  greatest  part  is  for 
compensations  for  the  decline  of  creativity  in  daily  work 
and  life,  and  is  thus  perpetuating  it. 

This  institutional  diffusion  of  high  culture  has  been 
part  of  the  many-sided  urban  and  industrial  development 
that  was  undertaken  by  American  society  after  World 
War  II  with  a  view  to  making  it  possible,  so  it  was  said, 
for  everyone  to  share  in  the  growth  of  the  economy  and 
the  amenities  it  was  expected  to  provide.  Under  the 
planning  of  the  major  corporations  and  government, 
aging  urban  areas  were  rooted  out,  industry  was  moved 
to  the  outskirts  and  modernized,  and  cities  became  the 
administrative  and  service  nuclei  of  their  regions  with 
new  tinted-glass  high  rises  and  convention,  entertain- 
ment, and  cultural  facilities  laced  with  multilane  free- 
ways. Meanwhile,  the  promise  that  urban  renewal  would 
bring  opportunities  to  all  Americans  was  not  borne  out. 
Minority  working-class  people  who  had  migrated  to  the 
industrial  cities  of  the  North  during  the  war  and  in  suc- 
ceeding decades  were  screened  out  of  the  scarcer,  more 
skilled  jobs  for  which  they  could  not  get  education,  at  the 
same  time  as  they  were  squeezed  into  ghettos  and 
warehoused  in  public  housing.  It  was  in  large  part  the 
failure  of  the  strategies  of  centralized,  paternalist  de- 
velopment to  solve  the  problems  of  poverty  and 
racism — in  fact,  its  exacerbating  of  them^ — that  provoked 
the  urban  unrest  of  the  sixties  and  seventies. 

Out  of  this  crisis  emerged  an  alternative  approach  to 
development,  one  that  the  deprived  invented  themselves. 
It  often  began  with  protest  demonstrations — an  elemen- 
tary union  of  art,  work,  and  community.  Local  people 
soon  extended  this  initiative  to  providing  directly  for 
their  needs.  Having  begun  by  depending  on  their  many 
feet,  they  turned  to  their  hands,  their  ingenuity,  and  the 
culture  that  united  them.  In  contrast  to  the  top-down 
development  methods  of  the  establishment,  theirs  were 
community-based,  counting  on  the  cooperation  of  local 
residents.  Among  their  first  necessities  was  the  develop- 
ment of  their  own  communications  media.  They  went  on 
to  create  educational,  health,  and  social  services  as  well  as 
labor  unions.  They  rehabilitated  their  housing  by  their 
own  skills  and  "sweat  equity."  These  efforts  at  coopera- 
tive self-help  were  seen  by  some  as  a  "cultural  revolu- 


Introduction  I  19 

tion,"  not  only  becau.se  people  were  organizing  around  a 
common  heritage,  but  also  because  the  community  effort 
gave  them  a  chance  to  begin  doing  personally  and  socially 
creative  work.**  These  new  undertakings,  including  the 
murals,  can  be  regarded  as  forms  of  "appropriate 
technology,"  a  term  first  used  with  reference  to  the 
development  methods  that  people  in  the  recently  decol- 
onized nations  adopted  to  meet  their  needs  in  a  manner 
that  permitted  their  balanced  growth.  Rather  than  invit- 
ing massive  foreign  investment  and  capital-intensive 
technology  in  order  to  catch  up,  which  often  had  cata- 
strophic effects  on  the  majority,  they  sought  means  to 
their  development  that  they  could  control  and  that  re- 
sponded to  their  cultural  and  social  as  well  as  their 
economic  requirements.  Third  World  people  abroad  and 
those  of  the  inner  city  and  farm  labor  camps  in  this 
country  have  struggled  against  similar  economic  forces 
and  evolved  comparable  methods  of  grass-roots  organiz- 
ing and  labor-intensive  services  that  cultivate  skills  and 
creativity.  Because  people  were  personally  involved  in 
carrying  out  their  own  development,  they  sought  to 
respond  to  their  complex  needs  in  integrated  ways  and 
invented  technologies  like  the  murals,  which  reunited 
work,  art,  and  community.  Hence,  the  murals  and  par- 
ticularly the  process  of  their  production  are  important  as 
an  example  of  a  style  of  development  and  ordinary  w  ork 
that  is  appropriate  to  all  human  beings. 

Although  the  muralists  and  their  communities  have 
sought  to  build  local  self-reliance  as  in  most  forms  of 
appropriate  technology,  securing  funds  has  been  prob- 
lematic. They  have  often  succeeded  in  raising  money 
locally,  but  this  has  seldom  been  enough.  For  it  has  been 
not  only  unemployment  and  neglect  but  also  the  drain  on 
the  resources  and  wealth  of  these  communities  by  the 
outside  economy  that  have  impoverished  them.  The 
experience  of  the  muralists  in  seeking  public  and  corpo- 
rate funding  throws  light  on  the  larger  issues  of  local 
self-determination. 

The  mural  movement  differs  from  previous  modern 
styles,  which  have  usually  been  short-lived,  in  that  it  is 
bound  up  with  the  converging  of  profound  social 
forces — the  yearning  of  artists  for  roots,  of  working 
people  for  means  of  expression,  of  communities  for  con- 
trol over  their  own  existence.  Professional  artists  are 
turning  from  private  careers  in  the  art  market  to  the 
community  and  are  rediscovering  that  art  offers  the 
fullest  chances  for  creativity  when  it  is  most  seriously 
engaged  in  common  life.  The  survival  and  success  of  the 
mural  movement  in  fact  depends  on  the  revival  of  local 
life  and  the  movement  for  genuine,  not  token,  commu- 
nity self-determination.  The  struggle  is  against  the  aliena- 
tion of  personal  careerism,  against  the  reduction  of 
culture  to  commodities  and  manipulation,  against  work 
without  imagination  and  art  without  practical  utility;  it  is 
against  the  domination  of  the  cultural  and  social  dimen- 
sions of  life  by  the  privileged. 


20  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

The  murals  represent  an  important  achievement  in 
building  a  democratic  culture  and  technology.  Success 
for  them  and  for  the  other  efforts  at  humane  modes  of 
production  and  life  is  at  best  far  off.  The  forces  ranged 
against  them  are  immense.  But  the  murals  arc  at  the 
cutting  edge,  and  the  energy  for  a  people's  art  grows  as  it 
comes  to  be  understood. 

NOTES 

1 .  The  caption  over  the  painting  is  an  advertisement  for  the 
owner  of  the  building,  "The  New  Sunlight  Public  Company." 

2.  John  Dewey,  commenting  on  American  society  in  the 
thirties,  makes  a  similar  observation  about  the  need  to  restore 
continuity  between  everyday  life  and  the  arts.  Art  as  Experience 
(New  York:  Capricorn  Books/ Putnam's,  1958),  p.  3  ff. 

3.  Studs  Terkei,  Working  (New  York:  Avon,  1972). 

4.  Quoted  by  Elsa  Honig  Pine  in  The  Afro-American  Artist 
(New  York:  Holt,  Rinehart  and  Winston,  1973),  p.  204,  from 
catalog  for  "Three  Graphic  Artists,"  Los  Angeles  County 
.Museum  of  Art,  January- .March,  1 97 1 . 

5.  Cf.  Lewis  Mumford,  Art  and  Technics  (New  York:  Col- 
umbia, 1952),  p.  62. 

6.  This  could  be  clearly  seen  in  the  "Splendor  of  Dresden" 
exhibit  that  traveled  the  museum  circuit  in  1978  and  '79.  Cf. 


Lewis  .Mumford,  Technics  and  Civilization  (New  York:  Har- 
binger, 1963),  pp.  96-106. 

7 .  The  term  cultural  worker  was  widely  used  by  the  socially 
conscious  artists  of  the  1930s.  Cf.  David  Shapiro:  Social 
Realism:  Art  as  a  Weapon  (New  York:  Ungar,  1973),  p.  23. 

8.  Quoted  by  Deborah  Rudo  and  Scott  Riklin,  "Galeria 
Suffers  $  Woes,"  Arts  Biweekly  (San  Francisco),  July  15,  1977, 
p.  6. 

9.  The  term  cultural  revolution  dates  from  at  least  the  1930s, 
when,  for  instance,  Holger  Cahill,  director  of  the  Federal  Art 
Project,  and  poet  Archibald  MacLcish  used  it  with  reference 
to  the  success  of  the  FAP  in  bringing  American  artists  and 
audiences  "face  to  face."  Quoted  in  Art  for  the  Millions,  ed. 
Francis  V.  O'Connor  (Greenwich:  New  York  Graphic  Soci- 
ety, 1973),  p.  39.  The  term  was  widely  used  again  during  the 
sixties  by  .Malcolm  X  and  supporters  of  ethnic  nationalism, 
which  will  be  discussed  later. 

It  was  also  adopted  in  the  seventies  for  a  different  but  related 
usage  by  writers  on  appropriate  technology:  cf.  Nicholas 
Jequier,  Appropriate  Technology:  Problems  and  Promises  (Stanford, 
Calif.:  Volunteers  in  Asia,  1977),  p.  14.  For  other  material  on 
appropriate  technology,  cf.  Ken  Darrow  and  Rick  Pam,  Ap- 
propriate Technology  Sourcebook  (Stanford,  Calif.:  Volunteers  in 
Asia,  1976),  and  E.  F.  Schumacher,  Small  Is  Beautiful  (New 
York:  Perennial  Library,  1975),  pp.  174-205. 


PART  I 
HISTORY 


Ben  Shahn:  The  Passion  of  Sacco  and  Vanzetti, 
tempera  design,  1932  (mosaic  mural,  Syracuse  Univer- 
sity, 1967).  (Photo  Kennedy  Galleries) 


PREHISTORY 


CONFLICT  IN  LIFE  AND  THE  ARTS 

The  situation  of  art  in  the  United  States  that  the  first 
makers  of  people's  murals  confronted  in  1967  was  rent  by 
conflict  that  was  social  as  well  as  cultural.  These  divi- 
sions were  reflected  by  the  different  kinds  of  murals  that 
were  already  being  produced.  If  "murals"  are  understood 
in  the  broad  sense  as  any  form  of  large-scale  articulate 
wall  painting,  mounted  in  public  places,  indoors  or  out, 
for  viewing  by  large  numbers  of  people  at  one  time,  then 
there  were  a  wide  variety  to  be  seen,  and  they  exhibited 
the  same  differences  to  be  found  in  the  whole  field  of  the 
visual  arts. 

Social  Murals  during  the  Quarter  Century  before  the 
New  Movement 

The  New  Deal  art  programs  that  supported  socially 
conscious  murals  through  the  Depression  came  to  an  end 
along  with  unemployment  lines  during  World  War  II. 
Some  muralists  like  Ben  Shahn  found  positions  doing 
posters  and  other  art  connected  with  the  defense  effort. 
The  last  important  mural  of  the  federal  programs  was 
Anton  Refregier's  sequence  of  twenty-nine  panels  on 
the  history  of  California  in  the  Rincon  Annex  Post  Office 
in  San  Francisco,  which  was  commissioned  before  the 
war  but  could  nqt  be  executed  until  afterward  and  then 
was  almost  destroyed  upon  its  completion  in  1948  be- 
cause it  championed  the  labor  movement.  Right-wing 
groups  and  congressmen  had  attempted  to  surpress  de- 
pictions of  working  people's  history  during  the  thirties, 
and  a  new  wave  of  cultural  repression  set  in  with  the 


Cold  War.  From  then  until  1968,  government  patronage 
of  murals  that  depicted  the  struggles  of  labor  and 
minorities  or  opposition  to  the  arms  race  was  unthink- 
able. Indeed,  any  depiction  of  these  themes  in  public 
places  was  almost  impossible. 

Many  artists  who  had  done  social  murals  during  the 
thirties  or  worked  in  New  Deal  art  programs  became 
disillusioned  by  the  labyrinth  of  politics  and  turned  to 
intensely  personal  creation.  Among  these  Jackson  Pol- 
lock, Arshile  Gorky,  Adolph  Gottlieb,  Philip  Guston, 
and  Willem  de  Kooning  under  the  rubric  of  Abstract 
Expressionism  produced  private  calligraphy  and  symbols 
often  on  a  scale  comparable  to  the  earlier  mural  art. 
During  the  fifties  Pop  artists  inflated  comic  strips  and 
product  labels  to  monumental  size  to  tease  the  consumer 
culture,  and  by  the  mid-sixties  a  few  members  of  the 
avant-garde  were  beginning  to  do  mural-scale  social 
commentary.  Robert  Rauschenberg  sandwiched  media 
images  of  urban  violence,  space-walkers,  and  John  Ken- 
nedy among  Rubens  nudes.  There  was  also  Larry  Riv- 
ers's  enormous  1965  assemblage.  History  of  the  Russian 
Revolution:  From  Marx  to  Mayakovsky.  But  all  of  this  was 
museum  art,  designed  for  a  select  audience  of  intellectu- 
als and  the  college-educated. 

During  the  postwar  years  a  few  older  artists  like  Shahn 
who  had  done  murals  during  the  thirties  and  were  still 
committed  to  social  art  had  to  work  mostly  on  a  smaller 
scale,  either  in  easel  art  or  in  forms  that  could  reach  a 
wider  public,  such  as  posters  and  book  illustration. 
Nevertheless,  Shahn  did  find  patrons  prepared  to  com- 
mission public  walls,  mainly  colleges  and  Jewish  congre- 
gations, and  in  these  he  maintained  his  humanistic  and 


23 


24  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

sometimes  political  voice.  Harvard  University  provided 
him  with  a  residency  and  a  series  of  lectures  in  1956 
during  which  he  spoke  out  on  the  necessity  of  social 
dissent  in  art  and  its  function  of  creating  community. 
Shahn's  concern  for  racial  justice  appeared  in  a  mosaic 
depicting  the  blow  ing  of  the  New  Year  ram's  horn  above 
faces  of  all  colors,  a  work  completed  in  1959  at  Congre- 
gation Oheb  Shalom  in  Nashville.  Another  of  his 
mosaics,  executed  in  1962  at  LeMoyne  College,  a  Black 
school  in  Memphis,  shows  a  man,  part  Black,  part 
White,  transmitting  his  vision  of  the  cosmos  into  art  and 
science.  A  few  synagogues  in  the  North  offered  addi- 
tional patronage,  and  a  final  large  mosaic  at  Peabody 
College  in  Nashville  w  as  completed  just  after  his  death  in 
1969.  But  his  most  socially  outspoken  mural  since  the 
New  Deal  w  as  The  Passion  ofSacco  and  Vanzetti,  mounted 
at  Syracuse  University  in  1967.  It  was  a  rendering  of  a 
1932  gouache  design  that  had  caused  considerable  con- 
troversy when  it  was  exhibited  at  the  .Museum  of  .Modern 
Art.  Although  its  execution  in  mosaic  thirty-five  years 
later  occurred  at  the  same  time  as  the  beginning  of  the 
community-based  mural  movement,  their  connection 
was  indirect.  It  was  not  to  the  newly  dedicated  Syracuse 
work  but  to  the  social  murals  done  during  the  thirties, 
especially  Shahn's,  that  some  of  the  new  muralists  looked 
for  validation  of  their  aims. 

But  there  was  a  more  direct  bridge  between  the  social 
murals  of  the  New  Deal  era  and  the  people's  art  that 
began  in  the  late  sixties.  It  had  its  origins  among  Black 
artists  and  especially  those  who  found  support  in  the 
colleges  of  the  South.  Pride  in  their  African  heritage  first 
appeared  in  the  art  of  the  Negro  Renaissance  that  began 
in  Harlem  in  the  twenties.  Aaron  Douglas's  1934  murals 
at  Fisk  University  in  Nashville  and  at  the  Countee  CuUen 
Branch  of  the  New  York  Public  Library  combined  the 
angular  silhouettes  of  African  sculpture  and  an  Art  Deco 
suaveness.  Charles  Alston  did  two  large  panels  titled 
Magic  and  Medicine  at  the  Harlem  Hospital  under  the 
Federal  Art  Project.  At  Talladega  College  in  Alabama, 
then  an  all-Black  institution.  Hale  Woodruff  in  1939  told 
the  story  of  the  Amistad  mutiny  and  the  founding  of  the 
college  by  the  descendants  of  the  abolitionists  who  took 
up  the  legal  defense  of  the  ship's  slaves.  While  Woodruff 
utilized  the  styles  of  the  .Mexican  muralists  and  Thomas 
Hart  Benton  here,  in  1952  at  Atlanta  University,  also  a 
Black  school  then,  he  utilized  African  imagery  for  a 
mural  sequence  in  the  library.  Woodruff  and  Alston  had 
already,  in  1949,  done  a  pair  of  murals  on  Black  history 
in  California  for  a  Los  Angeles  life  insurance  firm. 

But  the  most  prolific  seedbed  of  murals  of  Black 
consciousness  was  Hampton  Institute.  There  Viktor 
Lowenfeld  came  in  1940.  He  was  a  Viennese  Jew  who 
had  been  trained  as  an  artist  and  became  interested  in  art 
as  a  means  of  working  with  the  handicapjjed,  which  led 
him  to  psychology  and  study  with  Freud.  Escaping 
Hitler,  he  came  to  England  with  the  help  of  Herbert 
Read,  one  of  the  chief  proponents  of  a  democratic  cul- 


ture. After  teaching  a  year  at  Harvard,  he  decided  to 
work  with  Black  students  and  joined  the  faculty  at 
Hampton  to  teach  psychology.  When  he  found  that  no 
art  was  taught  there,  he  offered  a  course  against  the 
advice  of  the  administration,  which  believed  that  no  one 
would  be  interested.  Of  the  school's  800  students,  750 
tried  to  enroll.  The  course  continued  to  be  immensely 
popular  because  Lowenfeld  presented  art  as  a  means  of 
self-awareness  through  consciousness  of  one's  own 
people  and  their  roots.  John  Biggers,  who  was  to  carry  on 
Lowenfeld's  teaching,  says  that  there  already  was  a  Black 
awareness  that  he  and  his  fellow  students  brought  to 
Lowenfeld's  classes,  but  that  it  needed  drawing  out. 
Lowenfeld  was  an  admirer  of  the  way  the  Mexican 
muralists  were  achieving  this  and  encouraged  his  stu- 
dents to  do  collectively  painted  murals.  Another  student, 
Carroll  Simms,  who  was  to  go  on  to  teach  sculpture  and 
ceramics  and  who  has  done  a  few  murals,  says  of  Low- 
enfeld that  he  taught  art  as  "something  to  live  by,  the 
means  toward  a  social  and  ethical  consciousness."  Into 
this  atmosphere  Charles  White  came  in  1943,  invited  to 
do  what  became  his  best-known  mural.  The  Contribution 
of  the  Negro  to  American  Democracy.  Among  the  students 
who  did  walls  at  Hampton  was  Samella  Lewis,  who  later 
painted  murals  with  William  Walker  at  the  Columbus 
(Ohio)  Gallery  School  of  Arts  in  1947  and  1948.  Lewis 
was  to  go  on  to  a  career  as  both  a  painter  and  a  scholar  of 
Black  art,  while  Walker  was  to  coordinate  the  first  widely 
recognized  mural  of  the  new  community-based  move- 
ment in  1967,  which  differed  from  its  predecessors  in 
being  done  outdoors  in  the  ghetto. 

In  1949  John  Biggers  became  chairman  of  the  Art 
Department  at  Texas  State  University  for  Negroes  (later 
Texas  Southern  University)  and  transmitted  Lowenfeld's 
approach  to  his  students  in  Houston.  There  all  were 
required  to  do  a  mural  in  the  corridors  of  a  classroom 
building  that  also  housed  the  university's  administration. 
These  murals,  therefore,  were  not  mere  exercises;  they 
were  public  art  that  had  to  have  some  impact  on  the 
hundreds  of  students  and  staff  that  daily  passed  by  them. 
In  thirty  years,  three  floors  of  the  large  structure  were 
nearly  filled  with  this  art.  Some  seventy  murals  could  be 
seen  there  in  1980.  Works  that  were  regarded  by  the  art 
faculty  to  be  of  less  abiding  interest  were  painted  over  by 
new  ones.  The  quantity  and  force  of  the  works  can  only 
be  compared  to  those  in  the  auditorium  and  along  three 
tiers  of  the  patio  of  the  National  Preparatory  School  in 
Mexico  City  where  Rivera,  Orozco,  Siqueiros,  and  the 
others  who  created  the  Mexican  mural  movement  began 
in  1922.  All  the  Houston  murals  express  some  seriously 
perceived  version  of  the  Black  experience.  Biggers  sees  a 
development  from  early  concerns  about  social  justice 
through  militancy  and  a  growing  appreciation  of  the 
African  heritage  to  what  he  regards  as  a  subtlety  and 
maturity  that  combine  lyricism  with  activism.  A  number 
of  students  went  on  to  do  murals  in  the  community, 
mostly  in   Houston,   and   in    1972,   as  the  school  was 


Abraham  Washington:  "Cast  Down  Your  Buckets 
Where  You  Are" — Booker  T.  Washington,  1952,  Han- 
nah Hall,  Texas  Southern  University,  Houston. 


Leo  Tanguma  and  barrio  young  people:  The  Rebirth  of 
Our  NationaHty  (partial  view),  1972,  Houston. 


John  Biggers:  Local  872  longshoremen,  1956,  Inter- 
national Longshoremen's  Association  Local  872,  Houston. 


Xifmrnur. 


L^il  nf^ 

'^Zv  T,  jis- 

i^f^^ 

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26  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

becoming  integrated,  one  of  them,  Leo  Tanguma,  a 
Chicano,  was  allowed  to  satisfy  the  degree  requirement 
with  a  260-foot  work,  The  Rebirth  of  Our  Nationality, 
which  he  painted  with  the  assistance  of  150  barrio  young 
people  on  the  side  of  a  factory.  Biggers  himself  has 
painted  murals  at  the  university  throughout  his  tenure. 
As  early  as  1953  he  did  The  Contribution  of  Negro  Women  to 
American  Life  and  Education  at  a  Houston  YVVCA  and 
three  years  later  a  work  depicting  longshoremen  behind 
the  platform  of  their  local's  hall.  In  succeeding  years  he 
painted  murals  for  a  home  for  aged  Black  people,  a 
library,  and  other  public  places.  In  1980  he  and  Tan- 
guma were  developing  a  program  in  which  TSU  students 
would  be  able  to  do  murals  as  part  of  the  curriculum  in 
public  housing  projects. 

Thus,  during  the  quarter  century  that  preceded  the 
birth  of  the  community  mural  movement,  government 
was  no  longer  commissioning  public  art  that  expressed 
the  social  discontents  and  aspirations  of  ordinary  people; 
self-appointed  defenders  of  the  public  safety,  sometimes 
officials,  tried  to  suppress  such  art;  and  the  art  establish- 
ment dismissed  it  as  unsophisticated.  But  a  few  colleges, 
especially  Black  institutions,  were  providing  almost  the 
only  patronage  for  it.  Some  of  the  artists  who  were  to 
offer  leadership  for  community  murals  received  training 
in  these  schools.  How  many  is  not  yet  clear;  and  this  is  a 
subject  that  will  require  research.  At  the  very  least,  their 
work  and  the  example  of  the  murals  of  the  Negro  Renais- 
sance and  New  Deal  provided  inspiration.  Also  during 
the  sixties  artists  who  were  to  play  important  roles  in  the 
new  movement,  Mark  Rogovin,  Manuel  Martinez,  Ray 
Patlan,  and  Arnold  Belkin,  were  gaining  experience  in 
Mexico,  as  we  shall  see  later. 

Billboards 

Taking  as  "murals"  all  large-scale  images  on  public 
walls,  our  survey  must  include  billboards  as  the  domi- 
nant category  in  the  late  sixties,  when  community  artists 
were  about  to  invent  a  new  form.  Most  billboards  were 
commercial,  but  periodically  they  were  devoted  to  selling 
political  candidates.  These  were  usually  enormous 
works,  and  by  their  sheer  number  they  engulfed  the 
visible  environment  with  their  irrepressible  messages 
whether  in  the  city  or  countryside.  Along  with  ads  in 
newspapers,  magazines,  and  TV,  billboards  contributed 
to  the  heaviest  barrage  of  art  and  its  messages  that  human 
beings  had  ever  been  subjected  to.  With  their  single 
message  of  "Buy,"  these  media  taken  together  were 
instrumental  in  maintaining  a  society  that  found  more  of 
its  satisfactions  in  consuming  than  in  producing  and  kept 
the  two  sharply  apart.  What  the  billboards  offered  was 
an  impersonal  corporate  promise  of  new  taste  thrills, 
"getting  away,"  sex  appeal,  health,  wealth,  success,  and 
the  envy  of  your  friends  as  a  result  of  purchasing  prod- 
ucts of  uncertain  substantiality  that  you  often  did  not 
know  you  needed  before.  This  became  so  widely  ac- 


knowledged during  the  sixties  that  campaigns  were  led 
with  some  success  by  the  environmentally  minded  and 
were  joined  by  a  president's  wife.  Lady  Bird  Johnson,  to 
relieve  the  visual  pollution. 

Popular  Shop  Murals 

Less  common,  and  bearing  a  close  connection  to  the 
community  murals  that  were  to  appear,  was  another 
form  of  wall  painting  that  also  made  an  invitation  to 
customers  but  was  much  more  than  that.  Sometimes 
these  were  unframed  views  like  the  one  with  which 
Alfredo  Matamores  filled  an  outside  wall  of  the  Casa 
Carnitas  Restaurant  in  Los  Angeles  in  1967.  Although 
the  perspective  was  a  little  uncertain,  it  gave  the  illusion 
of  a  Mexican  village  street,  with  a  restaurant  of  the  same 
name  at  the  side,  paint  peeling  from  its  wall,  a  young 
woman  at  the  door,  and  a  volcano  in  the  distance.  A  great 
number  of  these  murals  were  to  be  found  in  the  barrios  of 
East  Los  Angeles,  where  two  hundred  thousand 
Chicanes  lived.  The  Tico  Tico  Restaurant  at  the  corner 
of  Brooklyn  and  Soto  showed  on  its  outside  a  scene  of 
campesino  street  musicians  performing  against  a  wall  with 
painted  cracks  and  red  tile  roofing.  There  was  also  the 
tiny  Chiquita  Flower  Shop  on  Whittier  Boulevard  with 
painted  blossoms  and  leaves  as  big  as  its  door.  These 
paintings  had  authenticity  because  they  were  part  of  the 
life  of  the  local  barrio  and  were  a  product  of  its  traditions. 
For  more  than  a  century  such  murals  were  a  common 
embellishment  of  all  sorts  of  shops  in  Mexico.  The  best 
known,  and  those  that  have  given  their  name  to  this 
whole  body  of  art,  were  in  the  old  pulquerias,  saloons 
were  pulque — unrefined  tequila — was  consumed.  Diego 
Rivera  has  observed,  "There  was  not  a  single  tavern, 
eating  house,  dairy,  wine  shop,  public  bath,  hotel, 
circus  or  chapel  to  any  saint  whatsoever,  which  had  not 
been  covered  with  paintings  by  painters  from  the 
people.  .  .  ."^  This  popular  painting  by  artisans  and 
self-taught  artists  had  roots  in  the  art  of  pre-Cortez  indios, 
for  Mexicans  have  always  sought  to  communicate  with 
each  other,  the  gods,  or  God  by  filling  their  walls  with 
imagery.^  Pulqueria  art  was  brought  across  the  border 
and  survived  in  restaurants  and  shops  wherever  barrios 
were  settled  in  this  country.  These  murals  recalled  an 
ancient  heritage  and  personal  memories  of  the  homeland 
just  because  they  relied  on  reworked  imagery.  They 
communicated  a  view  of  human  relations  and  customary 
activities  that  the  Anglo  melting  plot  threatened  to  dis- 
solve. As  later  Chicano  muralists  would  say  of  their 
painting, /»«/^«erw  art  perpetuated  ethnic  identity. 

In  the  seventies  Chicano  cafes  and  food  shops  were  to 
carry  militant  symbols  like  the  angry  faces,  Calaveras 
(skulls),  gallows,  and  Mexican  flag  on  the  outside  of  the 
Family  Place  opposite  Lincoln  High  School  in  "East 
Los."  And  some  of  the  most  refined  of  the  new  murals 
were  to  be  explicit  extensions  of  the  popular  art  of 
Mexican  and  Chicano  cafes.  For  example,  Para  el  Mercado 


PCST/IJPiINT 


Alfredo  Matamoros:  Casa  Camitas  Restaurant,  1967, 
repainted  1974,  Los  Angeles. 


Tico  Tico  Restaurant  (photographed  in  1974),  East  Los 
Angeles. 


,car'nitas.manscob| 

Mexico  C 


28  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Chiquita  I'loivers   (photographed  in   1974),    Last   Los 
Angeles. 


Family  Place  (photographed  in  1974),  East  Los  Angeles. 


(To  the  Market),  a  vibrant  panorama  of  fishing,  food 
gathering,  and  marketing  in  blazing  colors,  was  painted 
alongside  Paco  Taco's  drive-in  in  San  Francisco's  Mission 
District  by  Consuelo  Mendez  and  Graciela  Cerrillo 
members  of  Los  Mujeres  Muralistas  (The  Women 
Muralists)  in  1974.  Such  community  murals  have  revived 
the  traditional  pulqueria  art,  and  in  some,  such  as  Para  el 
Mercado,  it  is  only  the  up-to-date  style  that  is  different.  In 
others  new  themes  are  dealt  with,  but  both  the  new  and 
the  old  shop  art  are  rooted  in  the  intimate  life  of  the 
community.^ 

Black  people  also  have  embellished  the  street  fronts  of 
their  grocery  stores  and  fish  markets,  their  sandwich 
shops  and  barbecues,  with  images  of  their  life.  This  was 
usually  done  by  local  sign  painters  and  amateurs  in  both 
the  South  and  the  North  and  probably,  went  back  a 
century  to  the  time  when  Blacks  began  owning  their  own 
establishments.  A  recent  example  in  Oakland  is  a  simple 
but  moving  scene  of  a  cotton  field  and  woman  picker 
painted  on  the  fence  alongside  the  Universal  Pit.  Nearby 
the  storefront  of  a  discount  grocery  selling  damaged 
goods  displays  sketches  of  local  people,  including  West 
Indians,  and  their  food.  In  the  early  seventies  in  Boston's 
Roxbury  a  sign  with  a  huge  cone  of  black  frozen  custard 
showed  the  impact  of  the  new  ethnic  awareness  of  local 
people.  And  professional  muralists  later  recovered  this 
shop-art  in  Watts.  There  Pappy's  Bar-B-Q  had  been  a 
neighborhood  gathering  spot  for  years.  The  hamburger 
was  real  hamburger,  says  John  Outterbridge,  director  of 
the  nearby  Watts  Towers  Art  Center,  and  when  the 
price  rose  to  eighty-five  cents  elsewhere,  Pappy  kept  his 
at  thirty-five.  The  coffee  was  warmed  up  when  regulars 
were  seen  approaching,  and  because  the  shop  could  seat 
only  four  at  a  time,  people  stood  in  line.  Pappy  was  a 
"giver,"  Outterbridge  says.  He  was  also  preacher  at  the 
white  frame  church  in  the  same  block.  When  he  died,  the 
shop  closed  briefly,  but  then  members  of  the  congrega- 
tion reopened  it.  In  the  meantime  kids  took  to  throwing 
stones  at  the  walls,  so  the  people  at  the  Art  Center  were 
asked  to  do  something  about  it.  They  decided  to  envelop 
it  in  murals,  and  in  1979  Richard  Wyatt,  Jr.,  did  a  big 
frieze  across  the  front,  and  Elliot  Pinkney  filled  the  side 
with  over-life-size  faces  of  folks  enjoying  Pappy's  fare. 
The  images  recall  the  whole  tradition  of  black  shop  art 
and  the  advertisements  of  minstrel  shows.  These  paint- 
ings were  more  than  commercial  signs;  they  were  a 
celebration  of  Pappy,  a  community  institution,  and  a 
way  of  life. 

Related  examples  of  popular  art  were  to  be  found 
during  the  sixties  inside  and  outside  of  Italian  and 
Spanish  restaurants  with  their  scenes  of  Vesuvius  and 
the  bullring.  When  these  establishments  were  not  em- 
bedded in  their  ethnic  community,  the  art  tended  to  be 
commercially  picturesque  and  quaint,  not  part  of  an 
ongoing  way  of  life.  One  example  is  the  Gourmet  Wine 
Cellar  and  Sidewalk  Cafe  in  Westwood  Village,  the 
well-to-do  neighborhood  of  UCLA.  Its  three  stories  were 


Prehistory  I  29 

painted  to  give  the  illusion  of  an  old  bodega  with  a  huge 
wine  press,  guests  seated  on  a  balcony,  and  walls  over- 
grown with  ivy.  This  was  rendered  in  a  professional 
manner,  and  it  reminds  you  that  Los  Angeles  has  niore 
painters  of  stage  sets  than  any  other  city  in  the  world. 

Early  Puerto  Rican  Street  Murals 

The  shop  murals  of  Chicanos,  Blacks,  and  other  ethnic 
groups  have  affinities  with  the  street  art  of  Puerto  Ricans, 
who  in  this  country  painted  the  outside  of  their  tene- 
ments rather  than  stores  with  images  of  their  homeland 
and  way  of  life.  Alfredo  Hernandez,  a  veteran  commu- 
nity muralist  of  Cityarts  Workshop,  recalls  that  in  the 
Puerto  Rico  of  the  fifties  wall  paintings  were  widespread, 
some  with  indio  motifs.  He  also  remembers  murals  dur- 
ing that  decade  in  the  areas  of  New  York  where  Puer- 
toriquenos  had  been  settling  since  their  major  migration 
had  begun  in  the  early  forties.  Some  of  these  early 
paintings  and  others  like  them  were  to  be  seen  in  the 
early  seventies  on  the  Lower  East  Side  where  scenes  of 
conga  drummers  and  festivities  were  painted  on  brick 
walls  for  street  fairs.  Up  in  Spanish  Harlem  the  store- 
front windows  of  the  Loiza  Aldea  Social  Club  were 
boarded  over  and  painted  with  another  conga  player 
beneath  a  palm  tree.  Next  door  the  sooty  Renaissance- 
style  portal  of  an  apartment  house  was  freshly  decorated 
with  pastel  floral  patterns,  and  the  wall  beyond  displayed 
a  large,  brightly  colored  map  of  Puerto  Rico  and  a  gold 
carp  as  large  as  the  island.  To  this  was  added  the  symbol 
of  San  Juan  that  recurs  through  these  neighborhoods — 
the  projecting  turret  of  Morro  Castle.  Even  more  com- 
mon on  New  York  brick  were  the  flags  of  Puerto  Rico 
painted  out  of  patriotic  and  nationalist  feelings. 


Academic  Murals 

Besides  the  shop  murals  works  of  a  different  tradition 
of  Mexican  wall  art  were  to  be  seen  in  the  streets  of  East 
Los  Angeles  just  before  and  as  the  new  community 
murals  were  painted.  They  contributed  to  the  general 
atmosphere  of  ethnic  art  that  nourished  early  Chicano 
murals  as  well  as  to  their  actual  imagery  and  style. 
The  Pan-American  Bank  mounted  five  mosaic  panels  exe- 
cuted by  Jose  Reyes  Meza  of  Mexico  in  1966  on  its 
facade.  They  are  typical  of  the  decline  that  murals  there 
had  fallen  into  during  the  sixties,  having  lost  the  vigor  of 
Rivera,  Orozco,  and  Siqueiros,  and  becoming  facile  and 
heraldic.  The  figures,  handled  in  an  Art  Deco  manner, 
are  modeled  by  shadow  to  make  them  resemble  pre- 
Columbian  reliefs.  In  one  a  loin-clothed  indio  and  an 
armored  Spaniard  kill  each  other.  The  vehemence  with 
which  they  run  each  other  through  with  their  weapons  as 
flames  curl  around  them  might  be  exciting,  but  it  misses 
a  social  message  that  would  not  have  escaped  Meza's 
predecessors  or  the  later  Chicano  muralists.  The  tradi- 


30  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Universal  Pit  (photographed  in  1979),  Oakland. 


tion  of  the  murals  of  the  Mexican  Revolution  had  become 
academic. 

A  few  years  later  the  East  Los  Angeles  Doctors'  Hos- 
pital commissioned  four  mosaic  panels  from  John  Bene 
under  the  auspices  of  Goez  Gallery,  which  was  to  be- 
come one  of  the  principal  coordinators  of  Chicano  murals 
in  the  area.  Here  the  work  employed  a  European  Man- 
nerist style.  There  are  elegantly  straining  indios  sym- 
bolizing the  bringing  of  maiz,  fire,  water,  and  medical 

Karen  Dixon:   Mr.   Dixon's  Farmers  Market  (photo- 
graphed in  1979),  Oakland. 


knowledge  to  mankind.  Their  bodies  are  elongated  and 
shaded;  their  faces  are  Spanish.  Most  important,  neither 
the  Meza  nor  the  Bene  murals  addressed  the  problems 
that  confronted  barrio  people.  They  were  essentially 
ornamental.  Nevertheless,  both  these  mural  sequences, 
probably  the  first  to  appear  in  an  area  that  was  soon  to 
witness  a  flowering  of  popular  work,  provided  frequently 
seen  examples  of  the  mural  tradition.  Similar  academic 
stylization  was  to  reappear  in  the  community  murals  that 


FREIGHT 

DAMAG  E  D 

FOOD 


HR.  DIXON'S  FARfAERSmRe 

fSfe  ,  ^^  


Shop  sign  showing  the  influence  of  Black  Pride  movement 
(photographed  in  1974),  Roxbury,  Boston. 


Elliot  Pinkney  (left)  and  Richard  Wyatt,  Jr.   (right): 
Pappy's  Bar-B-Q,  1979,  Watts,  Los  Angeles. 


32  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Fiesta  mural  (photographed  in   1974),   Puerto  Rican 
section.  Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


Wall  art  (photographed  in  1974),  Spanish  Harlem,  New 
York. 


Goez  artists  painted  and  others  that  came  under  their 
influence,  but  the  gallery  provided  important  support  for 
more  indigenous  murals  in  East  Lxis. 

New  Realist  Murals 

A  body  of  public  wall  art  that  remained  essentially  a 
commercial  or  personal  form  of  painting  was  developing 
at  the  same  time  as  community  murals  and  was  to 
become  associated  with  the  New  Realism  of  the  sixties 
and  seventies.  It  has  a  variety  of  roots,  which  include  the 


scenes  of  ethnic  restaurants.  Related  to  these  is  the 
expanse  of  folksy  Americana  begun  by  Les  Grimes,  an 
Austrian  immigrant  who  became  a  Hollywood  sign 
painter.  Hired  in  1957  to  decorate  the  exterior  walls  of 
the  Farmer  John  Brand  meat  processing  plant  at  the 
Clougherty  Packing  Company  in  Los  Angeles,^  Grimes 
worked  for  eleven  years  covering  the  big  walls  with 
bucolic  scenes  of  pigs  disporting  themselves  in  verdant 
meadows,  on  the  roofs  of  barnyard  sheds  and  boxcars, 
and  climbing  in  and  out  of  windows.  The  whimsical 
painting  was  dubbed  "Hog  Heaven"  apropos  of  the 


Jose  Reyes  Meza:  Pan-American  Bank  Murals,  1966, 
East  Los  Angeles. 


John  Bene:  Doctors'  Hospital  Murals,  1968-69,  East 
Los  Angeles. 


•'5^3^ 


rM 


inr^i 


.     ?"^l 


Ifeu 


Les  Grimes  and  A  mo  Jordan:  Hog  Heaven,  1957-79, 
Farmer  John  Brand  meat  processing  plant,  Clougherty 
Packing  Company,  Vernon,  Los  Angeles. 


i^^^ 


Terry  Schoonhoven,  Vic  Henderson,  and  others  (Los 
Angeles  Fine  Arts  Squad):  Brooks  St.  Painting,  1969, 
Venice. 


butchering  going  on  inside  the  packing  house.  In  1968 
Grimes  fell  to  his  death  from  a  scaffold,  and  Arno  Jordan 
continued  the  work  and  repainted  faded  portions.  When 
one  looks  at  these  scenes  with  their  big  clouds  on  the  low 
buildings  against  the  Los  Angeles  sky,  it  is  easy  to  take 
the  painted  meadows  for  real.  As  advertisement  for 
bacon  and  sausage  these  walls  are  eminently  successful, 
for  they  are  known  all  over  Los  Angeles. 

When  Terry  Schoonhoven,  Vic  Henderson,  Jim  Fra- 
zin,  and  Leonard  Koren  formed  the  Los  Angeles  Fine 
Arts  Squad  in  1969,  what  they  did  was  to  transform  this 
advertising  whimsy  into  "fine  art,"  although  their  name 
was  intended  ironically.  Schoonhoven  says  that  they  left 
their  private  studio  because  they  wanted  to  be  a  part  of 
the  action  going  on  in  the  streets  at  the  time.  Their  first 
work  was  an  image  on  the  building  where  Henderson 
maintained  his  studio  in  the  Venice  section  of  Los 
Angeles.  The  mural  mirrors  the  building  opf)osite  and 
plays  high  jinks  with  the  viewer  as  to  which  is  real.  They 
had  originally  intended  to  include  a  police  car  in  the 
street,  Schoonhoven  and  Henderson  recall.  Looking 
backward  from  their  realistic  murals  of  disaster  that  were 
to  follow,  you  can  suspect  that  already  they  wanted  to 
tease  anxiety.  The  Fine  Arts  Squad's  work  was  a  witty 
version  of  the  Photo-  or  New  Realism  that  at  the  same 
time  was  capturing  the  imagination  of  other  artists 
around  the  country,  but  was  practiced  in  their  studios, 
and  was  seeking  walls  in  museums,  corporate  offices,  or 
very  commodious  living  rooms.  The  uniqueness  of  the 
Squad  was  to  carry  that  art  into  the  streets.  Like  other 
Photo-Realists,  the  Squad  was  a  group  of  the  avant-garde 
that  had  pushed  experimentalism  full  circle  and  back  into 
the  world  of  literal  visibility,  seeking  to  fascinate  the 
viewer  with  patterns  or  distortions  that  a  slide  transpar- 
ency might  create  or  by  rendering  in  crisp  forms  the 
banality  of  shop  windows  or  the  detail  of  reflections  from 
a  highly  waxed  automobile  fender.  At  the  very  least  and 
often  at  the  most  these  were  displays  of  craftsmanship. 
But  they  might  be  turned  to  social  commentary,  as  the 
Fine  Arts  Squad  did  in  some  of  its  work,  although  its 
ironies  were  often  only  chic. 

The  street  action  that  the  Fine  Arts  Squad  wanted  to 
become  a  part  of  was  not  the  demonstrations  of  Blacks 
and  Chicanes  or  of  peace  marchers,  but  the  antiestab- 
lishment  activity  of  one  section  of  the  counterculture.  In 
particular  the  Squad,  like  other  artists  who  had  made 
Venice  a  center  of  the  avant-garde  on  the  West  Coast, 
was  rebelling  against  the  monopoly  of  the  art  market  that 
the  dealers  of  La  Cienega  Avenue,  Los  Angeles's  "gallery 
row,"  had  sewed  up.  During  the  sixties  the  commerical 
galleries  had  profited  handsomely  with  their  stable  of 
carefully  selected  artists  whom  they  had  invested  in  and 
promoted.  Although  experimental  art  was  booming  and 
more  private  collectors  and  corporations  were  buying, 
the  dealers  were  not  going  to  risk  backing  untried  tal- 
ents.* As  the  opportunities  for  exhibition  declined  for 
the  majority  of  young  artists,  they  began  to  root  about 


Prehistory  /  35 

for  some  other  way  to  get  public  exposure.  They  turned 
to  their  own  turf,  the  Ocean  Park  section  of  Santa 
Monica,  in  the  later  sixties  and  continued  throughout  the 
next  decade  to  paint  their  and  their  neighbors'  modest 
cottages  and  garage  doors  with  over-life-sized  images  of 
their  heroes  and  friends.  The  first  says  Art  .Mortimer, 
one  of  the  artists,  was  Wayne  Holwick's  Bob  Dylan, 
done  in  1966  or  1967.  This  was  followed  in  1969  by 
Groupie,  a  skillfully  painted  sketch  in  black  of  a  young 
woman  who  looked  like  Liz  laylor.  Most  of  the  portraits 
were  executed  in  the  high-contrast  New  Realist  style  that 
followed  billboard  illustration  and  graphic  renditions  of 
photos  that  dropped  out  middle  tones,  leaving  hard  edges 
between  the  shadow  and  highlights.  The  effect  was  bold 
and  had  the  high  visibility  desirable  for  murals.  The 
strong  contrasts  intensified  the  three-dimensionality  of 
the  faces  but  also  made  interesting  two-dimensional  pat- 
terns. By  the  seventies  the  style  was  to  be  widely  used  by 
community  muralists,  and  Mortimer  in  1979  was  still 
doing  these  portraits,  replacing  an  earlier  work  with  the 
face  of  the  young  woman  w  hom  he  shortly  thereafter 
married.  These  Venice  murals  were  the  informed  work 
of  craftsmen  w  ho  knew  their  trade  and  did  not  need  to 
take  much  time  over  work  that  served  as  advertisements 
of  their  talents  and  gave  character  to  a  house  front.  Like 
the  Fine  Arts  Squad's  landscapes,  these  portraits  did 
succeed  in  bringing  art  into  the  streets  and  neighbor- 
hoods, but  it  w  as  essentially  an  enlarging  of  the  personal 
studio  work  that  the  artists  had  done  before.  The 
portraits  were  of  isolated  individuals  and,  while  mag- 
nifying the  faces  of  residents,  they  did  not  suggest  any 
collective  or  genuine  community  activity.  Some  of  these 
artists  did  find  large  commissions,  and  their  works  got 
bigger  and  bigger. 

Supergraphics 

The  impulse  of  artists  to  reach  a  public  and  particu- 
larly a  large  popular  audience  was  being  felt  in  the  East  at 
the  same  time.  In  April  1969,  Polish-born  "Tania" 
painted  one  of  the  first  supergraphics  in  Brooklyn,  and 
Allan  D'Arcangelo  did  one  in  June  in  lower  Manhattan.^ 
In  November,  D'Arcangelo  and  Jason  Crum  followed 
with  another  close  by  on  East  Ninth  Street.  Crum  had 
come  from  the  Los  Angeles  area,  and  years  earlier  he  had 
studied  with  Jose  Clemente  Orozco  in  Guadalajara.  But 
there  was  nothing  of  Orozco's  direct  social  involvement 
to  be  seen  in  supergraphics.  In  general  they  were 
blown-up  versions  of  flat  abstract  Op  Art,  which  created 
attractive  illusions  and  reversible  images  that  brightened 
sooty  urban  walls.  Most  were  painted  in  blighted  areas, 
many  in  the  Lower  East  Side.  It  was  not  unusual  for  one 
to  be  eleven  stories  high.  They  were  usually  designed  by 
artists  and  executed  by  commercial  sign  painters  who 
worked  from  swing  stages.  This  separation  of  the  de- 
signer of  art  from  its  executor,  a  gap  reflected  also  by 
commercial  artists,  was  already  well  established  in  in- 


Tania  (City  Walls):  Untitled,  1970,  Greenwich  Village, 
New  York. 


Prehistory  /  37 


dustry  by  dividing  research  and  development  staffs  from 
production  workers.  It  reflects  more  generally  the 
separating  of  theory  and  creativity  from  technological 
and  manual  work,  a  division  based  on  privilege  that  has 
long  been  characteristic  of  Western  culture. 

In  1970  a  number  of  these  makers  of  supergraphics 
went  into  business  together  in  New  York  as  City  Walls 
Inc.  Its  artists  have  included  Crum,  Tania,  Mel 
Pekarsky,  Robert  Wiegand,  Todd  Williams,  Knox  Mar- 
tin, and  Richard  Anuszkiewicz.  As  of  1978  they  not  only 
had  carried  out  more  than  fifty  commissions  in  the  New 
York  area  but  had  done  consulting  in  almost  every  state 
and  in  a  number  of  cities  abroad.*  They  were  practicing 
what  came  to  be  called  "public  art,"  a  term  widely  used 
not  only  by  City  Walls  but  also  by  community  muralists 
to  refer  to  any  works,  usually  monumental  in  scale,  that 
were  for  display  not  in  museums  but  in  other  places 
frequented  by  large  numbers  of  people.  It  included  as 
well  big  sculpture,  often  abstract,  in  outdoor  plazas. 

It  is  striking  to  hear  Crum  speak  of  City  Walls'  use  of 
public  art  to  overcome  the  estrangement  that  most  artists 
feel  today: 

Public  art  established  beauty  and  a  sense  of  one 
person  reaching  out  to  touch  another,  as  part  of  the 
experience  of  city  life.  Wall  paintings  provide  a  forum 
for  the  city's  artists  and  establish  a  hne  of  communica- 
tion between  the  artist  and  the  community.  It  elimi- 
nates the  alienation  of  artists  from  the  mainstream  of 
public  life.' 

There  is  pathos  in  Crum's  description.  Although  City 
Walls  brought  artists  into  the  mainstream,  it  is  not  clear 
that  this  made  them  any  less  alienated  than  the  designers 
of  billboards.  Public  exhibition,  though  long  yearned  for 
by  artists,  seems  hardly  enough  to  transform  in  any 
fundamental  way  the  relation  of  the  artist  and  life.  As  big 
and  impersonal  as  his  and  his  colleagues'  supergraphics 
were,  Crum  appeared  to  understand  them  as  efforts  at 
intimate  contact  with  other  people — the  recurring  aim  of 
the  alienated  artist  for  over  a  century.  It  may  be,  how- 
ever, that  it  was  the  very  method  of  communication  that 
muffled  the  speakers.  There  is  a  sharp  difference  be- 
tween an  artist  speaking  at  people  and  speaking  with 
them.  For  these  works  were  not  statements  the  artists 
developed  in  collaboration  with  ordinary  people;  they 
were  not  part  of  a  dialogue  that  the  community  carried 
on  with  itself.  They  were  imposed  without  asking,  like 
billboards,  on  everyone. 

Crum  regarded  his  murals  as  environmental  art: 

My  wall  paintings  are  in  response  to  the  setting.  By 
finding  integral  proportion,  set  to  evocative  color  re- 
lationships, the  painting^becomes  an  integrated  part  of 
the  colloquial  scene.  The  image  is  universal.  The 
viewer's  response  is  participatory.  He  is  part  of  the 
statement. 

The   wall  becomes  a  part  of  the  community.    It 


Jason  Crum:  Tammuz  (City  Walls),  1969,  Lower  East 
Side,  New  York. 


changes  with  the  light,  the  weather,  the  season,  and 
the  community  is  part  of  the  painting.  ...  It  becomes 
a  part  of  the  lives  of  the  community,  a  human  fact  in  a 
brutal  city.'" 

There  is  something  ominous  about  the  way  Crum  con- 
ceived of  the  "participation"  of  the  viewer  as  being 
absorbed  by  a  process  that  the  artist  has  supervised. 
Moreover,  he  saw  his  paintings  as  efforts  to  change  the 
sensory,  not  the  social  environment.  The  beholder's 
passive  enjoyment  of  the  play  of  color,  shape,  light,  and 
shade  was  certainly  not  to  be  despised.  But,  like  much 
abstract  art,  it  provided  only  visual  excitement,  without 
offering  guidance  as  to  how  the  observer  could  transmit 
that  stimulation  into  dealing  with  his  own  serious  con- 
cerns. Hence,  it  served  at  best  as  a  kind  of  entertainment 


38  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

to  distract  him  from  the  brutahty  of  the  city  rather  than 
helping  him  come  to  grips  w  ith  it.  It  is  for  this  reason 
that  many  makers  of  people's  murals  were  to  regard 
supergraphics  as  a  cosmetic  papering  over  of  deep-seated 
urban  problems  that  cry  out  to  be  expressed  and  solved. 
Community  muralists  were  to  criticize  these  decorations 
as  a  squandering  of  talent  and  money,  for  City  Walls  and 
like  enterprises  came  to  be  generously  funded  by  the 
National  Endowment  for  the  Arts,  municipal  au- 
thorities, and  private  business.  This  support  no  doubt 
was  due  to  the  efforts  of  supergraphics  to  "beautify" 
urban  blight  in  a  noncontroversial  way.  One  well-known 
community  muralist  does  not  hesitate  to  speak  of  these 
works  as  "shitty  walls." 

On  the  other  hand,  Crum's  words  and  the  increasing 
efforts  of  the  avant-garde  during  the  sixties  and  seventies 
to  find  an  audience  of  common  people  is  significant,  for 
these  artists  have  often  defensively  regarded  the  public  at 
large  with  contempt  and  pursued  a  hermetic  art  for  the 
initiated.  But  it  is  important  to  distinguish  between  an 
effort  to  build  a  larger  passive  audience  and  market,  and 
an  attempt  to  become  part  of  a  community  that  has  some 
input  into  what  it  sees. 

Graffiti 

Another  type  of  art  done  directly  on  public  walls  that 
was  well  established  when  community  murals  first  ap- 
pears was  graffiti,  or placas  as  Chicanos  call  them.  They 
vegetated  over  all  surfaces  within  reach  of  a  spray  can  or 
magic  marker  in  the  inner  cities,  downtowns,  subways, 
and  buses  of  America.  In  contrast  to  supergraphics,  they 
are  a  popular  art  made  by  teenagers  and  are  almost 
universally  deplored  by  respectable  people;  they  are  also 
unlawful.  What  differentiates  graffiti  from  murals  in 
terms  of  figuration  is  that  graffiti  usually  are  limited  to 
the  initials  of  the  writer,  sometimes  his  first  name  or 
nickname,  a  declaration  of  love  or  hate,  or  an  insult, 
epithet,  or  political  demand.  Frequently  graffiti  are  done 
by  a  gang  artist,  and  his  initials  may  appear  with  those  of 
the  gang,  or  its  full  name  may  be  given.  The  calligraphy 
is  sometimes  ingenious,  often  beautiful."  Graffiti  are 
often  acts  of  youthful  bravado,  accomplished  with  style, 
sometimes  in  impossible-to-get-to  places,  sometimes 
with  tragic  consequences. 

Although  there  is  an  obvious  difference  between  ini- 
tials and  recognizable  scenes,  what  graffiti  and  commu- 
nity murals  have  in  common  is  more  important  than 
what  separates  them.  Both  are  not  only  protests;  they  are 
also  affirmations  of  the  identity  of  people.  As  one  well- 
known  muralist  puts  it,  graffiti  say:  "Fuck  you;  here  I 
am."  While  some  graffiti  assert  the  sheer  existence  of 
their  creators,  others  mark  out  the  territory  of  a  gang  or 
its  invasion  into  another  turf.  "When  you  don't  own 
anything,  it's  natural  to  claim  walls  first  by  placas,  then 
by  murals,"  says  Judy  Baca,  founder  of  City  wide  Murals 
in  Los  Angeles.  Graffiti,  like  the  murals  that  often  follow 


them,  celebrate  the  only  community  their  makers  know; 
in  the  case  of  graffiti,  it  is  the  gang  itself.  "You  have  to  be 
a  member  of  a  gang  to  survive  in  the  barrios,"  Baca  says. 
"As  a  teenager  you  often  join  the  same  gang  your  father 
and  grandfather  were  members  of."  The  graffiti  artist  of 
a  gang  is  usually  a  highly  respected  member  of  its  leader- 
ship, just  as  muralists  win  stature  in  their  neighborhoods. 

Graffiti  and  often  murals  are  an  insurgence  against  a 
society  that  does  not  know  what  to  do  with  the  energies 
of  its  young,  especially  those  of  the  inner  city,  providing 
them  with  few  tasks  or  jobs  by  which  they  can  develop 
their  skills  and  self-respect,  while  schools  track  ethnic 
youth  for  dead-end  futures.  The  walls  that  permit 
hawking  only  by  paying  advertisers  bespeak  society's 
values.  Moreover,  billboards  and  commercial  signs  create 
a  much  greater  visual  cacophony  than  the  makers  of 
graffiti  could  ever  hope  to  achieve.  Graffiti  and  murals 
are  types  of  struggle  art  by  which  people  seek  to  survive 
as  human  in  an  increasingly  dehumanized  world. 

When  a  group  of  muralists  was  about  to  begin  prepar- 
ing a  wall  in  the  heart  of  the  street  culture  in  Berkeley  in 
1976,  they  distributed  to  passersby  leaflets  explaining 
that  they  were  going  to  paint  A  People's  History  of  Tele- 
graph Avenue,  beginning  with  the  Free  Speech  Movement 
of  1964.  On  the  handout,  the  painters  "apologize  to  the 
creators  of  the  graffiti  we  will  have  to  cover,  and  hope 
they  will  understand  and  appreciate  our  efforts."  Ac- 
knowledging that  "graffiti  artists  pit  their  spray  cans 
against  the  sophisticated  power  of  commercial  hype,"  the 
painters  conclude,  "we  feel  murals  escalate  the  strug- 
gle. ..." 

The  distance  in  figuration  from  graffiti  to  murals  is  a 
gradual  transition  from  bare  initials  through  increasingly 
elaborated  lettering  to  symbols — like  hearts,  stars,  and 
peace  signs — to  representational  parts  of  the  human 
body — fists,  heads,  genitals — or  other  objects  of  interest 
like  cars,  and  finally  to  detailed  scenes,  which  themselves 
range  from  symbolic  to  narrative.  This  sequence  from 
abstract  initials  to  images  corresponds  to  the  actual  suc- 
cession of  markings  that  often  appear  on  the  same  wall. 
What  begins  as  graffiti  frequently  concludes  as  a  mural. ''^ 
This  is  also  a  progression  from  a  single  person  making  art 
for  himself  to  work  on  behalf  of  a  gang  and  finally  to  the 
collectively  created  mural  of  a  community. 

If  murals  are  sometimes  used  to  cover  and  discourage 
graffiti,  they  have  been  generally  respected  by  graffitists 
at  least  on  their  own  turf.  Some  muralists  like  Willie 
Herron  of  East  Los  Angeles  have  provided  space  in  their 
work  and  invited  neighborhood  kids  to  add  their  placas. 

In  East  Los  Angeles  at  the  Ramona  Gardens  public 
housing  development,  which  has  murals  on  the  end  walls 
of  the  apartment  houses,  Chicano  children  got  together, 
probably  with  an  older  person  helping  them,  to  do  a 
collective  graffiti  project.  They  squared  off  eighteen-inch 
areas  on  a  retaining  wall  that  runs  along  the  lawn  and 
painted  their  "logos."  The  same  feeling  for  art  that 
appears  in  the  murals  had  infected  the  kids.  Their  placas, 


Children  of  Lowell  Elementary  School  directed  by  Victor 
Ochoa:  Graffiti  mural,  1974,  Chicano  Park,  San  Diego. 


Armando  Cabrera  and  Bobby  Gonzales  assisted  by  the  Big 
Hazard  Gang:  Flying  Cross  mural;  graffiti  added  by 
others,  1973,  Ramona  Gardens,  East  Los  Angeles. 


40  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

which  show  a  wide  range  of  individual  expression,  be- 
came an  organized  composition  attractive  to  our  pattern- 
seeking  eyes.  A  wall  was  no  longer  a  battlefield  of  the 
competitive  efforts  of  scores  of  kids,  efforts  similar  to 
those  of  adults  throughout  society.  Young  people  had 
discovered  a  cooperative  mode  of  expression.  Similarly 
organized  graffiti  have  been  done  elsewhere  around  the 
country,  for  instance  on  a  seven-foot-high  white  stone 
belt  around  a  school  in  the  North  End  of  Boston,  a  lively 
Italian  district.  Some  people  who  understand  the  needs 
that  graffiti  meet  believe  that  when  the  logos  of  gangs  and 
individual  kids  are  organized  they  lose  their  significance 
and  force.  This  depends  on  whether  the  teenagers  have 
full  say  in  the  composition.  If  organized  graffiti  give  them 
the  chance  to  pool  their  energies  and  express  their  unity, 
then  this  art  may  become  something  more  than  an  adult- 
supervised  cool-out.  As  graffitists  want  to  project  mes- 
sages that  are  more  complex  and  socially  conscious  and 
they  get  community  support,  they  begin  doing  murals. 

In  East  Los  Angeles  Chicano  artists  have  done  graffiti 
murals  with  spray  cans  that  bring  together  cultural  and 
personal  symbols — for  instance,  the  eagle  of  Aztlan, 
sacred  hearts,  eyes,  lips,  initials,  and  names.  One  such 
work,  Un  Corazon  por  la  Gente  (A  Heart  for  the  People), 
by  Frank  Romero  at  a  busy  East  Los  corner  was  spon- 
sored by  the  county's  Inner  City  Mural  Program  in  1974. 
Romero  is  a  member  of  Los  Four,  a  locally  well-known 
group  of  artists  who  have  also  done  portable  murals  in  a 
style  of  vibrating  back-and-forth  spraying  with  imagery 
including  calaveras,  cars,  and  grotesque  masks.  These 
have  been  taken  seriously  by  some  parts  of  the  art  world 
and  were  exhibited  in  such  institutions  as  the  Oakland 
Museum  in  1974. 

Graffiti  represented  the  most  widespread  form  of 
community-based  social  art  being  done  on  walls  when 
the  first  people's  murals  appeared.  Their  community  was 
either  the  gang  itself  or  its  turf  over  which  contending 
gangs  fought.  That  they  were  often  the  expression  of 
gang  violence  or  isolated  efforts  of  personal  expression 
indicates  the  social  and  cultural  deprivation  of  the  middle 
sixties.  By  then  they  began  to  be  joined  by  graffiti 
expressing  the  anger  of  Black  and  Brown  people  against 
racism  and  a  newfound  pride.  And  as  America's  in- 
volvement in  Indochina  deepened  there  appeared  peace 
symbols  and  antiwar  messages,  inscribed  by  people  of  all 
races  and  conditions,  which  expressed  a  wider  sense  of 
community. 


Conflicts  in  Art  and  Society 

The  range  of  public  wall  painting  just  as  the  new 
community-based  murals  began  to  appear  reflected  the 
same  conflicts  that  divided  the  visual  arts  in  general. 
Billboards,  the  popular  ethnic  imagery  of  restaurants  and 
shops,  academic  reworkings  of  Mexican  murals.  New 
Realist  big  walls,  supergraphics,  graffiti,  and  the  few 


genuine  social  murals  exhibited  strong  contrasts  of  pur- 
pose and  process,  which  were  matched  by  the  contrast- 
ing functions  of  product  design,  advertising,  the  old 
academicism,  the  new  avant-garde,  and  the  suppressed 
socially  conscious  art.  There  was,  on  the  one  hand,  an  art 
that  was  subject  to  corporations,  art  dealers,  and 
museum  boards  and  directors  and,  on  the  other,  art 
responsive  to  the  needs  and  desires  of  ordinary  people. 
Styling,  packaging,  and  promotion  demeaned  imagina- 
tion as  the  fine-arts  market  manipulated  talent.  High 
culture  came  increasingly  to  be  subject  to  the  same 
processes  of  production  and  control  as  the  mass  culture  of 
consumer  goods  and  the  entertainment  industry.  While 
resenting  the  humiliation  of  having  their  individuality 
reduced  to  commodities  handled  by  dealers,  painters 
nevertheless  sought  to  break  into  the  charmed  circle  of 
the  art  market.  Believing  that  they  were  seeking  unique 
self-expression,  they  bound  themselves  to  the  market's 
requirement  of  novelty  to  keep  demand  alive  and  prices 
rising. 

If  artists  in  general  had  difficulty  in  getting  their  work 
exhibited  by  dealers,  the  position  of  minority  artists  was 
more  acute.  They  experienced  even  greater  discrimina- 
tion in  the  more  constricted  fine-arts  market  than  their 
brothers  and  sisters  did  in  ordinary  employment.  In 
addition,  minority  artists  during  the  late  sixties  were 
increasing  their  protests  at  the  failure  of  publicly  funded 
museums  to  exhibit  the  art  of  their  heritage  or  its  current 
expressions.  Many  Black  and  Latino  artists  were  re- 
thinking the  purposes  of  their  own  art  and  the  functions 
of  the  museum,  and  some  opened  collective  workshops 
and  exhibition  spaces.  Among  these  were  the  community- 
based  Organization  of  Black  American  Culture  in 
Chicago,  set  up  in  1967,  which  was  to  sponsor  the 
first  of  the  new  murals,  and  the  moi;e  market-oriented 
Goez  and  Mechicano  Galleries  that  opened  in  Los 
Angeles  in  1969.  Mechicano  began  as  a  showcase  for 
Chicano  artists  on  "gallery  row"  and  only  later  became  a 
community  arts  and  mural  workshop,  while  Goez,  which 
began  as  an  outlet  for  local  artists  and  craftsmen,  also 
sponsored  murals  in  the  early  seventies.  The  Galeria  de 
la  Raza  in  San  Francisco,  which  was  to  become  a  center 
for  community  murals  as  well  as  a  place  to  show  contem- 
porary Chicano  art,  was  organized  in  1969  but  stems 
from  a  storefront  art  center  that  Rene  Yanez,  one  of  its 
founders,  had  operated  successfully  in  Oakland.  The 
Galeria  still  shows  current  work  but  does  not  sell  it. 

The  little  social  art  being  done  by  professionals  during 
the  fifties  and  sixties  continued  to  risk  charges  of  disloy- 
alty and  a  widespread  art-world  prejudice  that  regarded 
the  treatment  of  social  issues  as  naive.  But  there  still 
remained  a  few  older  artists  who  continued  the  social 
criticism  they  had  begun  in  the  thirties,  such  as  Jack 
Levine,  Jacob  Lawrence  and  Charles  White,  and  a  hardly 
younger  generation  that  included  Edward  Kienholz, 
Jacob  Landau,  and  Duane  Hanson.  They  remained 
lonely  voices  until  the  whole  art  scene  was  violently 
shaken  during  the  sixties. 


Meanwhile,  mainstream  fine  arts  were  dominated  by 
the  avant-garde's  formal  innovations  and  exploration  of 
private  consciousness.  Even  what  was  critical  of  Ameri- 
can culture  in  Pop  Art's  spoofs  was  readily  co-opted  as 
chic.  With  the  ascendancy  of  the  avant-garde,  the  fine 
arts  had  been  gradually  narrowed  to  their  minimal 
function — sensory,  emotional,  and  intellectual  stimula- 
tion. "Art  appreciation"  that  was  claimed  to  be  "disin- 
terested" had  become  the  approved  response  to  visual 
culture  because  the  public,  it  was  said,  wanted  diversion 
and  establishment  art  professionals  believed  that  the 
highest  human  faculties  could  only  be  fruitfully 
employed  when  they  were  detached  from  all  practical, 
ethnical,  religious,  or  social  aims.  All  such  purposes 
seemed  to  them  either  discredited  or  impossible  dreams 
in  the  modern  world.  While  most  advanced  artists  were 
critical  of  contemf)orary  society,  they  had  been  disil- 
lusioned by  the  reformist  and  revolutionary  efforts  of 
recent  history.  If  people  could  not  gain  mastery  over  the 
larger  events  of  their  time,  they  might,  it  seemed,  achieve 
control  within  a  work  of  art  and  enjoy  there  a  coherence 
and  beauty  unavailable  elsewhere.  Thus,  art  tended  to 
become  exclusively  absorbed  with  the  savoring  of  new 
experience  by  artist  and  audience.  It  was  this  that  made 
for  the  increasing  patronage  of  the  avant-garde  since  the 
twenties  and  particularly  since  World  War  II  by  affluent 
individuals  and  families,  then  large  corporations,  and 
finally  museums  and  government.  Such  art  provided 
cultivated  entertainment;  far  from  challenging  the  status 
quo,  it  strengthened  the  establishment's  claims  of  sup- 
porting individual  enterprise  and  humanism.  Fine  art,  it 
was  said,  existed  for  its  own  sake — that  is,  the  distraction 
of  its  makers  and  viewers  from  the  stubborn  problems  of 
human  existence,  which  in  fact  were  now  building  into 
crises  outside  studios  and  galleries. 


Prehistory  I  4 1 

These  sophisticated  amusements  that  the  fine  arts 
offered  ran  parallel  to  the  equally  passive  consuming  of 
classical  and  popular  music,  TV,  spectator  sports,  and 
the  compulsive  shopping  of  mass  culture.  Hobbies  and 
recreation  offered  only  limited  chances  for  personal  in- 
itiative. Both  high  and  popular  culture  provided  people 
with  some  of  the  vitality  that  was  missing  from  their 
daily  routine,  but  neither  offered  guidance  or  energy  to 
help  them  take  possession  of  their  lives. 

Thus,  the  fundamental  cultural  conflict  that  people's 
muralists  confronted  w  hen  they  took  to  the  walls  was  the 
separation  of  authentic  art  from  the  life  and  work  of 
ordinary  people.  What  was  missing  was  not  only  an  art 
that  dealt  with  the  serious  concerns  of  people  and 
through  which  they  could  take  an  active  part  in  public 
communication.  Also  required  were  chances  for  expres- 
sion and  creativity  in  their  ordinary  labor  so  that  it  too 
could  have  the  character  of  meaningful  craftsmanship. 
Then  they  would  not  need  to  seek  compensations  else- 
where. 

The  most  flagrant  deprivation  of  jseople's  ability  to  act 
and  create  to  meet  their  needs  was  among  the  minorities 
in  the  inner  cities  and  the  farm-worker  camps  across  the 
nation  and  among  the  impoverished  whites  of  Ap- 
palachia.  For  these  people  there  was  little  opportunity  for 
skill  or  expression  when  in  fact  employment  of  any  kind 
was  hard  to  come  by  and,  when  available,  it  was  usually 
of  a  menial  sort  with  small  chance  for  advancement. 
Moreover,  the  squalor  of  the  ghetto  and  barrio  hardly 
allowed  for  satisfaction  of  the  senses  or  imagination. 
There  was   precious  little  art  in  slum  dwellers'   lives 


Frank  Romero:  Un  Carazon  por  la  Gente,  1974,  East 
Los  Angeles. 


42  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

except  what  they  made  for  themselves — jazz,  salsa,  and 
graffiti.  Nor  was  the  press,  TV,  or  radio  available  to 
them  to  communicate  their  views  of  their  condition  to  the 
public  at  large  or  to  reach  one  another  so  as  to  organize 
for  change. 

The  framework  of  American  society  and  culture  at 
midcentury  had  in  it  stresses  that  threatened  to  bring  it 
down  or  to  transform  it  into  something  adequate  to  its 
idealism.  But  the  principal  force  for  change  was  the 
refusal  of  increasing  numbers  of  people  to  submit  to  a 
racism  that  crippled  their  chances  to  grow  and  create. 

ROOTS  IN  THE  STREETS 

Demonstrations 

The  movement  of  community-based  murals  was  part 
of  the  upsurge  of  popular  and  socially  oriented  culture 
that  began  in  the  late  fifties  and  early  sixties  to  confront 
the  nationwide  crisis  of  growing  authoritarianism  and 
alienation.  The  initial  thrust  came  with  the  revival  of  the 
struggle  of  Black  people  for  civil  rights  and  social  justice, 
symbolized  by  Rosa  Park's  refusal  to  sit  in  the  rear  of  a 
Montgomery  bus  in  1955.  This  came  a  year  after  the 
Supreme  Court  decision  that  found  school  segregation 
unconstitutional  and  so-called  separate  but  equal 
facilities  inherently  unequal. 

The  civil-rights  movement,  which  had  to  be  carried  on 
as  a  series  of  local  battles  fought  by  community  people, 
even  when  help  came  from  outside  and  it  assumed  na- 
tional proportions,  adopted  tactics  that  were  also  cultural 
forms,  because  they  were  intended  to  communicate  a 
public  message.  Black  and  then  Brown  people  used  the 
only  medium  they  had — their  own  bodies  and  voices. 
They  not  only  occupied  the  front  seats  of  buses  but  sat  in 
at  lunch  counters,  picketed,  and  marched.  They  were 
beaten,  arrested,  and  sometimes  killed.  They  were  soon 
joined  by  White  sympathizers,  especially  college  stu- 
dents.'^ These  demonstrations  became  the  first  and 
dominant  art  form  of  a  new  culture.  It  was  an  art  in  so  far 
as  it  was  a  form  of  communication  that  sought  to  project 
a  moral  appeal  that  could  be  augmented  to  a  demand;  it 
required  planning,  coordination,  and  the  discipline  of  all 
participants.  It  was,  moreover,  an  art  which  required  not 
professional  artists  but  as  many  concerned  people  as 
could  be  assembled.  People  developed  skills  in  organiz- 
ing, marshaling,  press  relations,  nonviolent  tactics,  and 
the  making  of  posters  and  props.  It  was  an  art  of  collec- 
tive participation  that  suddenly  altered  the  relation  of 
people  to  culture,  for  it  brought  millions  of  people  into 
the  street  during  two  decades.  Previously  they  had  been 
the  passive  audience  of  news,  advertising,  and  enter- 
tainments. Now  they  were  active  creators  of  a  culture 
that  was  not  only  a  mode  of  communicating  to  others  but 
was  a  new  way  of  their  being  together.  The  public 
demonstration  is  the  most  direct  form  of  people's  art  and 
became  the  model  of  subsequent  types.  Rallies,  picket- 
ings,  sit-ins,  and  marches  were  not  new,  but  they  now 
involved  such  numbers  of  participants  that  there  oc- 


curred a  fundamental  break  with  the  prevailing  passivity 
that  current  forms  of  culture  imposed  on  people. 
Moreover,  since  demonstrations  urged  their  public  to 
join  with  them,  they  sought  to  break  through  the  separa- 
tion between  artist  and  audience. 

In  a  few  brief  years  a  fundamental  change  in  the 
nature  of  art  began  to  occur,  and  this  change  was  not 
brought  about  mainly  by  artists,  but  by  people  who 
were  often  "uncultured"  and  had  no  idea  that  they 
were  making  art,  in  part  because  they  were  not  making, 
they  were  doing  art.  The  demonstration  is  not  even 
theater  as  we  have  become  accustomed  to  think  of  it, 
for  the  rally  or  march  is  not  a  representation  of  any- 
thing.'^ The  demonstration  reintegrates  art  and  life. 
It  is  simply  a  very  emphatic  way  of  speaking  with  other 
people  using  the  closest  mode  of  expression  at  hand — 
your  own  person.  After  art  had  become  increasingly 
disinterested,  detached  from  overt  conduct  in  modern 
times,  it  suddenly  became  action  again.  Putting  one's 
body  on  the  line  is  the  most  elementary  form  of  engaged 
art.  Particularly  putting  it  on  the  line  with  other  people  is 
the  prototype  of  social  art,  as  it  is  also  a  way  of  enacting 
community.  In  opposition  to  the  prevailing  forms  of 
alienation,  commitment  and  participation  became  the 
hallmarks  of  the  new  politics,  the  new  modes  of  associa- 
tion, and  the  social  art  of  this  era;  and  the  public  demon- 
stration was  their  most  fundamental  and  dramatic  form. 
The  demonstration  was  the  rediscovered  watershed  of 
art.  It  brought  people  together  to  act  creatively  and  to 
change  the  conditions  of  their  lives.  This  makes  it  under- 
standable why  the  public  demonstration  provided  the 
principal  imagery  of  community  murals.  And  murals 
converted  a  form  of  demonstration,  the  public  process  of 
their  making,  into  statements  that  lasted. 

The  demonstration,  of  course,  marked  not  only  a 
fundamental  change  in  people's  relation  to  art  but  also  in 
their  relation  to  politics.  In  both  they  ceased  being  the 
manipulated  and  became  active  initiators.  Art  became 
the  expression  of  their  politics,  which  became  the  enact- 
ing of  moral  and  social  convictions.  People  began  making 
public  art  when  they  began  grass-roots  organizing.  In  the 
course  of  creating  the  socially  conscious  art  that  was  to 
follow — posters,  murals,  music,  and  drama — it  would  be 
realized  that  such  art  required  popular  activism  to  sustain 
and  complete  it. 

The  minorities  as  well  as  middle-class  Whites  resorted 
to  the  demonstration  largely  because  of  their  lack  of 
access  to  high  technology's  media  of  communication  and 
persuasion.  And  they  made  of  it  a  technology  that  inte- 
grated art,  productive  action,  and  community.  Depend- 
ing more  on  numbers  of  people  who  could  organize 
themselves  than  on  any  elaborate  equipment  and  input  of 
funds,  it  was  labor-intensive.  Initiative  usually  came 
from  the  untrained  in  such  matters,  from  people  who 
experienced  serious  need  and  had  to  act.  They  had  to 
pool  their  resources  and  talents,  learn  methods  of  mutual 
aid  and  confrontation,  and  learn  how  to  defend  them- 
selves in  the  streets  and  the  courts.  The  demonstration 


Prehistory  /  43 


Miranda  Bergman,  Selma  Brown,  Thomas  Kunz,  Jane 
I   Norling,   Peggy   Tucker,  and  Arch   Williams  (Haight 
^    Ashbury  Muralists):  Rainbow  People  (detail),  1972, 
^    repainted  1974,  San  Francisco.  This  work,  like  the  next, 
illustrates  the  connection  between  murals  and  demonstra- 
tions. 


Miranda  Bergman,  Jane  Norling,  Vicky  Hamlin,  Thomas 
Kunz,  Peggy  Tucker,  and  Arch  Williams  (Haight  Ash- 
bury Muralists):  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery  (detail), 
1976,  San  Francisco. 


44  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

united  production  and  expression,  and  because  these 
were  guided  by  serious  ethical  considerations  it  was  an 
exemplary  form  of  appropriate  technology.  It  is  im- 
portant to  make  this  identification  because  the  demon- 
stration became  a  model  of  collective  and  engaged  art  as 
well  as  work  that  is  richly  expressive.  In  this  respect  it 
laid  the  groundwork  for  the  community  murals  that  were 
to  grow  from  it.  This  connection  also  relates  the  demon- 
stration to  the  wide  range  of  processes  that  were  being 
developed  particularly  by  Third  World  people  abroad  in 
an  effort  to  develop  their  productivity  under  their  own 
control,  in  line  with  their  means  and  in  a  manner  consis- 
tent with  their  culture. 


Community  Participation 

The  demonstration  was  not  only  an  instrument  for 
changing  society — it  was  that  change.  For  in  it  people 
were  working  together  in  a  new  way  in  which  they  could 
share  in  deciding  what  was  to  be  done  and  how.  It  was  a 
mode  of  face-to-face  acting  that  did  not  require  the 
pitting  of  people  against  each  other,  but  sought  to  bring 
opponents  over  and  to  open  them  and  oneself  to  new 
possibilities.  The  single  demonstration  was  usually  in- 
sufficient in  itself  and  required  follow-up,  repetition,  and 
hence  sustained  organizing.  Demonstrations  reawakened 
ordinary  people's  awareness  that,  if  there  were  to  be 
serious  change,  they  would  have  to  make  it  themselves 
and  together.  Increasingly,  they  insisted  on  participating 
directly  in  the  public  decisions  that  affected  their  lives 
and  in  operating  the  services  they  required,  rather  than 
being  the  clients  of  a  welfarism  that  was  inadequate  and 
humiliated  them.  It  was  the  on-going  functions  of  com- 
munity that  they  sought  to  develop.  Thus,  the  demon- 
stration had  transformed  art  into  political  action  out  of 
which  there  grew  the  possibility  of  community.  And  if 
community  were  to  remain  vital,  it  would  have  to  main- 
tain its  creators'  artful  involvement. 

The  connection  between  the  demonstration  and  com- 
munity organizing  is  clear  in  the  efforts  of  the  National 
Farm  Workers  Association  that  was  initiated  by  Cesar 
Chavez  in  Fresno  and  Delano  in  1962.  The  daily  picket- 
ings  in  the  vineyards  that  began  three  years  later  and  the 
larger  marches  renewed  the  experience  of  community 
among  migrant  workers  who  had  been  uprooted  from 
their  communal  villages  in  Mexico.  There  were  also 
many  of  Filipino  descent  among  them  who  shared  a 
similar  cultural  background.  These  were  not  only  efforts 
at  labor  organizing;  they  were  attempts  to  recover  ties 
that  had  been  lost  and  to  make  them  relevant  to  new 
needs.  This  was  most  dramatic  in  the  twenty-five-day, 
three-hundred-mile  march  of  the  grape  strikers  and  their 
families  from  Delano  to  the  state  capital  in  Sacramento 
during  the  Easter  season  of  1966.  They  conceived  of  it  as 
a  religious  as  well  as  a  social  action,  and  made  this  clear  in 
the  Plan  de  Delano  that  they  signed: 


This  Pilgrimage  is  a  witness  to  the  suffering  we  have 
seen  for  generations.  The  Penance  we  accept  sym- 
bolizes the  suffering  we  shall  have  in  order  to  bring 
justice  to  these  same  towns,  to  this  same  valley.  This  is 
the  beginning  of  a  social  movement  in  fact  and  not  in 
pronouncements.'* 

Although  they  marched  with  the  banner  of  the  Virgin  of 
Guadalupe,  the  patroness  of  Mexico,  they  appealed  to 
farm  workers  across  the  country,  most  of  them  members 
of  varied  minorities,  to  unite  to  bargain  collectively  and 
create  a  "new  social  order"  in  which  their  dignity  as 
working  people  would  be  respected.  They  had  been 
trying  since  1962  to  create  self-help  enterprises  in  the 
Central  Valley  and  hoped  eventually  to  own  their  own 
land.  Starting  with  a  group  insurance  plan,  they  went  on 
to  a  credit  union,  a  clinic,  a  newspaper,  the  Teatro 
Campesino,  and  soon  murals.  As  Chavez  has  said,  "We 
want  a  social  revolution.  We  want  to  change  the  condi- 
tions of  human  life.  .  .  .  We  are  trying  to  create  a 
community."'^ 

The  farm  workers'  achievements  were  among  the  first 
comprehensive  efforts  of  working  people  in  recent  times 
to  create  or  gain  control  of  their  facilities  and  institutions 
and  to  shape  them  to  meet  their  economic,  social,  and 
cultural  needs.  Comparable  undertakings  by  inner-city 
and  rural  Blacks  were  occurring  at  the  same  time  and 
later  working-  and  middle-class  Whites  were  to  pursue 
parallel  courses.  It  was  socially  conscious,  largely  White 
college  students  who  composed  in  1962  The  Port  Huron 
Statement,  the  classic  presentation  of  the  principles  that 
they  shared  with  the  farmworkers  and  the  neighborhoods 
that  were  struggling  for  community  control  and  later 
painted  murals  to  support  their  efforts.'^  The  document 
set  forth  with  some  eloquence  the  ideas  of  collective 
self-determination,  participatory  democracy,  and  self- 
reliance  in  operating  community  institutions  that  were 
also  held  by  the  Black  and  Brown  Power  and  Native 
American  movements.  The  same  ideas  animated  tenants' 
unions,  welfare-rights  groups,  neighborhood  arts  pro- 
grams, and  the  users  of  social  services  in  general  who 
organized  to  control  and  operate  them.  Meanwhile  work- 
ers and  communities  were  forming  producers'  as  well  as 
consumer's  cooperatives.  The  idea  of  participation  was 
key  to  the  White  middle-class  contribution  to  the  antiwar 
movement,  alternative-schools,  ecology,  and  consumer- 
protection  efforts.  It  was  basic  to  the  women's  rights  and 
sexual-freedom  movements.  Self-determination  was 
central  to  college  students'  demand  for  a  role  in  the 
governance  of  their  institutions,  and  their  social  vision 
involved  them  in  service  to  nearby  minority  and 
working-class  communities. 

One  of  the  first  efforts  of  students  and  faculty  to 
formalize  these  activities  was  undertaken  by  San  Fran- 
cisco State  College  in  1967  with  a  Community  Service 
Institute,  the  off-campus  Julian  Theater,  and  the  start 
they  gave  to  the  city's  Neighborhood  Arts  Program, 


which  four  years  later  was  to  become  the  prime  sponsor 
of  local  murals.  This  activism  also  included  work  toward 
Black  and  Third  World  studies  departments,  but,  when 
it  was  stymied  by  the  administration  in  1968,  a  student 
and  faculty  strike  followed  in  which  unions  and  large 
numbers  of  community  people  participated.  These 
achievements  and  frustrations  were  matched  all  over  the 
nation. 

Murals  from  Posters 

This  socially  involved  activity  on  campuses,  in  the 
inner  city,  and  in  rural  areas  created  an  upsurge  of 
engaged  art.  An  essential  part  of  the  demonstrations  were 
the  posters,  which  were  usually  homemade  works  of  art 
carried  by  their  creators  during  a  march  and  tacked  up 
around  the  neighborhood  and  at  schools  and  colleges. 
This  form  of  struggle  art  showed  imagination  and 
humor,  which  owed  something  to  the  popularity  of 
psychedelic  posters  of  the  mid-sixties.  Another  source 
were  the  posters  and  flags  of  the  farm  workers  which  had 
appeared  in  1966.  Visual  images  and  symbols  increas- 
ingly displaced  the  words  that  formerly  dominated  picket 
signs.  Among  the  first  important  political  graphic  artists 
of  the  younger  generation  was  Emory  Douglas,  who 
began  doing  powerful  posters  for  the  Black  Panthers  in 
Oakland  in  1967.  These  were  reproduced  by  offset,  were 
widely  distributed,  and  frequently  appeared  in  the  un- 
derground press.  The  graphics  associated  with  the  cul- 
tural nationalism  of  ethnic  groups  and  the  antiwar 
movement  appeared  at  the  same  moment  as  the  first 
murals.  In  fact,  the  Wall  of  Respect  created  in  Chicago  in 
1967  was  compositionally  a  montage  of  posters — 
portraits  of  Black  heroes — some  done  in  the  style  of 
graphics  rather  than  easel  painting.  William  Walker,  the 
coordinator  of  the  artists  who  worked  on  it,  and  Eugene 
Eda  continued  the  poster  style  in  their  Wall  of  Dignity  in 
Detroit  in  1968  and  Walker  in  his  Peace  and  Salvation, 
Wall  of  Understanding  in  1970,  where  the  marching  figures 
at  the  bottom  look  like  the  work  of  Emory  Douglas.  On  it 
simulated  posters  are  painted,  and  one  was  added  as  late 
as  1974  showing  a  number  of  familiar  White  faces  with 
the  caption  "Watergate."  The  mural  was  thus  not  re- 
garded as  a  finished  work  of  art,  completed  once  and  for 
all.  It  was  a  living  commentary  on  the  changing  scene, 
and  the  idea  of  an  art  form  that  could  be  kept  up-to-date 
was  contributed  by  posters. 

Malaquias  Montoya,  an  Oakland  graphic  artist  who 
was  to  do  some  of  the  first  murals  in  the  Bay  Area,  sees 
the  poster  as  their  forerunner.  Montoya  had  taken  part  in 
the  renaissance  of  Chicano  poster  art  in  1968  and  1969 
doing  silk  screens  for  local  events  ranging  from  political 
demonstrations  and  benefits  to  neighborhood  dances.  He 
tells  also  of  doing  posters  that  did  not  announce  events 
but  attempted  by  imagery  and  quotations  from  Raza 
poets  to  project  a  sense  of  cultural  identity.  He  would 
staple  them  to  telephone  poles  and  street  walls,  and  they 


Prehistory  I  45 

functioned  like  the  murals  that  he  was  to  begin  doing  in 
1969.  The  first  he  painted  depicted  Latinos  liberating 
themselves  on  a  sixteen-foot-square  portable  canvas, 
which  was  one  of  a  set  that  included  two  other  murals, 
one  by  another  Latino,  the  other  by  a  Black  artist,  for  the 
interior  of  the  East  Oakland  Development  Center.'*  The 
following  year  he  did  another  portable  mural  and  an 
impassioned  indictment  of  the  U.S.  crucifixion  of  the 
Third  World  on  the  back  of  a  ten-by-twelve  foot  oilcloth 
that  was  exhibited  at  a  protest  art  exhibit  at  the  Univer- 
sity of  California  at  Berkeley  at  the  time  of  the  strike 
against  the  invasion  of  Cambodia  and  the  killing  of 
students  at  Kent  State.  Erom  these  he  went  on  to  paint 
directly  on  walls  doing  what  was  probably  the  first  mural 
of  the  new  movement  in  San  Jose  in  1972,  a  large  work 
across  the  facade  of  the  Community  Legal  Service  office 
that  borrowed  from  the  New  Democracy  of  Siqueiros  and 
called  for  local  struggle.  While  the  making  of  popular 
social  posters  waned  after  the  withdrawal  of  U.S.  forces 
from  Indochina  in  1973  and  the  big  rallies  that  had 
generated  the  art,  their  effect  on  murals  continued,  as  we 
shall  see. 

The  people's  murals  that  began  appearing  in  1967 
arose  out  of  a  matrix  of  activism  that  produced  posters, 
demonstrations,  educational  innovations,  vocational  ex- 
periments, community-initiated  services,  civil-rights  and 
antiwar  agitation,  and  a  communitarian  kind  of  farm- 
worker organizing.  These  varied  phenomena  have  fre- 
quently been  tailed  "the  Movement,"  sometimes  a  "cul- 
tural revolution."  If  culture  is  understood  in  the  broad 
sense  of  a  meaningful  way  of  life,  that  is,  a  body  of 
behavior  and  technology  connected  by  common  values 
and  a  coherent  way  of  perceiving  the  world,  then,  in- 
deed, a  cultural  revolution  was  in  the  making.  For  the 
adherence  to  conventional  pieties,  modes  of  work,  and 
human  relationships  was  being  challenged.  There  was  a 
crisis  in  belief  and  commitment  that  was  provoked  by 
deferrals  of  social  justice  that  could  no  longer  be  main- 
tained, an  overseas  war  that  divided  citizens  at  home,  and 
a  society  whose  customary  roles  seemed  inauthentic  to 
even  many  who  enjoyed  its  privileges.  This  revolution 
was  cultural  in  so  far  as  it  was  motivated  by  a  conscious 
revision  of  values  and  ways  of  seeing  oneself,  other 
people,  and  their  possibilities  in  cooperative  undertak- 
ings. But  what  was  revolutionary  was  that  these 
perspectives,  that  were  not  at  all  new,  were  implemented 
by  widespread  and  concerted  practical  activity.  Ordinary 
people  undertook  to  change  the  quality  of  their  everyday 
lives  by  deliberate  doing  and  making.  And  they  increas- 
ingly realized  that,  if  American  society  were  to  be 
genuinely  democratic  and  humane,  they  had  to  come  to 
grips  with  the  unequal  distribution  of  power  in  its  in- 
stitutions. It  is  to  the  specific  conditions  of  that  revolu- 
tion that  we  must  turn  to  understand  how  the  murals 
emerged  and  functioned. 


Malaquias  Montoya:  banner  mural,  1970,  Berkeley. 


NOTES 

1.  The  information  on  Hampton  Institute  and  Texas 
Southern  University  is  based  on  my  conversations  with  John 
Biggers,  chairman  of  the  Art  Department  at  the  latter;  Carroll 
Simms,  a  member  of  the  faculty;  Samella  Lewis  of  Scripps 
College;  and  accounts  by  Biggers  and  Simms  recorded  by  John 
Weems  in  Black  Art  in  Houston  (College  Station:  Texas  A  &  M 
University  Press,  1978). 

2.  Quoted  by  Antonio  Rodriguez,  A  History  of  Mexican 
Mural  Painting  (New  York:  Putnam,  1969),  p.  133.  Although 
most  examples  of  this  art  have  disappeared  in  Mexico,  one  of 
the  best  places  to  see  it  is  the  Mercado  Abelardo  Rodriguez  in 
Mexico  City.  There  it  can  be  viewed  next  to  the  postrevolution- 
ary  murals  of  the  1930s  that  derived  from  it. 

3.  Ibid.,  p.  128. 

4.  Cf.  Rupert  Garcia,  "The  Legacy  and  Significance  of 
'Pulqueria  Art,'  "  El  Tecolote  (San  Francisco)  .March  1977. 

5.  Henry  G.  Gardiner,  "Painted  Exterior  Walls  of  Southern 
California,"  C«rra«<,  June-July,  1975,  p.  19. 

6.  Ibid.,  p.  17  f. 

7.  Ibid.,  p.  20. 

8.  "Art  Group  Dresses  Up  Urban  Areas,"  Independent  Jour- 
nal (Sin  Rafael,  Calif.),  August  9,  1978. 


9.  Quoted  by  Gardiner,  p.  21  from  City  Walls  Graphics 
Collection  brochure.  -• 

10.  Ibid. 

1 1.  The  lettering  in  New  York  sometimes  is  reminiscent  of 
psychedelic  posters  of  the  mid-sixties  and  the  Art  Nouveau 
from  which  they  borrowed.  In  East  Los  Angeles  block  capitals 
and  stick  figures  that  look  like  Celtic  runes  are  common. 
Manuel  Parsons,  a  former  Brown  Beret  who  grew  up  there  and 
is  recognized  by  barrio  people  as  an  expert  onplacas,  believes 
that  some  local  styles  were  influenced  by  Hebrew  lettering  on 
the  old  synagogues  in  this  area  where  Jewish  people  once  lived. 

12.  Muralist  Salvador  "Queso"  Torres  has  kept  a  photo- 
graphic record  of  this  transition  on  the  pylons  of  the  Coronado 
Bridge  in  San  Diego.  Cf.  Beth  Coffelt,  "No  Man's  Land:  A 
Transformation," 5a»  Diego  (magazine)  December  1973. 

13.  The  first  lunch-counter  sit-ins  by  Black  students  to  end 
segregation  occurred  at  Greensboro,  North  Carolina,  in  1960, 
and  they  were  matched  by  the  picketing  of  Woolworth's  in  the 
North.  But  racism  was  not  the  only  issue  that  produced 
demonstrations.  In  1959  and  1960  students  picketed  at  Berke- 
ley to  end  compulsory  ROTC,  and  in  1960  Bay  Area  students 
marched  against  the  execution  of  Caryl  Chessman  and 
a  hearing  of  the  House  Un-American  Activities  Committee  in 
San   Francisco.    In    1961    Black  and   White  Freedom   Riders 


organized  by  the  Congress  of  Racial  Equality  began  riding 
buses  into  the  South  to  test  the  segregation  of  interstate 
carriers.  That  year  also  the  Student  Non- Violent  Coordinating 
Committee  initiated  its  voter  registration  drive  in  Mississippi, 
and  while  incurring  violent  reactions,  they  spawned  parallel 
efforts.  Also  in  1961  students  on  several  campuses  demon- 
strated for  a  restoration  of  diplomatic  relations  with  Cuba 
which  the  United  States  had  broken  off.  In  1962  the  Student 
Peace  Union  sponsored  a  demonstration  in  Washington  during 
which  five  thousand  students  tried  to  talk  with  administration 
officials.  The  following  year  a  quarter  of  a  million  marched  on 
the  capital  and  heard  Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.,  speak  of  their 
dream  from  the  steps  of  the  Lincoln  Memorial.  Also  in  1963 
Harlem  families  initiated  one  of  the  first  rent  strikes  as  a  means 
of  forcing  landlords  to  correct  tenements'  hazards.  In  1964 
sit-ins  forced  the  granting  of  student  free-speech  demands  at 
Berkeley.  These  were  some  of  the  early  instances  and  varied 
issues  of  an  art  of  collective  participation. 

14.  Cf.  Lee  Baxandall,  "Spectacles  and  Scenarios:  A 
Dramaturgy  of  Radical  Activity,"  in  Radical  Perspectives  in  the 
Arts,  ed.  Baxandall  (Baltimore:  Pelican,  1972),  p.  371  ff. 

15.  Reprinted  in  Armando  B.  Rendon,  ed.,  Chicano  Mani- 
festo (New  York:  Collier,  1971),  p.  328. 

16.  Quoted  by  Stan  Steiner,  La  Raza,  The  Mexican  Americans 
(New  York:  Harper  and  Row,  1970),  p.  293. 

17.  The  Port  Huron  Statement,  drafted  by  Tom  Hay  den  at  a 
conference  of  the  Students  for  Democratic  Society  in  1962,  set 
forth  a  f)olitics  and  way  of  being  in  the  world  that  cut  across 
liberal  and  radical  programs  and  gave  definition  to  a  growing 
popular  consciousness  that  connected  individualism  and  com- 
munity. In  a  key  section  it  said: 


Prehistory  I  47 

As  A  social  system  we  seek  the  establishment  of  a  democracy  of 
individual  participation,  governed  by  two  central  aims:  that 
the  individual  share  in  these  social  decisions  determining  the 
quality  and  direction  of  his  life;  that  society  be  organized  to 
encourage  independence  in  men  and  provide  the  media  for 
their  common  participation. 

In  a  participatory  democracy,  the  political  life  would  be 
based  in  several  root  principles: 

that  decision-making  of  basic  social  consequence  be  carried 
on  by  public  groupings; 

that  politics  be  seen  positively,  as  the  art  of  collectively 
creating  an  acceptable  pattern  of  social  relations; 
that  politics  has  the  function  of  bringing  people  out  of 
isolation  and  into  community,  thus  being  a  necessary, 
though  not  sufficient,  means  of  finding  meaning  in  personal 
life.  .  .  . 

The  economic  sphere  should  have  as  its  basis  the  principles: 
that  work  should  involve  incentives  worthier  than  money  or 
survival.  It  should  be  educative,  not  stultifying;  creative,  not 
mechanical;  self-directed,  not  manipulated,  encouraging  in- 
dependence, a  respect  for  others,  a  sense  of  dignity  and  a 
willingness  to  accept  social  responsibility.  .  .  . 
that  the  economic  experience  is  so  personally  decisive  that 
the  individual  must  share  in  its  full  determination; 
that  the  economy  itself  is  of  such  social  importance  that  its 
major  resources  and  means  of  production  should  be  open  to 
democratic  participation  and  subject  to  democratic  social 
regulation. 


18.  For  description,  sec  p.  62.  The  other  portable  mural 
.Vlontoya  worked  on  in  1970  was  at  the  Latin- American  Li- 
brary in  Oakland  where  he  collaborated  with  Manuel 
Hernandez- Trujillo  and  others. 


INVENTION   (1961-69110) 


The  Cultural  Revolution  of  Ethnic  Power 

The  current  mural  movement  grew  out  of  the  upheav- 
als of  the  fifties  and  sixties  and  particularly  the  efforts  of 
Third  World  people  to  employ  the  resources  of  culture 
for  their  liberation.  These  struggles  were  not  only  to 
secure  civil  rights  and  social  justice,  for  which  art  was 
used  to  help  people  organize.  They  were  also  struggles 
against  culture  itself,  against  the  images  that  the  White 
majority  had  imposed  on  Black,  Brown,  and  Asian 
Americans.  These  stereotypes  had  been  used  to 
rationalize  discrimination  in  White  minds,  but,  more 
important,  they  had  eroded  the  self-esteem  of  ethnic 
people  and  their  resistance  to  exploitation.  People  of 
color  had  been  increasingly  cut  off  from  their  own  lan- 
guage and  customs  and  the  knowledge  of  the  achieve- 
ments of  their  heritage.  Millions  of  enslaved  Blacks  were 
the  first  to  experience  this  rupture.  The  defeat  of  Mexico 
in  1848  meant  that  the  Spanish-speaking  residents  of  the 
Southwest  and  ail  those  who  immigrated  later  were  to 
have  their  language  and  culture  suppressed,  in  spite  of 
the  promises  of  the  Treaty  of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo.  The 
Asians  who  were  brought  to  America  to  work  in  the 
mines  and  on  the  railroads  during  the  second  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  had  also  to  depend  on  their  own 
resources  to  preserve  their  language  and  heritage.  The 
experience  of  Puerto  Ricans,  Filipinos,  Poles,  Jews,  and 
other  non-Anglo-Saxon  immigrants  was  similar.  The 
public  school  system  and  ballot  did  not  acknowledge  the 
existence  of  "foreign"  cultures.  These  ethnic  groups  had 


to  submit  to  the  ideology  of  the  melting  pot  that  was  used 
to  justify  the  assimilation  of  immigrants  into  the  domi- 
nant English-speaking  culture  to  provide  large  numbers 
of  tractable,  cheap,  unskilled  workers  for  industrial  ex- 
pansion. 

Black  Power  and  Pride 

The  first  ethnic  group  to  turn  to  murals  to  affirm  their 
collective  identity  and  their  determination  to  save  and 
develop  their  communities  were  probably  Black  people 
of  the  inner  city.  This  occurred  as  a  result  of  a  major 
change  of  direction  by  the  movement  for  civil  rights  and 
social  justice.  The  prevailing  drive  for  integration  that 
had  been  pressed  by  Black  leaders  and  White  liberals  had 
in  fact  failed  to  improve  the  conditions  of  Blacks  in  any 
substantial  ways  during  the  decade  that  followed  the 
Supreme  Court  decision  of  1954  that  found  school  segre- 
gation unconstitutional.  Expectations  had  been  raised  by 
the  civil-rights  movement  and  government  legislation — 
the  War  on  Poverty  in  1964  and  the  Voting  Rights 
Law  in  1965 — but  the  condition  of  the  majority  of 
Black  people  had  deteriorated.  The  Kerner  Commission 
report  observed  that,  although  the  nonviolent  direct  ac- 
tion of  demonstrations  and  sit-ins  had  produced  scattered 
improvements,  "separate  and  inferior  schools,  slum 
housing,  and  police  hostility  proved  invulnerable  to  di- 
rect attack."'  One  result  was  the  rioting  that  started  in 
Watts  in  1965  and  spread  to  Chicago,  Cleveland,  Har- 
lem, Detroit,  Newark,  Washington,  and  other  cities.  At 


48 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  49 


the  same  time  some  Black  leaders  came  to  believe  that 
what  was  oppressing  their  people  was  an  economic 
power  structure  that  espoused  liberal  rhetoric  but  re- 
quired racism  to  sustain  itself  or  at  least  was  unprepared 
to  make  the  sacrifices  that  were  necessary  for  real  change. 
Blacks  had  begun  to  wonder  whether  liberal  integration 
policies  were  not  in  fact  self-defeating. 

A  new  mood  of  Black  self-reliance  and  pride  had  been 
emerging  during  the  early  sixties  that  was  articulated 
notably  by  .Malcolm  X  and  Stokely  Carmichael.^  It 
challenged  the  melting-pot  ideology — a  point  of  view,  it 
was  realized,  that  implied  that  there  was  nothing  of  value 
in  the  Black  culture  to  preserve.  .Moreover,  it  was  feared 
that  the  assimilation  of  Blacks  into  the  White  majority 
would  isolate  Black  people  from  each  other  and  make 
them  more  vulnerable  to  racism  and  exploitation.  Blacks 
had  increasingly  been  taking  over  leadership  roles  from 
liberal  Whites  in  the  civil-rights  movement  in  the  early 
sixties,  and  in  the  following  years  they  began  pressing  for 
Black  residents  to  control  their  own  communities  and 
win  their  fair  share  of  the  nation's  goods  and  services  by 
building  political  power  and  local  autonomy.  These  ideas 
and  experiences  coalesced  in  the  concept  of  Black 
Power — that  is.  Black  self-determination  based  on  the 
collective  strength  of  Black  people.  The  concept  led  to  a 
variety  of  strategies.  To  some  it  implied  voter- 
registration  drives  and  independent  political  action  out- 
side the  established  parties  until  a  substantial  base  was 
built  for  alliances  with  non-Black  groups.  To  others  it 
meant  Black-owned  business  serving  Blacks,  ghetto- 
owned  co-operatives,  and  community  control  of  public 
schools,  the  police,  and  other  social  services.  It  meant 
also  the  armed  self-defense  of  Black  neighborhoods,  to  a 
few  retaliatory  violence,  and,  to  still  others.  Black 
separatism.*  The  only  way  for  Black  people  to  survive,  it 
seemed  to  the  advocates  of  Black  Power,  was  for  them  to 
recognize  and  commit  themselves  to  their  unique  identity 
that  was  as  much  a  matter  of  soul  as  of  skin.  This  was  a 
profoundly  felt  sense  of  Blackness  that  connected  them  as 
soul  brothers  and  sisters.  It  was  also  a  special  kind  of 
creativity  that  had  produced  a  rich  culture  in  the  near 
and  distant  past.  And  that  culture,  particularly  its  music, 
but  its  visual  arts  as  well,  was  regarded  as  a  bond 
between  Blacks  and  a  source  that  could  help  them  build 
their  self-esteem.  It  was  not  only  their  cultural  heritage 
but  also  the  current  success  of  liberation  movements 
against  European  colonialism  that  moved  them  to  take 
pride  in  themselves  as  Afro-Americans. 

There  arose  demands  for  the  introduction  of  Black 
studies  in  school  and  college  curricula  and  for  the  reex- 
amination of  Black  history  in  this  country  and  abroad. 
"Afros"  began  to  supplant  hair  straighteners  and  skin 
bleaches.  Dashikis  replaced  shirts  and  ties.  Black  artists 
set  up  storefront  workshops  and  galleries  in  the  ghetto 
and  murals  began  to  appear  on  inner-city  walls. 

As  early  as  1964  Malcolm  X  had  designated  "cultural 
revolution"  as  one  of  the  purposes  of  the  Organization  of 


Afro-American  Unity,  which  he  founded  when  he  left 
the  Nation  of  Islam: 

A  race  of  people  is  like  an  individual  man;  until  it 
uses  its  own  talent,  takes  pride  in  its  own  history, 
expresses  its  own  culture,  affirms  its  own  selfhood,  it 
can  never  fulfill  itself. 

Our  history  and  our  culture  were  completely  de- 
stroyed when  we  were  forcibly  brought  to  America  in 
chains.  And  now  it  is  important  for  us  to  know  that 
our  history  did  not  begin  with  slavery.  We  came  from 
Africa,  a  great  continent,  wherein  live  a  proud  and 
varied  people,  a  land  which  is  the  new  world  and  was 
the  cradle  of  civilization.  Our  culture  and  our  history 
are  as  old  as  man  himself  and  yet  we  know  almost 
nothing  about  it. 

This  is  no  accident.  It  is  no  accident  that  such  a  high 
state  of  culture  existed  in  Africa  and  you  and  I  know 
nothing  about  it.  Why,  the  man  knew  that  as  long  as 
you  and  I  thought  we  were  somebody,  he  could  never 
treat  us  like  we  were  nobody.  .  .  .  And  once  he  had 
stripped  us  of  our  language,  stripped  us  of  our  history, 
stripped  us  of  all  cultural  knowledge,  and  brought  us 
down  to  the  level  of  an  animal — he  then  began  to  treat 
us  like  an  animal,  selling  us  from  one  plantation  to 
another,  selling  us  from  one  owner  to  another,  breed- 
ing us  like  you  breed  cattle.  .  .  . 

We  must  recapture  our  heritage  and  our  identity  if 
we  are  ever  to  liberate  ourselves  from  the  bonds  of 
white  supremacy.  We  must  launch  a  cultural  revolu- 
tion to  unbrainwash  an  entire  people.* 

Malcolm  went  on  to  anticipate  the  direction  the  mural 
movement  was  to  take: 

Our  cultural  revolution  must  be  the  means  of 
bringing  us  closer  to  our  African  brothers  and  sisters.  It 
must  begin  in  the  community  and  be  based  on  com- 
munity participation.  Afro-Americans  will  be  free  to 
create  only  when  they  can  depend  on  the  Afro- 
American  community  for  support,  and  Afro-American 
artists  must  realize  that  they  depend  on  the  Afro- 
American  community  for  inspiration.  .  .  . 

Armed  with  the  knowledge  of  our  past,  we  can  with 
confidence  charter  [sic]  the  course  for  our  future.  Cul- 
ture is  an  indispensable  weapon  in  the  freedom  strug- 
gle. We  must  take  hold  of  it  and  forge  the  future  with 
the  past.^ 

In  the  light  of  this,  Malcolm  proposed  the  establishment 
of  a  cultural  center  in  Harlem  that  would  conduct  work- 
shops for  people  of  all  ages  in  all  the  arts  as  well  as  Black 
history.  He  not  only  described  what  was  to  become  the 
function  of  murals  in  Black  and  other  ethnic  com- 
munities, he  anticipated  their  imagery.  He  emphasized 
the  importance  of  selecting  "heroes  about  which  black 
people  ought  to  be  taught."* 

Malcolm  repeatedly  spoke  of  the  high  culture  of  earlier 
African  civilizations,  particularly  those  of  West  Africa 
and  Egypt,  which  he  regarded  as  a  Black  society.  He 


50  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


spoke  with  great  pride  of  the  artifacts  discovered  in 
Africa  and  displayed  at  New  York's  Museum  of  Modern 
Art: 

Gold  work  of  such  fine  tolerance  and  workmanship 
that  it  has  no  rival.  Ancient  objects  produced  by  black 
hands  .  .  .  refined  by  those  blacks  hands  with  results 
that  no  human  hand  today  can  equal. ^ 

But  Malcolm  was  not  the  only  advocate  of  the  revival 
of  Black  culture  based  on  community  participation.  In 
1967  Stokely  Carmichael  and  Charles  V.  Hamilton 
v\  rote  that 

throughout  this  country,  vast  segments  of  the  black 
communities  are  beginning  to  recognize  the  need  to 
assert  their  ow  n  definitions,  to  reclaim  their  history, 
their  culture;  to  create  their  own  sense  of  community 
and  togetherness.** 

The  racial  and  cultural  personality  of  the  black 
community  must  be  preserved  and  that  community 
must  win  its  freedom  while  preserving  its  cultural 
integrity.  Integrity  includes  a  pride — in  the  sense  of 
self-acceptance,  not  chauvinism — in  being  black,  in 
the  historical  attainment  and  contributions  of  black 
people.** 

During  the  middle  sixties  a  Black  arts  movement  had 
been  developing  which  was  the  "aesthetic  and  spiritual 
sister  of  the  Black  Power  concept."'"  Larry  Neal, 
coeditor  with  Imarma  Ameer  Baraka  (LeRoi  Jones) of  the 
anthology  of  Afro-American  w  riting  Black  Fire  (1969)  and 
himself  a  poet  and  critic,  described  the  movement  as  a 
"cultural  revolution,"  as  Malcolm  had  before  the  Chinese 
used  the  term."  Neal  saw  the  Black  arts  movement  as 
absorbed  with  the  struggles  of  Black  communities  for 
.self-determination  and  addressed  primarily  to  Black 
people  rather  than  a  White  middle-class  audience.  It  was 
a  means  for  Blacks  to  define  the  world  according  to  their 
own  ethical  and  aesthetic  values. 

Early  Black  Murals 

The  titles  of  the  early  Black  murals  reflected  the  pride 
the  new  Black  orientation  attempted  to  instill.  The  Wall 
of  Respect  done  in  Chicago  in  1967  is  widely  regarded  as 
the  first  work  of  the  community-based  mural  movement, 
and  it  was  followed  by  Walls  of  Dignity,  Pride,  and 
Fruth  around  the  country.  The  Wall  of  Respect  was 
originally  the  idea  of  William  Walker.  He  had  grown  up 
in  Birmingham,  served  in  the  Air  Force,  and  studied  art 
at  the  Columbus  College  of  Art  and  Design  in  Ohio.  He 
worked  as  a  sign  painter  and  had  done  indoor  murals,  as 
we  saw,  in  the  fifties.  David  Bradford,  who  was  also  to 
work  on  the  Wall  of  Respect,  remembers  that  there  were 
hanging  in  his  mother's  home  in  Chicago  canvases  of 
Walker  on  Caribbean  subjects  with  long-necked  women. 
Walker  says  of  his  early  days  as  a  professional: 


It  was  in  .Memphis  that  I  first  became  aw  are  of  the 
fact  that  Black  people  had  no  appreciation  for  art  or 
artists — they  were  too  busy  just  struggling  to  survive. 
I  then  decided  that  a  Black  artist  must  dedicate  his 
work  to  his  people.  At  the  same  time,  he  must  retain 
his  relevance  and  integrity  as  an  artist. 

In  questioning  myself  as  to  how  I  could  best  give  my 
art  to  Black  people,  I  came  to  the  realization  that  art 
must  belong  to  ALL  people.  That  is  w  hen  I  first  began 
to  think  of  public  art.  '^ 

Walker  had  known  the  Black  community  around 
Forty-third  and  Langley  on  the  South  Side  of  Chicago 
for  twelve  years  when  he  brought  the  idea  of  public  art 
and  a  mural  to  the  Organization  for  Black  American 
Culture  and  the  Forty-third  Street  Association.  They 
agreed  to  go  ahead  and  that  the  subject  should  be  Black 
heroes.  7  hus  the  project  was  a  collaboration  of  cultural 
and  community  groups.  OBAC  (O-ba-see  in  Yoruba,  a 
Nigerian  language,  means  "chieftain")  had  itself  been 
organized  earlier  that  year  and  was  doing  workshops 
with  community  people  in  the  visual,  literary,  and  per- 
forming arts.  In  its  statement  of  purposes  it  asserted: 

Because  the  Black  Artist  and  the  creative  portrayal  of 
the  Black  Experience  have  been  consciously  excluded 
from  the  total  spectrum  of  American  arts,  we  want  to 
provide  a  new  context  for  the  Black  Artist  in  which  he 
can  work  out  his  problems  and  pursue  his  aims  un- 
hampered by  the  prejudices  and  dictates  of  the 
"mamstream."'^ 

The  Wall  of  Respect  did  just  that. 

Space  for  the  mural  was  provided  by  the  walls  and 
boarded-up  windows  of  a  building  that  stood  in  the  heart 
of  a  ghetto  that  was  condemned  for  urban  renew  al  and 
torn  by  frustration  and  crime.  But  Forty-third  and 
Langley  had  been  a  lively  commercial  and  residential 
area.  OBAC  poets  had  read  their  work  at  the  corner 
tavern.  There  was  a  still-open  storefront  church  in  the 
block.  The  artists  went  tcf  the  wall  in  hope  of  saving  their 
neighborhood  and  indeed  delayed  its  destruction  for  four 
years.  The  time  was  the  height  of  the  riots  and  racial 
tension  around  the  country.  The  preceding  July  disor- 
ders in  Chicago  had  resulted  in  the  deaths  of  three  Blacks 
and  the  arrest  of  533  people  before  4,200  National 
Guardsmen  brought  a  temporary  end  to  such  out- 
breaks.'* The  mural  told  a  different  story.  The  caption 
on  the  corner  oriel  window  announced:  "This  wall  was 
created  to  honor  our  Black  heroes  and  to  beautify  our 
community."  "Beautify"  implied  more  than  the  physical 
attractiveness  the  mural  would  bring  to  the  neighbor- 
hood. It  meant  that  the  wall  was  painted  to  raise  the 
awareness  in  local  people  of  their  "soul,"  creativity,  and 
power,  a  consciousness  that  was  expressed  by  the  then- 
new  affirmation  "Black  is  beautiful."  Twenty-one  paint- 
ers, photographers,  and  writers,  most  of  them  from 
OBAC,  participated.  They  divided  the  surface  into  sec- 


Twenty-one  Black  artists:  Wall  of  Respect  (partial 
view),  1967-69,  destroyed  1971 ,  Chicago.  (©  Public  Art 
Workshop) 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  51 


Eugene  Eda,  Mirna  Weaver,  Eliot  Hunter,  Jejf  Donald- 
son, and  William  Walker:  Wall  of  Respect  (partial 
view).  (©  Public  Art  Workshop) 


52  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

tions  related  to  the  architecture,  following  the  plan  of 
Sylvia  Abernathy,  a  student  at  the  Illinois  Institute  of 
Technology.'^  They  did  portraits  of  leaders  Frederick 
Douglass,  Harriet  Tubman,  Marcus  Garvey,  W.  E.  B. 
Du  Bois,  Malcolm  X.  Stokely  (>armichael,  and  H.  Rap 
Brown  in  one  area;  of  Muhammad  Ali,  Wilt  Chamber- 
lain,  and   others   in  a   section   devoted   to  athletes;   of 
musicians  Charlie  "Bird"   Parker,  John  Coltrane,   and 
Thelonious  Monk  and  singer  Nina  Simone  in  a  third;  and 
of  poets  Ameer  Baraka  Jones  and  Gwendolyn  Brooks  and 
yet  other  Black  artists  and  leaders.  Each  of  the  sections 
was  done  by  different  painters.  In  the  religious  section 
Walker  depicted  a  march  headed  by  Black  Muslim  leader 
Elijah  Muhammad,  titled  "The  Messenger,"  which  he 
later   painted   over   with    Nat   Turner   preaching   to   a 
crowd.'*  Eugene  Eda,  an  art  teacher  in  a  public  school, 
painted  a  monumental  fist  with  portraits  of  Malcolm, 
Stokely,  and  "Rap"  Brown  around  it.  Eda  recalls  that 
local  people  and  gangs  opposed  the  inclusion  of  King's 
jxjrtrait  at  first,  but  it  was  added  later.  Besides  paintings 
there  were  also  enlarged  photos  pasted  up  and  poems 
inscribed  on  the  wall.  The  Wall  of  Respect  established  two 
genres  of  painting  that  were  to  be  widely  followed — 
portraits  of  past  and  present  ethnic  heroes  and  symbolic 
or  narrative  scenes  of  climactic  events  in  ethnic  history. 
Almost  all  of  the  art  work  was  done  at  the  site.  It  was 
an  ongoing  joint  effort  of  artists  whom  residents  could 
watch  and  talk  with  as  they  painted.  The  artists  them- 
selves worked  and  reworked  their  images.  It  was  much 
more  than  a  playful  avant-garde  "happening."  It  was  an 
instrument  for  the  survival  of  people  and  their  commu- 
nity and  was  done  under  threat  of  defacement  and  vio- 
lence,  but   local  gangs   and   a   congressman   lent  their 
support.'^  The  art  and  activism  that  went  into  it  did  not 
come  to  an  end  when  the  painting  was  completed.  The 
Wall  of  Respect  became  a  focus  of  the  community,  with  a 
number  of  those  pictured  on  it  coming  to  speak  at  the  site 
to  gatherings  about  the  urgent  problems  of  Black  people 
and  to  perform  music.   At  its  dedication,  two  poems 
written  for  it  were  read  by  their  authors.  Don  L.  Lee 
proclaimed: 

The  Wall 

sending  their  negro 
toms  into  the  ghetto 
at  all  hours  of  the  day 
(disguised  as  black  people) 
to  dig 

the  wall,  (the  weapon) 

the  mighty  black  wall  (we  chase  them  out — kill  if 
necessary) 

whi-te  people  can't  stand 

the  wall, 

killed  their  eyes,  (they  cry) 

black  beauty  hurts  them — 

they  thought  black  beauty  was  a  horse — 

stupid  muthafuckas,  they  run  from 

the  mighty  black  wall 


brothers  &  sisters  screaming 

"picasso  ain't  got  shit  on  us. 

send  him  back  to  art  school." 

we  got  black  artists 

who  paint  black  art 

the  mighty  black  wall 

negroes  from  south  shore  & 

hyde  park  coming  to  check  out 

a  black  creation 

black  art,  of  the  people, 

for  the  people, 

art  for  people's  sake 

black  people 

the  mighty  black  wall 

black  photographers 
who  take  black  pictures 
can  you  dig, 

blackburn 

le  roi, 

muslim  sisters, 

black  on  gray  it's  hip 
they  deal,  black  photographers  deal  blackness  for 
the  mighty  black  wall 

black  artists  paint 

du  bois/  garvey/  gwen  brooks 
stokely/  rap/  james  brown 
trane/ miracles /ray  charles 
baldwin/killens/muhammad  ali 
alcindor/  blackness  /  revolution 

our  heroes,  we  pick  them,  for  the  wall 

the  mighty  black  wall/  about  our  business,  blackness 
can  you  dig? 

if  you  can't  you  ain't  black/     some  other  color 

negro  maybe?? 

the  wall 

the  mighty  black  wall, 

"ain't  the  muthafucka  layen  there?"'* 

And  Gwendolyn  Brooks  spoke  her  gift  to  the  mural  and 
its  community: 

The  Wall 

August  27,  1967 
[the  day  of  its  dedication] 

A  drumdrumdrum. 

Humbly  we  come. 
South  of  success  and  east  of  gloss  and  glass  are 
sandals; 
flowercloth; 

grave  hoops  of  wood  or  gold,  pendant 
from  black  ears,  brown  ears,  reddish-brown 
and  ivory  ears; 

black  boy-men. 

Black 

boy-men  on  roofs  fist  out  "Black  Power!"  Val, 

a  little  black  stampede 

in  African  images  of  brass  and  flowerswirl. 


fist  out  "Black  Power!" — tightens  pretty  eyes, 
leans  back  on  mothercountry  and  is  tract, 
is  treatise  through  her  perfect  and  tight  teeth. 

Women  in  wool  hair  chant  their  poetry. 

Phil  Cohran  gives  us  messages  and  music 

made  of  developed  bone  and  polished  and  honed 

cult. 
It  is  the  Hour  of  tribe  and  of  vibration, 
the  day-long  Hour.  It  is  the  Hour 
of  ringing,  rouse,  of  ferment-festival. 

On  Forty-third  and  Langley 

black  furnaces  resent  ancient 

legislatures 

or  ploy  and  scruple  and  practical  gelatin. 

They  keep  the  fever  in, 

fondle  the  fever. 

All 

worship  the  Wall. 

I  mount  the  rattling  wood.  Walter 

says,  "She  is  good. '  Says,  "She 

our  Sister  is.'  In  front  of  me 

hundreds  of  faces,  red-brown,  brown,  black,  ivory, 

yield  me  hot  trust,  their  yea  and  their 

Announcement 
that  they  are  ready  to  rile  the  high-flung  ground. 
Behind  me.  Paint. 
Heroes. 

No  child  has  defiled 

the  Heroes  of  this  Wall  this  serious  Appointment 
this  still  Wing 
this  Scald  this  Flute  this  heavy  Light  this  Hinge. 

An  emphasis  is  paroled. 

The  old  decapitations  are  revised, 

the  dispossessions  beakless. 

And  we  sing.'* 

The  Wall  of  Respect  became  a  community  totem,  a 
symbol  of  its  identity.  New  panels  were  added  in  1969, 
when  Eda  replaced  his  fist  and  portraits  with  Klansmen 
and  police  brutalizing  Black  people  and  Walker  made 
further  changes.  The  same  year  across  the  street  both 
painters  began  the  Wall  of  Truth.  A  sign  over  its  doorway 
read:  "We  the  People  of  this  community  claim  this  bldg. 
in  order  to  preserve  what  is  ours."  The  efforts  of  urban 
renewal  to  demolish  these  buildings  met  with  continued 
community  resistance,  and  it  was  only  a  fire  in  1971  that 
;  destroyed  what  has  come  to  be  regarded  as  the  first  of  the 
community  murals.  Even  then  at  least  one  panel  was 
saved  and  remounted  in  front  of  Malcolm  X  Commu'iiity 
College.  The  Wall  of  Respect  attracted  the  press.  Ebony  did 
an  article  on  it  in  1967  that  gave  it  national  notice.^"  The 
mural  caught  the  imagination  of  Black  people  around  the 
country  who  were  seeking  through  cultural  nationalism 
to  build  confidence  to  resist  discrimination  and  violence 
against  them.  It  also  encouraged  artists  of  all  races,  says 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  53 

Mark  Rogovin,  to  undertake  cooperative  expressions  on 
social  themes,  even  though  they  had  imperfect  materials 
to  work  with.  The  importance  of  the  Wall  of  Respect  lay 
first  in  its  serving  the  people  of  its  neighborhood,  then  in 
its  spreading  the  idea  of  art  done  outdoors  in  public  by  a 
collaboration  of  artists,  some  of  them  local  residents,  but 
all  of  whom  sought  to  speak  out  for  Black  people  and 
their  right  to  social  justice. 

In  the  summer  that  the  Wall  of  Respect  was  being 
created  Detroit  was  undergoing  the  most  destructive  riot 
of  the  era.  Paratroopers  as  well  as  the  National 
Guardsmen  had  been  brought  in.  Forty-three  people 
were  killed.^*  The  following  year,  1968,  The  East  Side 
Voice  invited  Walker  and  Eda  along  with  other  artists  who 
worked  on  the  Wall  of  Respect  to  Detroit  to  do  there  the 
kind  of  public  art  that  had  been  begun  in  Chicago. '^^ 
Their  first  work  in  the  Detroit  ghetto  was  the  Wall  of 
Dignity.  It  was  done  on  a  one-story  brick  wall  of  a 
building  that  had  been  a  skating  rink  and  wrestling  hall 
before  it  was  burnt  out  the  year  before  when  Black 
people  took  out  their  rage  by  attacking  property.  Within 
a  mile  were  four  truck  and  automobile  plants.  Posters  of 
wrestling  heroes  and  villains.  Black  and  White,  were 
pasted  along  the  wall  before  the  mural.  Eda  now  replaced 
these  with  portraits  of  Malcolm  X,  .Marcus  Garvey,  and 
other  Black  leaders. ^^  Across  the  top  he  painted  a  frieze 
that  showed  a  king  and  queen  issuing  instructions  to  their 
retainers  from  a  dais  in  their  outdoor  court  surrounded 
by  timbered  buildings  and  masonry  fortifications.  This 
was  Benin  City  in  what  is  now  Nigeria,  which  was  famed 
for  its  bronze  casting  from  as  early  as  1400.  Eda  included 
images  of  court  officials  from  two  high-relief  bronze 
plaques  that  once  had  clad  the  pillars  of  the  audience 
chambers.  There  are  also  over-life-sized  scarified  faces  to 
which  the  Benin  and  earlier  Ife  bronze  casters  had  given  a 
highly  refined  style.  The  idealized  naturalism  of  these 
figures  is  of  great  beauty,  certainly  one  of  the  achieve- 
ments of  human  culture,  and  Eda  clearly  wanted  to 
impress  this  on  the  people  of  the  Detroit  ghetto.  The 
remainder  of  the  frieze  is  given  over  to  scenes  from 
ancient  Egypt — artists,  leaders,  warriors  in  a  chariot, 
boatmen,  the  Sphinx,  and  pyramids,  rendered  in  the  flat 
profile  style  of  Egyptian  murals,  all  of  which  Eda  pre- 
sents as  a  Black  civilization.  Beneath  the  frieze  Walker 
and  Edward  Christmas  did  a  series  of  vignettes,  some 
directly  on  the  brick,  some  on  panels  attached  to  it.  One 
shows  the  chained  victims  of  a  slave  ship  presented  in 
overlapping  silhouettes  outlined  with  white.  Above  it  the 
rendering  was  reversed  to  a  black-on-white  line  drawing 
of  a  crowd,  also  in  profile,  being  addressed  by  a  speaker 
with  the  words  of  Ameer  Baraka,  "Calling  All  Black 
People.  .  .  ."  Another  panel  shows  the  interlocking  faces 
and  features  of  four  youngsters.  And  across  the  bottom 
are  successive  waves  of  Black  men  in  dashikis,  their  eyes 
staring  with  intense  determination  to  make  good  their 
heritage.  In  each  instance  Walker  utilized  different  vari- 
ations on  his  style  of  overlapping  parallel  figures  to 
express  collective  experience. 


Eugene  Eda,  William  Walker,  Edward  Christmas,  and 
Eliot  Hunter:  Wall  of  Dignity,  196S,  Detroit.  (Photo 
Robert  Sommer) 


ER 

Eugene  Eda:  Wall  of  Dignity  (detail) 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  55 


The  Chicago  muralists  were  next  invited  to  vsork  v\  ith 
local  artists  on  the  Grace  Kpiscopal  Church  near  the  site 
of  the  riots,  and  they  created  the  Wall  of  Pride.  Their  final 
project  in  FJetroit  was  across  the  street  from  the  Wall  of 
Dignity  at  Saint  Bernard's  Church.  Eda  and  Walker  were 
asked  to  paint  a  set  of  panels  for  the  facade  on  the 
relevance  of  the  Israelites'  liberation  from  bondage  to  the 
present  experience  of  Black  people.  A  similar  comparison 
had  inspired  the  spirituals  of  plantation  workers  in  the 
past.  Eda  did  the  central  panel  depicting  a  Black  Moses 
before  a  Black  Pharaoh  with  slaves  in  the  background.  In 
the  panel  to  the  left,  Walker  presented  Black  people 
chained  and  behind  bars,  but  praying.  The  stylization  of 
this  panel  is  immensely  impressive.  The  whole  scene  is 
rendered  in  parallel  vertical,  sometimes  vibrating,  lines 
that  suggest  tears  and  bodies  trembling  with  hope  as  well 
as  fear.  The  black  striations  recall  the  scarring  of  Ife  faces 
symbolic  of  the  overcoming  of  pain  that  Eda  utilized  in 
the  Wall  of  Dignity.  They  also  suggest  the  rough-hew  n 
gouging  of  woodcut  graphics  and  the  verticality  of 
Gothic  design,  which  Walker  emphasizes  with  the 
pointed  arch  at  the  top.  Finally,  these  stripings  are  tied  in 
with  the  crowded  parallel  profiles:  they  express  a  feeling 
that  is  shared  by  all  the  figures,  a  hope  that  seems 
promising  because  they  are  united.  Walker's  power  is  to 
create  imagery  with  wide  suggestibility  and  to  pull  it 
together  in  a  very  moving  and  simple  w  ay. 

On  the  opposite  panel  Walker  presented  a  new  exodus 
out  of  bondage.  Here  he  depicted  a  dense  march  of  Black 
people  at  the  head  of  which  are  .Martin  Luther  King,  Jr., 
and  Malcolm  X,  and  they  are  not  in  profile  as  on  the  left 
panel,  but  coming  directly  at  you.  The  church  titled  the 
three-part  composition  the  Harriet  Tubman  Memorial 
Wall,  giving  further  reference  to  its  theme  of  exodus  and 
journey  to  a  promised  land,  for  Harriet  Tubman  had  led 
slaves  out  of  bondage  to  the  North  before  the  Civil  War 
by  way  of  the  underground  railroad. 

Walker  had  used  the  motif  of  the  march  already  in  the 
Wall  of  Respect  in  Chicago  with  the  depiction  of  Elijah 
Muhammed  leading  a  demonstration.  On  the  Wall  of 
Dignity  across  the  street  from  Saint  Bernard's  he  had 
again  presented  different  aspects  of  the  collective  experi- 
ence of  Black  people,  using  styles  similar  to  the  concen- 
trated linear  imagery  on  the  church.  The  follow  ing  year, 
1969,  he  returned  to  the  Wall  of  Respect  to  add  a  large  icon 
of  grim  Black  profiles  confronting  jeering  White  faces, 
while  from  the  outside  the  open  hands  of  the  different 
races  reached  toward  each  other,  forming  a  large  cross, 
while  holding  a  wreath  surrounding  the  composition 
with  the  words  "Peace,  Salvation,  Peace,  Peace."  Here, 
as  at  Saint  Bernard's,  Walker  scored  the  faces  of  his  Black 
people  with  the  scars  of  suffering  and  dignity. 

All  of  these  elements — the  striated  faces,  the  crowded 
profile  figures,  the  mass  demonstration  and 
confrontation — would  return  in  Walker's  subsequent 
work.  What  seems  especially  to  absorb  him  from  the 
beginning  of  his  murals  is  expressing  collective  experi- 


W'illiam  Walker:  Wall  of  Dignity  (detail). 


ence  in  both  its  humane  and  its  hostile  moods.  Persons 
are  always  presented  in  groups.  He  is  concerned  with 
what  separates  them:  here  they  are  divided  by  race;  later 
it  will  be  their  identification  with  labor  or  management. 
He  is  also  concerned  with  what  can  bring  them  together. 
And  he  continually  explores  the  means  to  express  both. 
In  its  subject  and  form  Walker's  work  is  distinctly  a 
people's  art. 

The  importance  Walker  gives  to  motifs  of  people 
drawing  together,  confronting  one  another,  and  march- 
ing  makes   explicit   the   connection    between   the    new 


56  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Eugene  Eda  and  William  Walker:  Harriet  Tubman 
Memorial  Wall,  1968,  St.  Bernard's  Church,  Detroit. 


medium  of  community  murals  and  the  demonstration  as 
forms  of  people's  art.  Both  are  expressions  from  the  grass 
roots,  determined  statements  by  direct  public  action. 
They  are  also  labor-intensive  forms  of  public  communi- 
cation, technologies  appropriate  to  the  needs  of  local 
people. 

The  Wall  of  Dignity  and  the  panels  on  Saint  Bernard's 
Church  across  the  street  also  became  a  rallying  place  for 
the  community  like  the  Wall  of  Respect.  Seen  in  1974,  they 
looked  out  on  an  empty  lot  on  the  third  side  of  which 
stood  a  red,  black,  and  green  stage  with  a  large  sign 
overhead  that  read: 

Heroes  *  Prisoners  *  Crusaders  *  Martyrs  *  Heroines 
Mankind's  Search  for  Freedom,  Justice,  Opportunity, 
Righteousness,  Peace. 


William  Walker:  Harriet  Tubman  Memorial  Wall 
(left panel),  1968,  St.  Bernard's  Church,  Detroit. 


And  on  a  wall  up  against  new  public  housing  were  two 
Black  figures  ceremoniously  grasping  hands.  With  mu- 
rals on  three  sides  creating  an  atmosphere  of  heritage, 
solidarity  and  struggle,  the  empty  lot  had  been  trans- 
formed into  a  public  square  with  a  solemn  civic  presence. 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  57 


William    Walker:   Wall   of  Respect   (detail), 
Chicago. 


1969, 


While  Walker  and  Eda  were  painting  at  Detroit  in 
1968,  in  Boston  militant  Black  Power  murals  were  being 
done.  Gary  Rickson  and  Dana  Chandler  collaborated  on 
a  number  of  these  projects.  Rickson,  an  art  teacher,  had 
founded  the  Boston  Negro  Artists  Association  in  1963  to 
sponsor  exhibitions  throughout  the  country,  and  was  its 
president  when  he  began  doing  street  murals.  In  1966  he 
had  been  sent  on  a  cultural  exchange  to  the  Soviet  Union. 
Chandler  had  grown  up  in  Roxbury  and  graduated  in 
1967  from  the  Massachusetts  College  of  Art.  Later  he 
was  to  teach  at  Simmons  College  in  Boston  and  to  lecture 
widely  on  Black  art  on  college  campuses.^*  On  the  upper 
floors  of  the  three-story  Exodus  Building,  an  alternative 
school  for  Black  children  in  the  Roxbury  ghetto,  they 
painted  Black  men  with  weapons  laying  their  hands 
protectively  on  the  shoulders  of  their  children.  Next  to 
them  was  the  slogan  "Arm  yourself  or  harm  yourself." 

During  the  same  year  at  a  major  intersection  close  to 
downtown,  the  South  End  Neighborhood  Action  Pro- 
gram decided  to  transform  an  empty  lot  into  a  play- 
ground. Three  M.I.T.  graduate  students  in  architecture 
helped  local  kids  design  the  apparatus  and  basketball 


court,  and  the  youngsters  provided  most  of  the  labor. ^^ 
Rickson  and  Chandler  were  commissioned  to  paint  the 
five-story  brick  wall  at  the  rear  while  the  kids  added  their 
art  to  the  lower  part.  On  the  upper  half  Rickson  depicted 
a  huge  weeping  eye  looking  out  across  the  roofs  of  the 
city  at  a  White  man  hanging  from  a  gallows.  This  he 
titled  Segregation  B.C.  Below  in  Chandler's  section, 
Stokely  Carmichael,  leader  of  the  Student  Non-Violent 
Coordinating  Committee,  was  shown  radiating  energy 
from  his  hands  that  broke  the  chains  of  Black  men. 
Alongside  them  H.  Rap  Brown,  another  SNCC  leader, 
was  about  to  hurl  a  gasoline  bomb — in  defense,  Chandler 
still  says.  The  title  he  gave  his  section  was  Stokely  and  Rap: 
Freedom  and  Self-Defense,  and  he  told  a  reporter  that  "Black 
art  is  not  a  decoration.  It's  a  revolutionary  force."  He 
added  that  "there  is  no  Black  art  in  the  Museum  of  Fine 
Arts,  so  we  are  going  to  utilize  the  facade  of  buildings  in 
our  country  for  our  museum."^*  Both  this  pair  of  murals 
and  the  one  on  the  Exodus  Building  generated  con- 
troversy, partly  because  they  were  funded  by  Summer- 
thing,  a  project  of  the  Mayor's  Office  of  Cultural  Affairs 
with  federal,  state,  and  local  corporate  money,  which 


Dana  Chandler  and  Gary  Rickson  (Summerthing):  Ex- 
odus Building  Mural,  1968,  Roxbury,  Boston. 


had  been  allocated  to  murals  in  order  to  diffuse  racial 
tension.  Summerthing,  organi/x'd  in  1968,  was  one  of  the 
first  instances  of  government  support  for  murals,  and  in 
the  future  it  was  more  careful  to  monitor  its  projects. 
The  double  murals  were  later  destroyed. 

But  militancy  was  to  continue  as  <me  of  the  main 
directions  of  Black  murals  for  another  year.  In  1969  in 
Chicago  young  people  at  Saint  Dominic's  Church,  close 
by  Cabrini  Green  public  housing,  worked  out  with  the 
assistance  of  John  Weber  the  ideas  and  imagery  of  a 
thirty-seven-foot-iong  painting  that  was  one  of  the  first 
collaborations  of  a  team  of  untrained  community  resi- 
dents with  a  professional  artist,  particularly  on  an  outside 
wall.  This  is  important  because  it  was  to  become  a  major 
method  of  creating  community  murals.  Moreover,  while 
the  youngsters  were  Black,  Weber  vv  as  White,  a  graduate 
of  Harvard  who  had  studied  art  in  Paris  on  a  F"ulbright 


scholarship  and  had  recently  completed  a  master's  degree 
at  the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago.  His  ability  to  work  in  the 
ghetto  and  what  he  could  bring  to  it  was  another  break- 
through in  cooperation.  Producing  the  mural  was  a 
summer  long  undertaking,  involving  scores  of  young 
people,  some  for  only  a  few  days.  In  the  manner  of  the 
Walls  of  Respect  and  Dignity,  it  incorporated  portraits  of 
Black  leaders,  here,  Frederick  Douglass,  .Malcolm  X, 
Huey  Newton,  and  Erika  Huggins.  They  confront 
skeletons  and  a  pig  wearing  helmets.  Between  them  are 
images  of  an  enlarged  upright  fist  holding  broken  chains 
seen  against  a  fallen  open  hand,  broken  off  like  a  piece  of 
sculpture,  while  in  the  background  are  guns  and  thick 
blades  of  flame.  The  caption  is  "Dare  to  Struggle,  Dare 
to  Win,  All  Power  to  the  People."  The  design  recalls  the 
chunky,  thickly  outlined  images  of  the  French  painter 
Fernand  Leger,  a  political  progressive  himself,  who  had 
developed  a  cubist  style  based  on  both  ancient  statuary 
and  machine  forms,  that  he  usually  employed  to  cele- 
rate  the  labor  and  pleasures  of  workers.  (It  is  probably 
the  common  borrowing  from  Leger  that  makes  this  and 


later  murals  that  Weber  directed  resemble  those  done  by 
the  Ramona  Parra  Brigades  in  Chile,  that  also  got  under 
way  in  1969.)  The  slogan  and  imagery  which  were  the 
ideas  of  the  Saint  Dominic  youngsters, ^^  were  adopted 
from  the  Black  Panther  party.  Huey  Newton,  its  na- 
tional chairman,  was  at  that  time  imprisoned  in  Califor- 
nia, convicted  of  the  murder  of  a  police  officer,  and  Erika 
Huggins,  deputy  chairmah  of  the  New  Haven  chapter, 
was  standing  trial  for  murder,  but  was  finally  cleared;  her 
husband,  another  Panther  leader,  had  been  killed  earlier. 
Her  image  with  fist  raised  was  taken  from  a  newspaper 
photo. 

The  fist  and  the  gun  had  become  important  motifs  in 
murals  largely  through  the  Panthers'  use  of  them  as 
symbols  and  realities.  Panther  artist  Emory  Douglas  had 
made  a  point  of  showing  community  people  with 
weapons  in  his  posters.  The  organization  had  been 
formed  by  Newton  and  Bobby  Scale  in  Oakland  in  1966, 
functioning  at  first  as  a  community-alert  patrol  that 
followed  police  cars  and  advised  Black  residents  of  their 
rights  when  they  were  stopped.  Police  harassment  and 
brutality  in  the  ghetto  moved  them  to  carry  unconcealed 
weapons,  which  they  were  ready  to  use,  they  stressed,  in 
self-defense  only.  They  opposed  rioting  and  v\ere  cred- 
ited with  keeping  Oakland  cool  after  the  slaying  of  Dr. 
King.  But  the  guns  also  served  as  symbols  of  the  unwill- 
ingness of  Black  people  to  submit  to  what  many  saw  as 
systematic  oppression.  The  symbolic  act  that  most  con- 
Gary  Rickson:  Segregation  B.(].  (upper),  and  Dana 
Chandler:  Stokely  and  Rap  (lower),  1968  (Summer- 
thing),  Boston.  (Photo  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art) 


Local  youth  directed  by  John  Weber:  All  Power  to  the 
People,  1969,  St.  Dominic's  Church,  Chicago.  (Photo 
John  Weber) 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  59 


60  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

founded  the  public  was  the  Panthers'  carrying  rifles  into 
the  CaHfornia  state  capital  in  1967  to  protest  police 
brutality  and  demonstrate  their  constitutional  right  to 
bear  arms.  Such  symbolic  acts  were  also  warnings:  art 
and  reality  had  merged. 

The  Panthers  regarded  their  program  as  a  series  of 
demonstration  projects,  examples  to  be  adopted  wher- 
ever there  were  Black  people.  Their  newspaper  made  this 
clear:  "The  black  community  in  general  would  learn  by 
observing  the  actions  of  the  Party  in  the  community,  it 
was  reasoned,  and  everything  the  Party  did  was  educa- 
tional."^'* These  activities  included  establishing  health 
clinics,  free  breakfasts  for  children,  and  community 
schools  that  taught  residents  about  their  heritage.  The 
Panther  platform  called  for  the  control  of  local  police  by 
Black  communities,  the  trial  of  Black  people  by  a  jury  of 
their  peers,  the  freeing  of  all  Blacks  in  jails  and  prisons 
because  they  could  not  possibly  have  received  fair  trials, 
and  the  provision  of  decent  employment  and  housing  by 
government  aid  in  establishing  community-owned 
cooperatives.  The  Panthers,  numbering  about  two 
thousand  nationwide,  were  avowedly  socialist,  and  the 
press  dramatized  them  as  a  bizarre  terrorist  group.  At  the 
same  time  the  FBI  and  police  tried  to  render  the  organi- 
zation ineffective  by  arrests  and  killings  on  trumped-up 
charges,  as  became  increasingly  clear  after  Watergate 
made  such  exposure  salable  copy.^^  A  few  months  after 
the  completion  of  All  Power  to  the  People  at  Saint 
Dominic's  Church,  Illinois  Panther  chairman  Fred 
Hampton  was  shot  in  the  back  of  the  head  by  police  who 
broke  through  the  door  of  his  Chicago  apartment  while 
he  was  sleeping. 


Shirley  Triest  and  David  Salgado:  Leaders  and  Mar- 
tyrs, 1969,  Merritt  College,  Oakland. 


Meanwhile  the  need  to  respond  to  racial  oppression 
was  provoking  some  of  the  first  murals  in  the  Bay  Area  at 
Oakland's  Merritt  College,  a  two-year  institution  that 
particularly  served  the  city's  Third  World  population. 
Here  Panther  founders  Huey  Newton  and  Bobby  Scale 
had  gone  to  school  in  the  mid-sixties,  and  Newton 
through  his  outspokenness  had  been  "a  large  influence  on 
the  whole  campus,"  as  Scale  put  it.""  In  1967,  the  year 
following  their  organizing  of  the  Panthers,  Newton  was 
arrested  for  killing  an  Oakland  policeman,  and  in  1968  he 
was  convicted  and  imprisoned.  A  "Free  Huey"  campaign 
was  joined  by  increasing  numbers  of  those  who  believed 
that  he  was  framed  to  destroy  the  Panthers.  In  1971  he 
won  two  retrials  that  resulted  in  hung  juries  and  finally 
the  dismissing  of  charges.  But  while  he  was  confined,  his 
supporters  set  fires  in  trash  baskets  at  Merritt  and  bar- 
raged  campus  walls  with  spray-painted  calls  to  "Free 
Huey."  Finally  an  agreement  was  reached  between  the 
college  president  and  the  militant  students  to  end  the 
trashing  by  painting  a  set  of  murals.  The  president  asked 
Helen  Dozier,  an  art  teacher,  to  coordinate  the  project, 
and  she  invited  her  classes  to  submit  designs.  They  were 
screened  by  the  student  activists,  and  a  composition  by 
Shirley  Triest,  a  young  White  woman,  and  David  Sal- 
gado, a  Filipino  student,  was  carried  out  on  one  of  the 
outside  walls  during  the  fall  semester  of  1969.  At  the 
center  they  placed  the  empty  wicker  chair  in  which 
Newton  had  often  been  pictured,  and  "Free  Huey"  was 
inscribed  on  its  back.  Around  it  in  a  high-contrast 
Photo-Realist  rendering  were  monumental  portraits  of 
Newton,  Bobby  Hutton  (a  young  Panther  slain  by  the 
police),  Malcolm  X,  Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.,  Robert 
Kennedy,  and  H.  Rap  Brown,  among  others.  In- 
terspersed were  repeated  appeals  for  unity.  They  called 
their  mural  Leaders  and  Martyrs.  (When  the  campus  was 


moved,  the  portable  building  on  which  this  was  painted 
was  transported,  and  in  1978  one  of  the  first  of  the 
outdoor  community  murals  in  the  Bay  Area  remained 
intact.) 

The  students  did  three  additional  works  at  the  same 
time,  one  of  the  first  instances  of  the  combination  of 
imagery  from  different  Third  World  groups,  which 
reflected  their  awareness  that  they  shared  common 
problems  and  aspirations  and  understood  the  need  of 
working  together.  One  panel  united  the  faces  of  ordinary 
people  of  the  different  races.  Flanking  them  on  one  side 
were  images  of  Che  Guevera,  Emiliano  Zapata,  and  Don 


Invention  (1967-69 1 70)  I  6\ 

Pedro  Albizu  Campos,  Puerto  Rico's  "Tiger  of  Liberty." 
It  was  marked  La  Causa.  On  the  other  side  there  was  a 
frieze  in  the  flat  style  of  ancient  Egypt  (all  in  profile 
except  the  shoulders)  done  by  Joan  X  showing  Black 
figures  moving  toward  a  Muslim  crescent  and  star  while 
carrying  scales  of  justice,  a  book,  a  model  for  a  pyramid, 
and  a  pick  and  shovel.  Alongside  was  the  caption  "Let 
there  be  Peace  &  Love  &  Perfection  among  all  creation." 
Murals  on  the  Indochina  and  other  Third  World  strug- 
gles were  added  in  the  following  months  and  into  1970. 
On  one  of  these  Wilma  Bonnett  depicted  a  wall-sized 
Puerto  Rican  Nationalist  flag  with  a  cane-cutter  against 


Joan  X  and  other  students:  La  Causa/ Peace,  Love  and 
Perfection,  1969-70,  Merritt  College,  Oakland. 


Wilma  Bonnett:   Untitled,   1969-70,  Merritt  College, 
Oakland. 


62  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

its  large  cross  with  his  arms  outstretched,  a  machete  in 
hand,  gesturing  toward  scenes  of  demonstrators  and  of 
the  massacre  at  Ponce,  Puerto  Rico,  in  1937  when  20 
people  were  killed  and  150  wounded  by  police  at  a  march 
of  nationahsts  calling  for  the  release  of  Albizu,  who  is 
also  pictured  in  the  mural. ^'  Among  the  Latino  students 
who  worked  on  these  murals  at  Merritt  College  was 
Domingo  Rivera,  who  was  years  later  to  do  a  number  of 
his  own  in  San  Francisco  and  become  director  of  Mission 
Media  Arts  and  a  member  of  the  city's  Art  Commission. 
Meanwhile,  late  in  1969  and  early  in  1970,  another 
interracial  set  of  murals  was  being  done  by  Malaquias 
Montoya,  Manuel  Hernandez- Trujillo  and  David  Brad- 
ford for  the  East  Oakland  Development  Center  (later, 
Merritt  College  Community  Educational  Center)  w  here 
they  taught.  Bradford,  who  had  worked  for  a  few  days 
on  the  Wall  of  Respect  in  (>hicago,  here  showed  a  Black 
couple  at  the  right  considering  possible  roles.  Fheir 
clothing  characterizes  them:  young  people  in  a  dashiki,  a 
mini-skirt,  or  Levi's;  a  grandmother  in  an  apron;  and 
men  in  suits  and  dark  glasses.  In  the  center  an  angry 
young  man  is  about  to  strike  out.  And  belov\  them,  as  if 
in  a  dark  basement,  others  huddle  about  a  naked  light 
bulb  and  pour  over  a  plan  w  hile  guns  are  stacked  at  the 
side.  In  Alontova's  panel  of  heated  color  the  central 
figure  is  breaking  his  chains,  holding  in  one  hand  a  book 
and  in  the  other  a  mirror — the  pre-(>olumbian  symbol  of 
self-knowledge.  Behind  are  figures  of  struggle  and  the 
cultivation  of  the  land,  while  to  either  side  are  a  victim  of 
a  firing  squad,  a  Zapatista,  a  Vietnam  vet,  farm  workers, 


David  Bradford:  Untitled,  1969-70,  East  Oakland  De- 
velopment Center  (later  Merritt  College  Community 
Educational  Center),  Oakland. 


Malaquias  Montoya:  Untitled,  1969-70,  East  Oakland 
Development  Center. 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  63 


Manuel  Herndndez-Trujillo:  Untitled,  1969-70,  East 
Oakland  Development  Center. 


and  a  Brown  Beret.  In  the  panel  of  Hernandez-  rrujillo 
amid  symbols  of  the  oppression  of  La  Raza  there  rises  an 
illuminated  area  of  flowering  plants  and  maiz,  the 
suggestion  of  a  bird's  wing,  indio  designs,  and  the  pow- 
erful shape  of  an  eagle's  talons.  The  brutalizing  of  images 
and  the  scrubbed-on  color  contrast  with  the  tender  deli- 
cacy of  the  new  life  that  seems  to  emerge  in  the  center. 
Thus  at  both  Oakland  institutions  minority  and  White 
students  and  teachers  had  been  able  to  collaborate  on 
public  art  that  affirmed  ethnic  pride  and  interracial  sup- 
port in  the  continuing  struggle. 

This  work  by  students  from  varied  ethnic  groups  in 
Oakland  in  1969  and  1970  was  not  the  first  instance  of 
people  outside  the  Black  Power  and  Pride  movements 
turning  to  community  murals.  Moreover,  while  Black 
murals  were  the  first  at  Merritt,  it  is  not  clear  that  the 
early  Black  work  elsewhere,  in  spite  of  its  major  con- 


tribution, directly  stimulated  the  earliest  community 
murals  of  Chicanos  and  Puerto  Ricans.  These  were 
certainly  encouraged  by  their  still-active  mural  tradi- 
tions, and  it  may  well  have  been  the  general  atmosphere 
of  social  activism  during  the  late  sixties  that  was 
sufficient  to  turn  Latinos  to  the  new  wall  painting. 

The  Chicano  Cultural  Revolution 

At  the  same  time  that  the  Black  Power  movement  was 
developing,  other  ethnic  groups,  fed  up  with  being 
exploited  and  humiliated,  were  turning  to  their  culture  as 
a  source  of  strength  in  comparable  struggles  for  self- 
determination.  In  1969  in  the  Southwestern  states  La 
Raza,  made  up  mainly  of  Chicanos  (people  of  Mexican 
descent)  but  also  other  Latin  Americans,  was  the  largest 
ethnic  minority.  In  California  there  were  three  million, 
twice  as  many  as  there  were  Blacks.  In  Ims  Angeles 
the  average  income  of  Chicanos  in  1969  was  $1,380, 
while  that  of  Blacks  was  $1,437.'^  Chicanos  received 
on  an  average  only  eight  years  of  schooling,  compared 


64  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

with  ten  years  for  Blacks  and  twelve  for  Whites.  In 
the  cities  of  the  Southwest,  Chicanos  lived  in  barrios 
(neighborhoods)  with  massive  unemployment  and 
substandard  housing,  though  some  of  it  was  public. 
There  were  high  rates  of  drug  abuse  and  gang  vandalism 
and  killings  because  young  people  could  not  turn  their 
frustrations  outward  against  the  racism  of  Anglo  society. 
The  numbers  of  Chicanos  were  being  continually 
swelled  by  undocumented  workers  who  came  across  the 
border  illegally  because  conditions  were  even  worse  in 
Mexico.  There,  what  "development"  was  occurring  took 
the  form  of  capital-intensive  industry  and  the  industriali- 
zation of  farming  by  agribusiness,  often  financed  by  U.S. 
corporations.  The  result  was  that  50  percent  of  Mexican 
rural  workers  were  unemployed.  In  Los  Angeles  almost 
half  the  Spanish-speaking  population  were  "illegals," 
who  could  be  easily  taken  advantage  of  by  employers. 
Between  75  and  80  percent  of  all  agricultural  workers  in 
the  Southwest  were  undocumented  Mexican  nationals. ^^ 
The  "illegals"  were  making  a  major  contribution  to  the 
economy,  one  that  was  far  in  excess  of  the  wages  and 
social  services  they  could  demand,  since  they  lived  in  fear 
of  detection.  In  the  farm  country  thousands  of  migrant 
workers  were  subject  to  the  mass-production  procedures 
of  domestic  agribusiness,  which  sought  to  get  the  most 
out  of  them  with  minimal  wages  until  workers  could  be 
replaced  by  machines.  The  result  was  stoop  labor  with 
the  short  hoe,  exposure  to  toxic  insecticides,  corrupt 
hiring  practices,  shanty  labor  camps,  irregular  schooling, 
and  an  unstable  community  life. 

In  1962  Cesar  Chavez  began  organizing  the  Mexican, 
Chicano,  and  Filipino  farm  workers  in  Delano.  Three 
years  later  they  undertook  what  was  to  become  the 
longest  agricultural  strike  in  U.S.  history.  It  was  not 
merely  a  matter  of  labor  organizing;  it  was,  as  Chavez 
described  it,  "a  movement,  more  than  a  union,"  a  "way 
of  living"  free  of  bureaucracy  that  could  only  come  into 
being  if  people  organized  themselves.  ^^  The  farm-worker 
staff  refused  to  give  their  members  numbers,  though  that 
would  have  been  more  efficient.  They  sought  to 
humanize  working  and  living  conditions  by  creating  new 
community  facilities  built  on  the  cooperative  usages  of 
the  past.  Their  roots  were  deep  in  traditional  culture, 
and  from  the  beginning  of  the  strike  the  eagle  and  the 
Virgin  of  Guadalupe  were  used  as  symbols  for  its  flags 
and  posters. 

The  black  eagle  with  its  wings  spread  was  an  amalgam 
of  the  Indian  thunderbird  and  the  symbol  on  the  Mexi- 
can flag,  which  commemorates  the  fulfilling  of  the  oracle 
that  the  Aztecs  were  to  complete  their  long  migration 
from  the  north  and  settle  at  the  place  where  they  saw  an 
eagle  on  a  cactus  struggling  with  a  snake.  The  place  was 
later  called  Mexico  City.  The  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  was 
not  the  cool  Spanish  mother  of  the  Immaculate  Concep- 
tion but  an  emanation  of  converted  indios.  She  was  the 
Dark  Madonna,  who  was  both  Christian  and  Aztec 
mother  of  gods,  Tonanztin.  Legend  has  it  that  she  ap- 


peared shortly  after  the  Spanish  conquest  to  the  very 
poor  indio  Juan  Diego,  asking  for  a  santuary  to  be  built 
for  her,  and  that  he  tried  to  persuade  his  archbishop,  who 
was  convined  only  when  he  saw  the  Madonna's  image  on 
Juan  Diego's  carrying  net.  The  Virgin  of  Guadalupe 
became  the  patroness  of  Mexico  and  particularly  of  the 
impoverished  and  dark-skinned.  It  was  under  her  banner 
that  Father  Hidalgo  led  the  rebels  against  the  Spanish 
during  the  War  for  Independence  in  1810.^*  Thus  she 
became  a  symbol  of  people's  struggles  that  was  carried  by 
farm  workers  in  the  valley  of  California. 

Meanwhile  in  the  mid-sixties  in  Denver  Chicano  un- 
employment was  over  three  times  that  of  Whites,  and  75 
percent  of  prisoners  in  local  jails  were  Chicano.^®  There 
Rodolfo  "Corky"  Gonzales,  a  former  boxing  champ  and 
successful  businessman,  resigned  from  his  chairmanship 
of  the  city's  War  on  Poverty  and  a  seat  on  the  steering 
committee  of  the  program  for  the  Southwestern  States 
because  he  believed  these  government  programs  were 
emasculating.^^  He  devoted  himself  both  to  community 
organizing  and  writing  poetry  and  drama  about  the 
struggles  of  La  Raza.  In  1967  he  wrote  /  Am  Joaquin,  a 
poem  that  gained  wide  circulation  because  it  expressed 
the  plight  of  Chicanos.  They  were  forced  to  choose,  he 
said,  between  embracing  the  Anglo  way  of  life,  which 
might  provide  a  full  stomach  but  insured  spiritual 
hunger,  and  adhering  to  Chicano  culture  and  facing  the 
likelihood  of  poverty.'*  Gonzales  had  already  sought  to 
resolve  the  paradox  of  cultural  survival  and  physical 
hunger  by  founding  in  1965  the  Crusade  for  Justice, 
which  created  El  Centro  Para  Justicia.  It  was  a  commu- 
nity center  that  provided  employment,  legal,  health,  and 
recreation  services;  a  library,  nursery,  and  dining  room; 
Mexican  shops;  a  gymnasium  and  ballroom;  a  school 
with  "liberation  classes";  a  "revolutionary  theater";  and 
an  art  gallery.'^  The  Crusade  was  also  to  sponsor  murals. 
Gonzales  offered  dynamic  leadership  for  the  cause  of 
Chicano  nationalism  and  authored  the  Plan  of  the  Barrio, 
that  called  for  community  control  of  all  facets  of  its 
public  life  and  the  restoration  of  ancestral  lands  to  the 
pueblos,  the  villages  of  the  countryside. 

The  Crusade's  social  and  cultural  efforts  were  crystal- 
lized in  the  revival  of  the  concept  of  Aztlan  by  the  young 
San  Diego  poet  Alberto  Alurista  and  the  Youth  Libera- 
tion Conference  that  was  held  in  Denver  in  1969  and 
which  Chicanos  from  all  over  the  country  attended. 
Aztlan  was  the  legendary  and  perhaps  historic  homeland 
of  the  ancestors  of  the  Aztecs  in  what  is  now  the  south- 
western United  States.  They  are  said  to  have  migrated 
from  there  to  the  site  of  modern  Mexico  City  where  they 
founded  their  new  capital  in  1325.  The  Spiritual  Plan  of 
Aztlan  that  the  Denver  conference  produced  spoke  for 
the  consciousness  of  nationhood  that  Chicanos  had  been 
working  towards  during  the  sixties: 

In  the  spirit  of  a  new  people  that  is  conscious  not  only 
of  its  proud  heritage,  but  also  of  the  brutal  "gringo" 


invasion  of  our  territories,  we  the  Chicano  inhabitants 
and  civiHzers  of  the  northern  land  of  Aztlan,  from 
whence  came  our  forefathers,  reclaiming  the  land  of 
their  birth  and  consecrating  the  determination  of  our 
people  of  the  sun,  declare  that  the  call  of  our  blood  is 
our  power,  our  responsibility,  and  our  inevitable 
destiny. 

We  are  free  and  sovereign  to  determine  those  tasks 
which  are  justly  called  for  by  our  house,  our  land,  the 
sweat  of  our  brows,  and  by  our  hearts.  Aztlan  belongs 
to  those  that  plant  the  seeds,  water  the  fields,  and 
gather  the  crops,  and  not  to  the  foreign  Europeans.  We 
do  not  recognize  capricious  frontiers  on  the  Bronze 
Continent. 

Brotherhood  unites  us,  love  for  our  brothers  makes 
us  a  people  whose  time  has  come  and  who  struggles 
against  the  foreigner  "gabacho"  who  exploits  our  ricnes 
and  destroys  our  culture.  With  our  heart  in  our  hand 
and  our  hands  in  the  soil,  we  declare  the  independence 
of  our  mestizo  Nation.  We  are  a  bronze  people  with  a 
bronze  culture.  Before  the  world,  before  all  of  North 
America,  before  all  our  brothers  in  the  Bronze  Conti- 
nent, we  are  a  Nation.  We  are  a  union  of  free  pueblos. 
We  are  Aztlan. 

To  hell  with  the  nothing  race. 

All  power  for  our  people 
March  31,  1969'»» 

The  feelings  of  brotherhood  of  which  Gonzales  spoke 
Chicanos  also  call  carnalismo,  "common  flesh."  It  implies 
a  unity  that  is  cultural  as  well  as  genetic,  the  conscious- 
ness of  La  Raza.  It  is  a  sense  of  identity  due  to  a  common 
way  of  life,  a  distinct  language,  and  a  garrulous  absorp- 
tion of  people  in  local  affairs.  The  specific  form  that  the 
nation  of  Aztlan  was  to  take  has  remained  a  subject  of 
discussion  among  Chicanos.  Few  seriously  pursued  the 
idea  of  independence  or  a  separate  state  within  the 
United  States.  More  often  Chicanos  have  sought  to 
realize  Aztlan  in  terms  of  community  organizing,  the 
developing  of  locally  controlled  institutions,  the  mutual 
support  of  Chicanos  in  different  cities,  and  the  develop- 
ing of  political  leverage  on  the  state  and  national  scene 

i  within  the  context  of  mainstream  politics.  Gonzales 
wrote  of  the  Chicanos  in  his  Plan  of  the  Barrio,  "We  are 

'  basically  a  communal  people,"  and  went  on  to  describe  a 
vision  of  cooperative  shops  and  small  industries  sup- 

^  ported  by  low-interest  loans,  family  homes  around 
plazas,  local  schools  where  Spanish  is  the  first  language, 
and  textbooks  rewritten  to  tell  the  truth  about  the  indio 
and  Mexican  contribution  to  the  Southwest.^'  Its  aims 
have  been  not  only  to  bring  an  end  to  racial  discrimina- 
tion against  Raza  people  but  also  to  restore  their  lan- 
guage, culture,  and  social  forms,  particularly  indigenous 
cooperative  institutions.  And  the  spirit  of  Aztlan  has 
informed  murals  from  Chicago  to  Santa  Fe  and  San 
Diego. 

In  1967  Reies  Tijerina  led  a  raid  of  the  Alianza  Federal 
de  Pueblos  Libres  on  a  courthouse  in  northern  New 
Mexico  to  make  a  citizen's  arrest  of  the  district  attorney 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  65 

of  Santa  Fe  county  for  obstructing  their  efforts  to  recover 
ancestral  lands.  The  Alianza  itself,  founded  in  1962,  was 
an  organization  of  rural  villages  that  sought  to  reclaim 
land  grants  that  had  been  lost  to  the  Anglos  by  force  and 
guile  since  the  Mexican  War.  It  and  independent  Raza 
groups  and  villages  in  New  Mexico,  inspired  by  com- 
munal traditions,  experimented  in  cooperative  farming, 
collectively  owned  stores  and  small  industry,  and 
community-controlled  social  services. ^^  The  murals  of 
Santa  Fe  that  Los  Artes  de  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan 
began  in  1970  grew  out  of  this  spirit  of  protest  and  the 
sense  that  Chicanos  could  resist  racism  only  by  reaching 
back  to  their  old  culture  and  usages  to  shape  a  modern 
way  of  life  that  was  uniquely  their  own. 

The  concept  of  "cultural  revolution"  was  adopted  by 
Raza  intellectuals,  as  it  was  by  Blacks.  Eliu  Carranza, 
professor  of  .Mexican  American  Graduate  Studies  at  San 
Jose  State  College  (later  University),  wrote  in  1969: 

....  This  is  the  essence  of  the  Chicano  Cultural 
Revolution.  A  confrontation  and  a  realization  of  worth 
and  value  through  a  brutally  honest  self-examination 
has  occurred  and  has  revealed  to  Chicanos  a  link  with 
the  past  and  a  leap  into  the  future,  a  future  which 
Chicanos  are  fashioning,  a  future  that  has  validity  for 
Chicanos  because  Chicanos  are  the  agents,  i.e.,  the 
creators  and  the  builders  of  their  destiny."** 

This  cultural  revolution  has  become  manifest  not  only  in 
murals  but  also  in  a  burst  of  imaginative  writing  and 
social  action.  But  the  murals  reveal  with  particular  clarity 
the  encouragement  that  Raza  people  have  sought  in  their 
heritage  to  "leap  into  the  future." 

Early  Chicano  Murals 

The  first  documented  community-based  Chicano 
murals  were  done  in  1968  in  Del  Rey  and  Sacramento, 
California,  in  Denver,  and  in  Chicago.  Del  Rey,  a  town  of 
fruit-packing  sheds,  cantinas,  and  migrants,  is  sixty  miles 
from  Delano,  where  the  farm  workers'  strike  began  in 
1965.^''  Nearby  are  two  dozen  more  villages  where  dur- 
ing harvest  season  tens  of  thousands  of  migrants  camp. 
The  Del  Rey  mural  was  painted  at  the  entrance  of  an 
abandoned  drugstore  where  Luis  Valdez  two  years  ear- 
lier had  createtd  the  Teatro  Catnpesino  as  part  of  the  farm 
workers'  organizing.  Valdez  describes  how  the  huelga 
brought  a  "cultural  revolution  of  those  who  were  too 
uneducated  and  too  illiterate  to  know  they  were  sup- 
posed to  be  culturally  deprived. ""**  Where  formerly  the 
farm  workers  had  been  frightened  by  Anglo  society  and 
silent,  they  were  singing  as  they  marched  into  the  vin- 
yards  with  their  simple  paintings  of  the  Virgin  to  bring 
their  compadres  out.  Their  newspaper  El  Malcrtado  (the 
mischievous  one)  published  poetry  and  essays.**  The 
actors  oiEl  Teatro  were  field  hands  who  wore  masks  and 
signs  designating  their  roles  in  the  slapstick  morality 


66  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Antonio  Bemal:  Untitled,  1968,  El  Teatro  Campesino 
Cultural,  Del  Rey,  California,  (Photo  Robert  Sommer) 


plays  of  labor  union  and  community,  a  mix  of  Cantinflas, 
Mexican  soap  opera,  medieval  sacred  drama,  and  Aztec 
ritual.  These  short  satiric  actos  were  not  written  but 
created  by  the  collective  improvisation  of  the  perform- 
ers,*' a  method  similar  to  that  of  the  murals  that  were 
to  be  produced  by  a  collaboration  of  an  artist  and  non- 
professional community  people.  Moreover,  the  murals 
and  actos'  practice  served  as  an  example  of  their 
purpose — to  inspire  social  activism.  Valdez  asks: 

What  about  culture?  It  is  akin  to  a  political  act.  It  is 
when  a  man  stands  up  and  takes  his  life  in  his  hands 
and  says,  I  am  going  to  change  my  life.  That's  what 
culture  is  all  about.  I  feel  that  before  you  get  any 
political  act  out  of  a  man,  that  man  has  to  feel  a  certain 
pride  in  himself.  He  has  to  touch  his  own  dignity,  his 
own  destiny.  La  Raza  needs  the  arts  to  tell  itself  where 
it  is. 

The  arts  are  largely  prophetic.** 

El  Teatro  Campesino  was  not  only  the  farm  workers 
speaking  to  themselves.  It  carried  their  message  through 
the  Central  Valley  and  to  the  big  cities  of  the  United 
States,  to  the  Old  Senate  Office  Building  in  Washington, 
and  overseas.  It  also  spawned  similar  teatros.  In  Del  Rey 
its  home  was  the  Centro  Campesino  Cultural,  where  art  and 
guitar  lessons  were  given  as  well  as  new  actos  of  Mexican 
and  Chicano  history  every  two  or  three  weeks. 


On  either  side  of  its  entrance  Antonio  Bernal  in  1968 
painted  a  visual  translation  of  these  historical  dramas.  At 
one  side  was  a  procession  of  Aztec  nobles  and  women.  At 
the  other,  a  procession  of  recent  heroes:  Adelita  (the 
legendary  woman  guerrilla  of  the  Mexican  Revolution 
who  has  been  sung  of  since),  Joaquin  Murieta  (the 
gringo-fighter  of  California  mining  country  who  was  also 
largely  legendary),  Emiliano  Zapata,  Pancho  Villa,  Reies 
Tijerina,  Malcolm  X,  and  Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.  In  the 
center  was  Cesar  Chavez  carrying  the  farm  workers' 
banner.** 

This  must  have  recalled  to  viewers  their  recent  pil- 
grimage to  Sacramento  and  the  daily  marches  into  the 
fields.  These  processions  and  their  resemblance  to  reli- 
gious observances  provided  the  living  prototyf>e  both  for 
the  actos  of  El  Teatro  and  for  what  is  depicted  on  the 
wall.  And  Bernal  connected  the  farm  workers'  current 
organizing  efforts  to  the  rituals  by  which  their  ancient 
Aztec  predecessors  sought  to  assure  the  welfare  of  the 
community.  The  Del  Rey  mural  thus  suggests  that  this 
new  art  form  in  which  community  people  actively  par- 
ticipated grew  out  of  the  crucial  experience  of  public 
demonstrations  by  which  they  transformed  themselves 
from  victims  and  spectators  into  creators. 

This  was  the  crux  of  the  cultural  revolution,  for  it 
meant  not  only  a  change  in  people's  relation  to  art  but  a 
radical  change  of  their  daily  life.  In  the  process  of  that 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  67 


Antonio  Bernal,  Untitled,  1968,  El  Teatro  Campesino 
Cultural,  Del  Rey,  California.  (Photo  Robert  Sommer). 


transformation  art  ceased  being  an  entertainment  and 
became  integrated  with  their  work.  As  the  demon- 
strations and  the  murals  were  work  for  social  change,  so 
working  in  the  fields  as  organized  farm  laborers  who 
were  gaining  control  over  their  lives  and  shaping  new 
community  institutions  acquired  meaningfulness  as 
forms  of  social  creativity. 

While  the  Del  Rey  mural  appears  to  be  the  first  of  its 
kind,  it  was  not  to  be  unique,  for  the  imagery  of  people 
marching  in  support  of  farm  workers  became  a  major 
motif  of  Raza  murals  in  the  years  ahead.  In  many  cases 
this  imagery  was  based  not  on  knowledge  of  previous 
murals  but  on  either  participation  in  such  demonstrations 
or  acquaintance  with  them  through  the  media.  Hence 
direct  action  in  the  streets  continued  to  foster  the  creation 
of  murals  by  local  people.  Bernal's  mural  summed  up  the 
traditions  of  Mexican  imagery  and  anticipated  much  of 
what  was  to  come  in  Chicano  murals.  There  were  not 
only  the  marches  but  also  the  familiar  Mexican  montage 
of  portraits  of  political  leaders  and  the  ancient  indio 
inheritance. 

During  the  same  year,  1968,  that  Bernal  was  painting 
at  Del  Rey,  Esteban  Villa  was  taking  his  students  from 
the  studios  of  the  Art  Department  at  Sacramento  State 


College  to  paint  in  the  barrio.  On  an  inside  wall  of  the 
basketball  court  at  the  Washington  Neighborhood 
Center  they  created  immensely  powerful  images  of 
Chicanos  struggling  to  break  out  of  their  oppression.  In 
the  center  against  a  farm  workers'  thunderbird,  a  naked 
howling  man  of  knotted  muscle  is  bursting  out  of  his 
constriction  and  the  wall,  while  to  either  side  other 
figures  stream  outward,  one  a  Brown  Beret  gripping  a 
rifle,  the  other  a  woman  who  carries  books  titled  Princi- 
ples of  Education — Aztldn  and  El  Grito.  (The  latter  title, 
which  recalls  the  cry  of  Hidalgo  when  he  began  the  War 
of  Independence  against  Spain,  was  a  journal  started  that 
year  that  published  new  Chicano  art  and  literature.) 
Next  to  these  images  of  both  militant  and  cultural  strug- 
gle, the  painters  pictured  a  calavera  with  daggers  in  it,  an 
indictment  of  the  current  condition  of  Chicanos,  and  a 
pregnant  woman  with  a  child  coming  forward,  suggest- 
ing the  future.  The  emphatic  flesh  and  bone  rendered 
roughly  by  big  patches  of  color  and  thick,  shadowy  line 
was  a  powerful  way  of  expressing  the  anger  and  energy 
of  people  who  were  becoming  conscious  of  their  pos- 
sibilities. 

The  visualization  of  the  naked  or  seminaked  body  as  a 
symbol  of  the  totality  of  human  powers — intellectual  and 
spiritual  as  well  as  physical — was  to  remain  a  major 
resource  of  Chicano  art.  It  had  its  roots  in  indio  culture 
and  Latin  machismo,  which,  though  sometimes  criticized 
by  Chicanos  themselves  for  its  insensitivity,  nevertheless 


68  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Esteban  Villa  and  art  students  from  Sacramento  State 
College:  Emergence  .  .  .  ,  1968,  Washington  Neighbor- 
hood Center,  Sacramento. 


grew  out  of  a  feeling  for  the  dignity  of  the  flesh  that  was 
respected  in  women  as  well.  This  elemental  sense  of 
human  energy  and  its  connection  with  the  earth  was  to 
give  Chicano  murals  a  unique  character  that  combined 
the  physical  with  the  visionary. 

The  Washington  Center  mural  was  done  during  Villa's 
second  semester  at  "Sac  State,"  where  he  taught  with  an 
old  friend,  Jose  Montoya,  who  was  in  Art  Education. 
(Jose's  brother  was  Malaquias,  who  did  some  of  the  first 
murals  in  Oakland  and  San  Jose.)  Jose  and  Villa  had  gone 
to  school  together  at  the  California  College  of  Arts  and 
Crafts  in  Oakland  along  with  Salvador  Torres,  who  was 
later  to  do  murals  in  San  Diego.)  Villa  became  interested 
in  public  wall  art  as  the  result  of  a  trip  to  .Mexico  in  1964. 
He  also  had  heard  about  the  Wall  of  Respect,  which  was 
created  a  year  before  his  first  mural.  Together  with 
.Montoya  and  their  students,  Ricardo  Favela  and  Juanishi 
Orosco,  who  dropped  out  of  college  to  do  what  they 
believed  was  more  relevant  work,  they  organized  the 
Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front  in  1968,  which  others,  noting 


the  initials,  dubbed  the  Royal  Chicano  Air  Force.  The 
artists  accepted  the  nickname  and  played  the  role  in  their 
later  imagery.  The  RCAF's  initial  mural  work  was  to 
carry  them  into  much  broader  community-based  art  in 
the  early  seventies.  Still  thriving  in  1979,  they  were  to  be 
one  of  the  longest-surviving  mural  groups  in  the  country. 
Another  Chicano  mural  painted  in  1968  was  done  in 
the  Pilsen  barrio  of  Chicago.  Until  1950  the  neighbor- 
hood was  occupied  mainly  by  Central  and  Eastern  Euro- 
pean immigrants.  Then  people  of  Mexican  descent  began 
moving  in  until  twenty  years  later  they  set  the  character 
of  the  community.  Most  of  Chicago's  half  million  people 
of  Mexican  heritage  lived  in  Pilsen,  the  largest  Chicano 
area  outside  of  the  Southwest.  As  a  barrio  publication 
described  Pilsen,  it  was  the  poorest  area  in  the  city, 
unemployment  was  high,  the  educational  level  was  low, 
health  facilities  were  lacking,  and  housing  was  substan- 
dard. A  young  fellow  had  to  join  a  gang  for  protection 
and  there  was  widespread  dependence  on  drugs.  But  in 
the  sixties  and  early  seventies  the  community  had  begun 
directing  its  own  redevelopment,  and  murals  were  part  of 
this.  Mario  Castillo,  a  student  at  the  Art  Institute  who 
was  also  working  with  young  people  in  Pilsen,  did  two 
murals  with  them  there  in  1968  and  1969.  Castillo  took 


Invention  (1967-69170)  I  69 


Local  youth  directed  by  Mario  Castillo:  Metafisica, 
1968,  Halsted  Urban  Progress  Center,  Pilsen,  Chicago. 
(©  Public  Art  Workshop) 


the  teenagers  to  local  museums,  showed  them  slides,  and 
gave  them  instruction  in  design.  Then  he  drafted  the 
general  outlines  of  the  murals  and  asked  the  youngsters 
to  work  out  the  details.  The  group  selected  the  ones  they 
liked  most  and  carried  them  out  on  the  walls.  Both 
murals  were  abstract  but  called  up  the  traditions  of  barrio 
residents.  Castillo  says  that  in  the  first  he  borrowed  from 
the  designs  of  the  Native  Americans  of  the  Northwest 
Coast  as  well  as  pre-Columbian  motifs.  He  regarded  both 
as  part  of  a  common  heritage.  The  intention  of  the 
painters  was  to  decorate  the  minipark  that  they  were 
developing  at  the  Halsted  Urban  Progress  Center.  One 
of  the  teenagers  wrote  "Metafisica"  alongside  his  part  of 
the  design,  and  the  title  was  adopted  for  the  whole  work, 
which  anticipates  the  visionary  character  of  many 
Chicano  murals  that  were  later  done  around  the  country. 
The  second,  the  Wall  of  Brotherhood,  was  done  nearby  as  a 
program  of  the  city's  Department  of  Human  Resources. 
Here  a  deliberate  effort  was  made  to  evoke  Raza  heritage 
by  adopting  the  forms  of  pre-Columbian  temple 
moldings.  In  the  center  of  the  decorative  patterns  of  each 
mural  was  a  peace  symbol,  which  had  special  significance 
for  Chicanos  because  of  the  excessive  proportion  of 
young  Raza  men  who  had  been  drafted  for  service  in 
Indochina.  Since  few  Chicanos  went  to  college,  they  did 
not  have  the  benefit  of  deferments.  Also,  the  courts, 
which  convicted  large  numbers  of  minority  people, 
would  sometimes  give  them  the  choice  of  jail  or  volun- 
teering for  the  Army. 

.Meanwhile,  the  first  Chicano  mural  in  Denver  was 
undertaken  in  1968  at  the  Crusade  for  Justice  center  by 


Manuel  Martinez,  who  also  worked  with  .Mayan 
motifs.***  Martinez  had  discovered  his  ability  to  draw  as  a 
delinquent  in  a  boys'  school  at  thirteen  when  the  nurse, 
against  the  rules,  secured  him  materials.*'  In  high  school 
he  began  winning  prizes  and  scholarships,  and  after 
graduation  he  took  art  courses  in  the  local  state  college. 
In  1967  he  hitched  a  ride  to  Mexico  to  see  its  murals  and 
meet  Siqueiros,  returning  the  following  year  to  paint 
with  the  master  and  help  install  his  March  of  Humanity  in 
Latin  America  in  the  Polyforum  built  for  it  in  Mexico 
City.  Working  as  a  lifeguard  in  Denver's  Lincoln  Park 
(later  La  Alma)  in  1970,  he  painted  two  poolside  build- 
ings, one  with  a  seventy-foot-long  mural  using  motifs 
that  were  becoming  central  to  Chicano  art.*^  There  was  a 
three-faced  mestizo  head,  symbolizing  the  mixture  oiindio 
and  Spanish  blood  that  flowing  together  make  for  La 
Raza,  and  enveloping  it  were  the  serpents  revered  by  the 
Toltecs  and  one  of  the  five  suns,  symbolizing  the  epochs 
of  the  Aztec  calendar.  At  one  side  was  a  full-length 
portrait  of  Emiliano  Zapata,  who  led  the  peasants  of 
.Morelos  in  the  struggle  for  the  restoration  of  their  tradi- 
tional communal  lands  during  the  revolution  of  1910-2  L 
At  the  other  side,  in  a  design  of  his  own,  .Martinez 
showed  four  hands — one  brown,  the  others  black,  yel- 
low, and  white — each  clasping  the  wrist  of  the  other  in  a 
symbol  of  the  unity  of  the  races.  Quetzalcoatl,  the  god  of 
culture,  was  also  there.  While  Martinez  had  begun  with 
the  intention  of  doing  only  the  mestizo  head  to  give  local 
people  imagery  with  which  they  could  identify,  he  and 
the  neighborhood  youngsters  who  helped  him  got  carried 
away.  As  a  further  result,  many  of  the  kids  began 
attending  arts  and  crafts  classes  at  an  opportunity  school 
where  he  taught. 

Shortly  afterward  Martinez  and  Roberto  Lucero  were 
painting  more  indio  imagery  at  Columbus  Park,  including 


70  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  youth  directed  by  Mario  Castillo:  Wall  of  Brother- 
hood, 1969,  Pilsen,  Chicago.  (©  Public  Art  Workshop) 


Manuel  Martinez:  Untitled,  1970,  Lincoln  Park,  Den- 
ver. (Photo  Denver  Postj 


the  last  Aztec  emperor  Cuauhtemoc,  who  was  slain  by 
the  conquistadores  because  he  defied  them.'^^  Martinez 
was  now  sought  by  other  recreation  centers  to  do  murals, 
and  he  was  creating  his  own  position  as  a  full-time 
muralist  for  the  Denver  Parks  and  Recreation  Depart- 
ment. But  w  hen  its  director  asked  him  to  paint  out  one  of 
Lucero's  murals  because  it  angered  a  councilman,  Mar- 
tinez refused  and  resigned.'^''  He  received  a  commission 
to  do  a  mural  in  Albuquerque  and  remained  in  New 
Mexico  running  bars,  returning  to  Denver  later  to  take 
up  murals  once  more. 


At  the  end  of  the  sixties  East  Los  Angeles  was  the 
home  of  about  two  hundred  thousand  people  of  Mexican 
descent.  Perhaps  the  earliest  mural  to  be  painted  there  by 
Chicanes  was  The  Birth  of  Our  Art  on  the  facade  of  the 
Goez  Gallery  in  1969  and  1970.  Goez  had  opened  in  the 
fall  of  1969  in  a  meat-packing  warehouse  which  was 
refurbished  into  the  exhibition  space  and  workshop  of 
Chicano  artists  who  had  joined  together  to  establish  a 
permanent  place  to  market  their  art.  They  also  hoped  to 
reestablish  the  old  apprenticeship  system.  By  the  early 
seventies  some  three  hundred  painters,  sculptors,  furni- 


Invention  (1967-69170)  I  71 


John  Gonzalez,  designer,  assisted  by  Jose  Gonzalez,  Robert 
Arenivar,  David  Botello,  Ignacio  Gomez  and  others:  The 
Birth  of  Our  Art,  1969-70,  facade  of  Goez  Gallery, 
East  Los  Angeles. 


ture  makers,  metal  and  ceramic  craftsmen,  decorators, 
and  restorers  became  associated  with  Goez.  One  of  the 
founders,  Jose  Gonzalez,  who  had  training  in  both  art 
and  engineering,  had  been  restoring  murals  and  statues 
in  churches  for  the  previous  dozen  years.  His  brother 
John,  another  of  the  original  members,  had  lived  for  a 
time  in  Spain.  Their  experience  partly  accounts  for  the 
dark,  ornamental  wood  interior  of  Goez,  intended  to  look 
like  the  cabin  of  a  galleon,  and  the  character  of  the  murals 
its  artists  were  to  do.  The  Gonzalez  brothers  were  joined 
by  Robert  Arenivar,  a  former  college  friend  of  Joe  who 
earned  his  living  before  by  polishing  chrome  bumpers  in 
auto  repair  shops.  He  is  a  husky  man  with  a  love  of 
classical  literature  and  quotations.  Joe  says  that  when 
they  began  doing  murals  together  they  depended  on 
Robert's  facility  at  transforming  a  verbal  concept  into 
visual  imagery. 

One  of  the  intentions  of  the  artists  who  opened  Goez 
was  to  introduce  the  doing  of  murals  in  East  Los 
Angeles.  Therefore  they  planned  a  work  for  their  facade 
and  tried  to  involve  as  many  artists  as  possible  in  some 
part  of  the  painting.  John  Gonzalez  did  the  basic  design, 
and  Joe,  Robert,  David  Botello,  Ignacio  Gomez,  and 
others  lent  a  hand.  The  mural  pictured  the  indio  and 
Spanish  sources  of  their  culture.  A  dark-skinned  nude 
woman  bearing  an  earthenware  bowl  modestly  in  front  of 
her  and  surrounded  by  pre-Columbian  artifacts  is  bal- 
anced by  a  naked  conquistador  similarly  holding  a  hel- 


met, while  behind  him  castles  and  a  wheel  (an  invention 
of  the  Old  World)  as  well  as  Velazquez's  portrait  of  his 
Moorish  assistant  are  offered  as  symbols  of  European 
culture.  The  two  main  figures  separated  by  a  sea  monster 
are  shown  dispensing  their  riches  on  the  land  that  later 
became  the  United  States.  The  composition  is  handled  in 
a  symmetrical,  heraldic  way,  and  the  figures  are  illumi- 
nated and  modeled  in  the  dramatic  manner  of  the  High 
Renaissance  and  Baroque.  There  is  a  distant  recollection 
of  Michelangelo's  God  conveying  the  spark  of  life  to 
Adam  and  a  closer  connection  with  the  mosaic  murals  of 
Jose  Reyes  Meza  and  John  Bene  at  the  Pan-American 
National  Bank  and  the  East  Los  Angeles  Doctors'  Hos- 
pital nearby.  These  styles  are  rendered  in  the  manner  of 
popular  magazine  and  commercial  illustration  of  the 
early  twentieth  century.  You  expect  to  find  antiques 
inside  rather  than  the  experimental  modern  art  fre- 
quently exhibited.  Although  the  mural  appears  old- 
fashioned  when  compared  with  the  work  of  Rivera, 
Orozco,  and  Siqueiros,  it  meant  the  reassertion  of  heri- 
tage to  its  artists  and  many  who  saw  it.  Much  of  the  new 
wall  art  in  East  Los  Angeles  that  was  to  follow  pursued 
the  manner  of  Goez,  Bene,  and  Meza — their  imagery  of 
indios  and  conquistadores,  and  the  display  of  the  human 
body's  grace  and  force,  rendered  in  an  updated 
sixteenth-century  way.  This  style  would  be  employed  by 
local  artists  to  reevoke  the  achievements  of  the  past  to 
suggest  what  could  be  accomplished  in  the  future.  The 
dramatic  modeling,  illumination,  and  arabesques  would 
be  used  to  convey  the  energy  the  artists  sought  to  ex- 
press. This  was  a  popularized  and  picturesque  "Spanish" 


72  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

style  like  the  elaborately  carved  and  upholstered  furni- 
ture that  merchants  in  the  area  tried  to  persuade  people 
had  the  opulence  of  the  aristocratic  past.  Whatever  its 
weakness,  the  style  did  stimulate  an  awareness  of  a  rich 
heritage  and  provided  a  bridge  to  stronger  invention  that 
was  soon  to  appear  as  the  anger  of  the  barrio  provided 
new  substance  to  its  art.  Some  of  the  forms  were  to 
remain,  but  there  would  be  a  new  vehemence  and  social 
content. 

The  frustrations  that  had  been  building  during  the 
sixties  finally  came  to  a  head  with  blowouts  in  the 
schools  in  1968  and  1969  and  a  general  strike  of  Raza 
students.  Students  complained  that  they  were  not  per- 
mitted to  speak  Spanish,  were  treated  with  contempt  and 
were  channeled  for  menial  dead-end  jobs,  that  Raza 
history  and  culture  were  neglected,  and  that  Chicano 
teachers  were  not  hired.  The  first  walkout  of  the  students 
in  1968  was  led  by  the  Brown  Berets,  young  men  often 
from  gangs  who  had  organized  the  previous  year  as 
barrio  defense  units  to  monitor  school  and  police  action 
against  Chicano  youth  and  to  protect  their  rights  "by  all 
means  necessary."**  Taking  their  example  from  the 
Black  Panthers,  they  exercised  their  right  to  bear  arms  to 
defend  their  communities.  In  1969  they  also  opened  a 
free  medical  clinic  in  East  Los  Angeles.  When  high 
school,  elementary  school,  and  college  students  went  on 
strike,  their  parents  came  to  their  support  and  the  barrios 
organized.  They  were  also  becoming  aware  of  the  dis- 
proportionate number  of  Chicanos  drafted.  A  national 
Chicano  draft  resistance  movement  had  been  organized 
in  1969,  initiated  by  the  UCLA  student  body  president, 
Rosalio  Murioz,  and  it  sponsored  the  National  Chicano 
Moratorium  in  an  East  Los  Angeles  park  on  August  29, 
1970.  The  demonstration  of  some  fifteen  thousand  was 
cut  short  by  a  police  attack  in  which  three  people  were 
killed,  one  of  them  Ruben  Salazar,  a  former  feature 
writer  for  the  Los  Angeles  Times  who  was  at  that  time  the 
news  director  of  KMEX-TV.  Salazar  had  been  hit  by  a 
tear-gas  grenade  the  police  fired  into  a  cafe.*^  His  death 
became  a  symbol  nationally  but  particularly  in  East  Los 
Angeles  of  Anglo  oppression  of  Third  World  people  in 
the  United  States  and  overseas.  The  growth  of  Chicano 
consciousness  that  culminated  in  the  Moratorium  pro- 
vided the  base  for  the  murals  that  were  to  follow  in  East 
Los.*^  One  of  these,  a  mosaic  work,  showing  the  news- 
man reading  to  young  people  with  images  of  their  heri- 
tage behind  them,  was  titled  Homage  to  Ruben  Salazar. 
Done  by  Frank  iViartinez,  it  was  mounted  at  the 
emergency  entrance  of  East  Los  Angeles  Doctors'  Hos- 
pital. (See  photo,  p.  171.) 

The  escalation  of  events  in  the  barrios  in  the  late  sixties 
and  the  development  of  Brown  Power  and  Pride  explain 
the  break  that  Chicano  murals  in  Los  Angeles  made  with 
the  well-behaved  academicism  of  the  work  of  Meza, 
Bene,  and  Goez.  Two  months  before  the  Chicano 
Moratorium,  Saiil  Solache,  Eduardo  Carrillo,  Ramses 
Noriega  and  Sergio  Hernandez  completed  a  mural  in  the 


Chicano  Studies  Office  at  UCLA.  Titled  Chicano  History, 
it  is  a  powerful  indictment  of  the  violence  that  La  Raza 
suffered  both  from  its  adversaries  and  itself.  It  shows  a 
muscular  naked  Anglo's  body  with  a  skeletal  head 
crowned  with  a  bishop's  miter.  In  one  hand  he  holds  his 
self-castrated  genitals,  in  the  other  a  sword  with  unbal- 
anced scales  of  justice,  and  he  strides  a  river  of  blood. 
One  Mexican  eagle  rips  at  his  chest,  and  another  carries 
off  his  crozier  that  ends  in  a  snake's  rattle.  He  is  con- 
fronted by  a  young  Chicano  couple,  the  man  holding  a 
rifle,  the  woman  sheaves  of  corn  suggesting  culture  and 
fertility.  Between  the  bishop  and  the  couple  are  a  contin- 
gent of  helmeted  police  or  soldiers  brutalizing  Chicanos; 
Uncle  Sam  is  carrying  a  bucket  of  blood  and  an  addict  is 
lying  strung-out  in  the  desert.  In  a  detail  like  an  updated 
episode  out  of  Posada,  the  Mexican  popular  engraver  of 
the  turn  of  the  century,  a  blond  Anglo  in  a  white  suit  is 
gnawing  the  arm  he  has  ripped  from  a  child.  This  is 
matched  by  a  seemingly  ravished,  blindfolded,  blond 
lady  of  justice  with  money  in  her  hand.  Meanwhile  in  the 
center,  another  Mexican  eagle  with  a  human  head  and 
chest  lifts  its  winged  arms,  freeing  itself  from  chains  and 
the  emblematic  serpent.  Behind  the  young  couple,  the 
desert  has  suddenly  been  watered  by  a  stream,  and  from 
the  other  direction  ranks  of  people  carrying  posters  ap- 
proach. The  picket  signs  carry  the  farm  workers'  eagle 
and  read  "Unidos  Venceremos"  (United  we  shall  over- 
come), "Crusade  for  Justice,"  and  "MECHA" 
(Movimiento  Estudiantil  Chicano  de  Azdan,  a  student  or- 
ganization). Although  the  main  figures  are  rendered  with 
the  detail  and  three-dimensional  modeling  of  the  earlier 
academic  murals,  there  is  a  vehemence  and  topicality  that 
makes  it  understandable  how  Chicano  History  stimulated 
murals  throughout  East  Los  Angeles. 

Counterculture  Murals 

Community-based  murals  frequently  involved  the 
collaboration  of  a  number  of  painters,  trained  and  un- 
trained. It  was  a  new  experience  for  them  to  make  a 
collective  work,  for  painting  for  at  least  a  century  had 
been  regarded  as  the  preserve  of  highly  professionalized 
self-expression.  It  is  understandable  why  it  took  time  for 
people  to  be  able  to  work  together  on  a  single  unified 
image.  The  first  murals  were  often  a  collection  of  sepa- 
rate compositions  linked  by  a  broad  theme.  For  instance, 
in  the  Wall  of  Respect  and  Wall  of  Dignity  the  racism 
represented  by  scenes  of  violence  against  Blacks  was 
contrasted  with  depictions  of  their  historical  achieve- 
ments, portraits  of  leaders,  and  scenes  of  civil-rights 
demonstrations.  The  exodus  theme  unified  Walker  and 
Eda's  panels  on  Saint  Bernard's  Church  that  were  differ- 
ent in  style,  although  this  made  explicit  the  difference 
between  the  ancient  and  present  exoduses.  Chicano  His- 
tory represents  a  more  unified  effort  of  artists  to  arrive  at 
a  single  image,  although  it  also  tends  to  be  composed  of 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  73 


Local  residents:  People's  Wall,  1969,  Berkeley.  (Photo 
Robert  Sommer) 


separate  but  related  episodes.  These  early  collaborative 
murals  developed  from  add-on  panels  and  images  to 
gradually  more  unified  ones,  which  occurred  as  a  result 
of  increasing  experience  in  working  together. 

The  most  elementary  collaboration  is  represented  by 
the  People's  Wall  in  Berkeley,  which  must  have  begun  as  a 
series  of  unconnected  graffiti  no  different  from  other 
walls  in  nearby  streets  and  throughout  urban  America 
where  young  people  left  their  marks.  But  this  wall 
because  of  its  location  became  the  site  of  written  and 
increasingly  more  elaborate  figurative  messages.  It  be- 
came a  pictorial  community  bulletin  board  writ  large. 
The  name  People's  Wall  was  probably  given  it  in  1969  at 
the  time  of  People's  Park.  This  was  the  first  large  wall 
between  the  park  and  Telegraph  Avenue  that  then  ran 
about  five  blocks  past  bookstores,  restaurants  and  shops 
serving  the  university  community  to  the  plaza  of  Sproul 
Hall,  the  administration  building.  This  route  was  the 
focus  of  a  decade  of  student  and  counterculture  activity 
which  climaxed  with  People's  Park,  the  project  of  stu- 
dents, a  few  professors,  local  residents  and  street  people 
to  transform  a  muddy,  unpaved  parking  lot  into  a  user- 
maintained  vegetable  garden  and  recreation  area.  The 
university,  which  owned  the  land,  wanted  to  clear  them 
out  and  to  build  on  its  property.  Although  the  faculty, 
student  body  organizations  as  well  as  local  merchants 
favored  the  park,  the  university  forcibly  evicted  the 
occupants  and  a  street  battle  ensued  during  which  one 
watcher  from  a  roof  was  shot  and  killed  by  the  police.  On 
Memorial  Day,  two  weeks  later,  thirty  thousand  people 
marched   through    Berkeley    in   defiance   of  Governor 


Reagan's  ban  and  the  presence  of  three  battalions  of 
National  Guardsmen.  The  newly  named  People's  Wall 
had  become  during  this  time  an  alternative  to  the 
mainstream  media.  Like  the  park  it  was  a  form  of  appro- 
priate technology. 

It  had  no  formal  beginning.  Shortly  after  the  eviction, 
the  wall  offered  scenes  urging  the  support  of  People's 
Park.  Later  there  was  an  image  of  a  figure  hooded  and 
draped  in  a  flag  together  with  a  city  councilman  and  a  cop 
blinded  by  his  visor  and  pointing  a  gun,  another  beating 
on  the  head  of  one  of  the  young,  and  a  tombstone 
inscribed  with  the  name  of  the  one  student  who  was 
killed  during  the  People's  Park  riots — James  Rector.  At 
one  moment,  there  were  portraits  of  bearded,  long- 
haired, smiling,  serious  local  people  of  every  color  lined 
up  and  confronting  you  as  in  a  school  photo.  Some 
waved,  some  folded  their  arms  soberly,  one  held  an 
infant,  one  a  dog.  Inscribed  across  the  scene  was  "Free 
Territory"  and  "Revolution."  Simultaneously  or  at  suc- 
cessive times  there  was  a  scene  of  the  city  in  flames  with 
the  call  to  "Liberate  Berkeley,"  and  images  of  Che, 
Bobby  Scale,  Huey  Newton,  the  Masonic  eye  in  a 
triangle  with  the  mystic  syllable  "Om"  printed  above  it, 
and  in  adjoining  panels,  a  multiarmed  hippie  molesting  a 
young  woman  and  then  her  swinging  around  to  kick  him 
in  the  groin.  There  was  also  "Whistler's  Mother" — 
seated,  but  holding  a  machine  gun.  The  caption  over  her 
read:  "Women's  Liberation  is  gonna  get  your  mama  and 
your  sister  and  your  girl  friend."  Another  image  and 
caption  called  for  "Kid's  Lib."  White  spots  had  been 
added  to  the  real  bars  of  a  window  in  the  wall,  and  below 
it  were  painted  red  and  white  stripes  with  a  peace  symbol 
superimposed.  In  another  part  of  the  mural  chimneys 
spewing  smoke  protested  pollution.  The  graffiti  ranged 
from  true  gang  inscriptions  like  "Red  Rockets  Rule"  to 


74  /  COiMMLNITY  MURALS 


"The  Bible  for  Peace,"  "Turn  On  To  Others  As  U 
Would  Have  Others  Turn  On  To  U,"  "Only  real  wars 
are  never  won"  ( — E.E.  Cummings),  "End  Greed,"  "End 
Graphitti,"  and  "Brothers  Try  A  Little  Togetherness." 
Finally,  a  few  years  later,  all  the  images  and  messages 
were  painted  out  and  replaced  by  the  new  proprietors, 
the  One  World  Family,  with  a  unified  mural  that  showed 
a  beaming  sun  and  flying  saucer  and  called  for  "The 
People's  Spiritual  Reformation."  But  in  1976  a  group  of 
artists  working  together  was  to  do  A  People's  History  of 
Telegraph  Avenue  reviewing  the  events  of  the  sixties  and 
calling  themselves  the  People's  Wall  Muralists. 

While  Berkeley  during  the  sixties  was  the  national 
focus  of  student  activism,  the  Haight-Ashbury  in  San 
Francisco  was  the  symbol  of  the  psychedelic  and  alterna- 
tive life  styles  of  mainly  White  youth  who,  it  was  said, 
"dropped  out,"  but  in  fact  actively  rejected  the  destruc- 
tiveness  of  conventional  vocations  and  personal  relation- 
ships. Many  had  left  comfortable  middle-class  homes, 
but  there  were  also  some  from  working-class  families. 
One  of  the  Haight's  communes  was  The  Family,  which 
had  come  together  about  1964.  Gradually  it  gained  pos- 
session of  the  building  across  the  street  from  the  Straight 
Theater,  the  scene  of  rock  concerts,  light  shows,  dances, 
and  poetry  readings.  The  Family  valued  psychedelic 
experience  and  sought  to  live  an  "organic"  life,  one  in 
conformity  with  their  understanding  of  nature.  Unlike 
most  comparable  groups.  The  Family  was  still  thriving 


Local  residents:  People's  Wall  (partial  view), 
Berkeley.  (Photo  Robert  Sommer). 


1969, 


Joanna  J obson:  Evolution  Rainbow,  1969-70,  Haight- 
Ashbury,  San  Francisco. 


with  some  of  its  early  members  as  late  as  1979  and 
operated  a  health-food  store  on  the  corner.  Joanna  Jobson 
and  her  husband  were  among  the  early  members,  and  a 
child  was  born  to  them  while  they  were  with  The 
Family.  Working  alone,  she  captured  the  spirit  of  the 
group  and  the  Haight  scene  in  a  mural  she  did  on  their 
building  in  1970,  calling  it  Evolution  Rainbow.  In  fact  it 
was  half  a  rainbow,  but  it  seemed  to  spring  into  the 
future.  It  reads  from  left  to  right,  beginning  with  clouds 
and  then  a  band  of  indigo  in  v\  hich  spermlike  cells  swim 
toward  tiny  flowers.  In  successive  bands  as  purple 
merges  to  green,  dinosaurs  appear  amid  the  vegetation, 
fish  and  octopus  swim  in  the  blue,  and  successive  forms 
of  life  emerge  and  cavort  with  one  another.  Finally,  in 
the  orange,  humans  appear  along  with  their  creations — 
tepees,  castles  and  churches,  ships,  battle-axes,  and 
peace  signs.  The  red  area  with  cut  tree  stumps  was  left 
unfinished.  One  of  the  longtime  members  of  The  Family 
says  that  the  artist  intended  to  contrast  there  scenes  of 
desolation  with  dancing — leaving  it  to  viewers  to  choose 
and  do  something  about  it.  The  final  band  is  clouds 
again.  In  1979  The  Family  still  hoped  that  Joanna  would 
return  to  finish  and  restore  their  rainbow . 

The  rainbow  motif  by  1970  was  becoming  a  symbol  of 
the  counterculture,  suggesting  its  hopes  for  a  fulfilling, 
peaceful  world,  one  in  which  people  of  different  cultures 
and  races  could  share.  Down  Haight  Street  in  two  years 
a  more  political  mural  called  Rainbow  People  was  to  be 
painted,  and  the  city's  museums  a  few  years  later  did  a 
Rainbow  Show  that  assembled  art  done  with  the  motif. 
Evolution  Rainbow,  by  reminding  viewers  of  their  place  in 
nature  and  responsibility,  anticipated  the  murals  that 
were  to  deal  with  ecology  in  a  few  years.  Arch  Williams, 
one  of  the  painters  of  Rainbow  People,  believes  that  the 
light  shows  and  the  chalk-ins  of  the  sixties  when  scores  of 
people  would  embellish  the  sidewalks  and  pavements  of 
Haight  Street  and  the  Panhandle  of  Golden  Gate  Park, 
led  them  to  think  of  big  art  and  prepared  the  way  for 
murals.  He  recalls  that  many  painted  their  rooms  in 
imaginative  and  wild  ways,  creating  new  spaces,  new 
environments.  Joanna  Jobson  was  one  of  these. 

Kindred  psychedelic  and  new-life-style  murals  were 
being  created  in  the  late  sixties  and  early  seventies 
around  the  country.  In  Baltimore  Bob  Hieronimus  as 
early  as  1968  was  introducing  them  to  staid  old  Johns 
Hopkins  University  and  only  finished  six  years  later.  He 
enveloped  the  walls  and  ceilings  of  the  chapel  and  stair- 
case well  of  the  student  center  with  occult  and  contempo- 
rary symbols  that  included  the  Statue  of  Liberty,  the 
Russian  bear,  Chinese  dragon,  biblical  prophets,  and 
Egyptian  and  kabalistic  imagery.  He  called  it  all  The 
Apocalypse.  Flowers  and  vibrating  lines  enrich  it.  There  is 
a  tonality  of  the  whole  ranging  from  deep  wine  to  gold 
that  combines  with  the  density  of  detail  to  create  a 
serious  religious  ambience.  Working  with  assistants, 
Hieronimus  sought  the  same  meticulousness  in  painting 
as  in  his  researching  of  the  symbols.  At  the  Graduate 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  I  75 

Club  in  1969  he  used  tarot  figures,  script  familiar  from 
psychedelic  posters  and  rippling  pattern  to  illustrate  the 
Lord's  Prayer.  He  also  founded  and  successfully  con- 
tinued throughout  the  seventies  a  college  of  esoteric  lore 
that  made  murals  part  of  its  curriculum. 

Hieronimus's  and  Jobson's  work  arc  important  exam- 
ples of  the  early  murals  of  the  counterculture,  which  the 
term  "hippies"  tends  to  demean.  Frying  to  create  an 
alternative  to  bourgeois  life,  they  used  wall  art  as  an 
instrument  of  revisualizing  and  reshaping  the  world. 
Both  artists  approached  the  task  with  a  strong  sense  of 
the  past  and  the  ongoing  processes  of  the  universe. 
Although  the  orientation  of  the  "organic "  and  esoteric 
life-styles  differed  from  that  of  the  New  Left,  many  of 
whose  members  also  had  middle-class  backgrounds,  they 
all  were  concerned  with  fundamental  change  and  at- 
tempted to  create  cooperative  working  and  living  situa- 
tions. Together  they  struggled  against  a  bourgeois  v\  ay  of 
life  that  most  of  them  knew  from  the  inside,  while 
minority  people  and  the  poor  were  organizing  against  its 
exploitation  that  came  down  on  them  from  outside. 
There  was  complex  interaction  among  these  groups  be- 
cause of  their  common  enemy  and  because  of  their  belief 
in  community  activism.  Opposition  to  the  Indochina 
War  and  racism  at  home  linked  many  of  them.  Many 
enjoyed  freer  personal  relations  and  looked  to  drugs,  art 
and  music  as  important.  Each  group  developed  its  own 
kind  of  mural  because  of  its  need  for  public  communica- 
tion. All  could  be  co-opted  by  the  establishment,  but 
those  from  bourgeois  backgrounds  were  more  vulnerable 
because  they  usually  could  go  back,  while  the  poor  and 
minorities  had  few  chances  at  upward  mobility. 

Summary 

The  first  three  years  of  the  new  murals,  1967  through 
1969  and  1970,  exhibited  isolated  but  determined  efforts 
of  artists  and  the  untrained  to  use  public  walls  to  assert 
their  grievances  against  an  establishment  that  deprived 
them  of  what  was  essential  to  their  survival  and  self- 
respect.  Fhey  took  to  the  walls  as  another  form  of  public 
demonstration  at  a  time  when  marches,  picketing,  sit-ins, 
and  boycotts  were  giving  people  the  confidence  to  speak 
out  collectively  and  because  mainstream  politics  and 
media  were  inaccessible  to  them.  Although  the  national 
publicity  that  the  Wall  of  Respect  in  Chicago  received 
stimulated  many  of  the  community  murals,  it  is  likely 
that  others  were  done  without  knowledge  of  it  or  similar 
works,  but  arose  .out  of  the  widespread  atmosphere  of 
social  activism  and  still-living  traditions  of  making  mu- 
rals. Those  who  initially  were  drawn  to  community  mu- 
rals were  Third  World  People  who  identified  with  the 
Black  and  Brown  Power  movements  in  their  com- 
munities and  revived  their  ethnic  culture  as  a  means  to 
redefine  who  they  were  and  establish  new  bearings  as 
they  came  to  believe  that  the  liberal  ideology  of  assimila- 
tion could  no  longer  serve  them.  If  they  were  ever  to  be 


76  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

accepted  as  equal  members  of  American  society,  they 
realized  it  would  have  to  be  as  people  who  gained 
strength  through  active  cooperation  with  those  who 
shared  the  same  neighborhood  and  work,  the  same  past, 
the  same  problems  and  hopes.  And  public  art  was  a 
means  for  defining  and  projecting  that  consciousness. 
Much  of  this  early  art  was  angry  and  protested  against 
the  humiliations  they  had  suffered.  Some  called  for 
armed  self-defense,  some  for  nonviolent  demonstrations 
and  organizing.  From  the  very  beginning,  artists  of  like 
mind  began  finding  one  another,  while  other  artists 
began  seeking  out  untrained  but  interested  young  people. 
A  few  White  artists  made  common  cause  with  minority 
people,  and  in  other  cases,  as  at  the  People's  Wall,  Whites 
along  with  Third  World  people  made  separate  statements 
and  images  next  to  each  other.  Some  murals  done  by 
White  artists  expressed  the  life-styles  of  the  countercul- 
ture. What  all  who  were  drawn  to  murals  expressed  was 
the  need  for  control  over  their  own  lives,  and  many  saw 
this  as  possible  only  through  fundamental  social  change. 
What  shape  that  new  life  was  to  take  was  a  matter  of 
controversy  among  them,  but  in  fact  they  began  to  act  it 
out  as  they  painted. 

Community  murals  during  their  first  three  years  were 
being  invented.  Old  uses  of  art  were  being  rediscovered, 
and  new  ways  of  making  it  were  being  tried  out.  A 
variety  of  methods  of  working  were  developed,  which  in 
their  most  elementary  forms  were  an  elaboration  of 
graffiti  but  in  other  instances  started  out  as  collaborations 
of  professional  artists  or  as  joint  ventures  between  them 
and  the  untrained.  What  was  important  to  the  makers  of 
the  murals  was  not  that  they  were  developing  a  new  art 
form  to  become  another  innovation  of  the  modern  era. 
What  they  had  in  mind  was  finding  an  instrument  to 
meet  their  most  serious  needs,  needs  that  they  recognized 
as  shared  and  which  could  only  be  dealt  with  if  artists 
and  their  communities  worked  together. 

NOTES 

1 .  Report  of  the  National  Advisory  Commission  on  Civil  Disorders 
(New  York:  Bantam,  1968),  p.  231. 

2.  Malcolm  X,  The  Autobiography  of  Malcolm  X  (New  York: 
Grove,  1966);  Stokely  Carmichaei  and  Charles  V.  Hamilton, 
Black  Power  {New  York:  Vintage,  1967). 

3 .  Report  of  the  National  Advisory  Commission  on  Civil  Disorders, 
p.  232  ff. 

4.  Speech  at  the  founding  rally  of  the  OAAU,  New  York, 
June  28,  1964,  in  By  Any  Means  Necessary,  ed.  George  Breitman 
(New  York:  Pathfinder,  1970),  pp.  53-54. 

5.  Ibid.,  pp.  55-56. 

6.  Answer  to  question  at  sp>eech  November  23,  1964,  in 
Malcolm  X  on  Afro-American  History,  ed.  George  Breitman 
(New  York:  Pathfinder,  1970),  p.  69. 

7.  Malcolm  X,  The  Autobiography  of  Malcolm  X ,  p.  181. 

8.  Carmichaei  and  Hamilton,  p.  44. 

9.  Ibid.,  p.  55. 


10.  Larry  Neal,  "The  Black  Arts  Movement,"  in  The  Black 
Aesthetic,  ed.  Addison  Gayle,  Jr.  (New  York:  Doubleday  An- 
chor, 1972),  p.  257. 

11.  Ibid.,  p.  258. 

12.  "The  Artists'  Statement,"  distributed  at  exhibit  of 
Chicago  muralists  at  Museum  of  Contemporary  Art,  Chicago, 
February  15-March  15,  1971.  Redistributed  by  Public  Art 
Workshop,  Chicago. 

13.  "Wall  of  Respect,"  fiowy,  December  1967,  p.  49. 

14.  Report  .  .  .  on  Civil  Disorders,  p.  39. 

15.  Victor  A.  Soreli,  Guide  to  Chicago  Murals:  Yesterday  and 
Today  (Chicago  Council  on  Fine  Arts,  1978),  p.  32  f. 

16.  Eva  Cockcroft,  John  Weber,  and  James  Cockcroft,  To- 
ward a  People's  Art  (New  York:  Dutton,  1977),  p.  4. 

17.  Ibid. 

18.  Don  L.  Lee,  Black  Pride  (Detroit:  Broadside/Crummell 
Press,  1969). 

19.  Gwendolyn  Brooks,  The  World  of  Gwendolyn  Brooks  (New 
York:  Harper  and  Row,  1967),  p.  414  f. 

20.  December  issue.  Arts  and  Society  pictured  the  Wall  of 
Respect  on  its  cover  with  an  accompanying  article  in  Summer- 
Fall  1968,  and  Time  included  a  large  photo  of  it  in  its  April  6, 
1970,  issue. 

21.  Report .  .  .  on  Civil  Disorders,  p.  107. 

22.  Weber  and  Cockcrofts,  p.  5. 

23.  Dan  Georgakas  and  Marvin  Surkin,  Detroit:  I  Do  Mind 
Dying  (New  York:  St.  Martin's  Press,  1975),  p.  135  f. 

24.  Fine,  p.  204. 

25.  "SNAP  Playground  Dedicated,"  Boston  Globe,  Sep- 
tember 8,  1968. 

26.  Thomas  H.  Shepard,  "Exodus  Building  Hub  Artists 
Canvas,"  unknown  Boston  newspaper.  Summer,  1968. 

27.  Jim  McGmv/ ,  Renewal  (Chicsigo),  December,  1969,  p.  2. 

28.  Black  Panther,  May  31,  1969,  p.  4. 

29.  The  Senate  Intelligence  Committee  reported  that  the 
FBI  directed  233  actions  against  the  Panthers  between  1969 
and  1971.  In  1977  a  $100  million  suit  was  filed  against  the  FBI, 
CIA,  and  other  government  agencies  charging  that  they  had 
been  trying  to  destroy  the  party.  By  then  the  Panthers'  com- 
munity service  activities,  voter  registration,  and  campaign 
work  for  liberal  Black  candidates  had  made  them  respectable 
and  important  in  Oakland  mainstream  politics.  "Black  Pan- 
thers: Now  a  Strong  Political  Force,"  San  Francisco  Examiner, 
July  3,  1977,  p.  1  f. 

30.  "The  Biography  of  Huey  Newton,"  Ramparts,  October 
26,  1968,  p.  24. 

31.  For  the  Ponce  Massacre,  see  Lincoln  Bergman  et.  al., 
Puerto  Rico:  The  Flame  of  Resistance,  (San  Francisco:  People's 
Press),  1977,  p.  58  ff.  This  mural  anticipates  a  powerful  one 
done  by  Mario  Galan  in  1971  in  Chicago  where  Campos  is 
placed  at  the  center  of  the  flag  as  a  crucified  martyr. 

32.  Kathy  Mulherin,  "Chicanos  turn  to  Brown  Power," 
National  Catholic  Reporter,  June  4,  1969. 

33.  "Et  Tu,  Cesar," /»  These  Times,  March  28,  1979,  p.  12. 
Also,  Jim  Wood,  "Illegal  Aliens'  Economic  Ro\e," San  Francisco 
Sunday  Examiner  &  Chronicle,  September  11,  1977,  p.  12. 

34.  Steiner,  p.  293. 


35.  Anita   Brenner,   Idols  behind  Altars  (Boston:    Beacon, 
1970),  p.  149  ff. 

36.  Mulherin. 

37.  Steiner,  p.  383  f. 

38.  I  Am  Joaquin,  1967,  p.  3. 

39.  Rendon,  p.  168. 

40.  Ibid.,  p.  336  f. 

41.  Steiner,  p.  387  f. 

42.  Ibid.,  pp.  95-110;  Rendon,  p.  166. 

43.  Pensamientos:   On  Los  Chicanes:   A   Cultural  Revolution 
(Berkeley:  California  Book  Co.,  1969),  p.  8. 

44.  Steiner,  p.  325. 

45.  Ibid.,  p.  328. 

46.  Ibid. 

47.  Luis  Valdez,  "The  Actos,"  Guerrilla  Street  Theater,  ed. 
Henry  Lxsnick  (New  York:  Bard  Books,  Avon,  1973),  p.  196. 

48.  Steiner,  p.  334. 


Invention  (1967-69/70)  1 11 

49.  Cf.  Tim  Drescher  and  Rupert  Garcia:  "Recent  Raza 
Murals  in  the  U.S.,"  Radical  America,  .March-April,  1978,  pp. 
15,  19. 

50.  Ibid.,  p.  29.  n.5 

5 1 .  Glenn  Troelstrup,  "Former  Delinquent  Paints  His  Way 
Out  of  Corner,"  Denver  Post,  April  23,  1977,  p.  2. 

52.  George  Lane,  "Lincoln  Park  Mural  Is  Designed  To 
Educate,  Stimulate,"  Denver  Post,  August  23,  1970,  p.  29. 

53.  "Columbus  Park  .Mural  To  Be  Finished,"  September 
14,  1970,  p.  3. 

54.  Cockcroft,  Weber,  and  Cockcroft,  p.  224. 

55.  Steiner,  p.  115. 

56.  Rendon,  p.  216  ff. 

57.  Says  Shifra  .M.  Goldman,  who  has  worked  with  local 
Chicano  groups  for  many  years,  has  written  about  murals,  and 
teaches  at  Santa  Ana  College  in  California. 


3 


DEVELOPMENT  (1969110-12) 


While  the  first  three  years  of  community  murals  had 
been  devoted  to  their  invention,  during  the  next  three 
their  use  was  deepened  and  spread  widely,  and  some 
professional  artists  decided  to  make  them  their  vocation 
and  organized  muralist  groups.  Because  the  murals  were 
conceived  at  first  mainly  as  instruments  to  fight  racism, 
they  spread  along  racial  lines — to  nearby  walls,  to 
neighborhoods  of  the  same  ethnic  groups  elsewhere  in  a 
city,  and  to  other  cities  where  slides  were  shown  or  news 
photos  were  seen.  .Media  coverage  during  these  first  years 
was  minimal  however.  But  Black,  Chicano,  and  Puerto 
Rican  artists  also  learned  from  each  other,  and  soon 
Asian-Americans  began  doing  ethnic  works.  Murals 
came  to  grips  with  the  danger  of  minorities  being  drawn 
into  further  racial  violence.  The  necessity  for  community 
organizing  and  overcoming  the  self-destructive  behavior 
that  racism  produced — rioting,  gang  war,  and  drugs — 
became  important  subject  matters.  Racism  was  met  by 
a  growing  number  of  works  reaffirming  ethnic  pride 
through  depictions  of  historical  and  cultural  heritage. 
Some  murals  stressed  the  need  of  minority  f>eople  for 
a  new  kind  of  education  so  that  they  could  serve  their 
communities.  Also  during  this  period  the  first  murals 
appeared  on  the  special  concerns  of  ethnic  women; 
only  later  would  wall  paintings  be  done  by  interracial 
groups  on  the  issues  that  all  women  shared. 

New  Responses  to  Racism  in  Boston  and  Chicago 

The  shift  away  from  confrontation  to  the  importance 
of  education  and  culture  as  more  lasting  means  of  com- 
bating racism  and  deprivation  occurred  most  dramati- 


cally in  the  murals  of  Rickson  and  Chandler  in  Boston. 
While  in  1968  they  had  cooperated  on  two  militant  walls, 
Rickson  turned  to  the  Black  heritage  in  his  surreal  mural 
Africa  Is  the  Beginning  on  the  Roxbury  YMCA  in  1969. 
Here  night  draws  back  as  if  at  the  dawn  of  culture,  and  a 
pyramid — symbol  of  what  the  artist  believed  was  the  first 
civilization  and  also  a  Black  culture — casts  its  shadow 
across  the  earth.  This  reflected  a  theory  that  was  gaining 
credence  among  supporters  of  Black  Power  and  that  was 
based  on  scholarly  research.  It  held  that  the  world's  first 
civilization  was  indeed  Black  because  Egyptian  culture 
was  not  merely  African,  but  was  derived  from  Black 
African  sources.  We  shall  turn  to  the  details  of  this  later, 
but  for  the  moment  it  is  sufficient  to  understand  that  the 
idea  of  the  Black  origin  of  Egyptian  civilization  accounts 
for  Rickson  and  Eda's  compositions  and  the  plethora  of 
Black  King  Tutankhamuns  that  were  to  appear  in  murals 
in  the  early  seventies.'  What  is  particularly  impressive 
about  Rickson's  mural  is  its  success  in  adopting  the  style 
of  surrealism,  which  is  notorious  for  its  esoteric  charac- 
ter, and  making  a  statement  that  is  legible  to  the  unin- 
structed  viewer  and  at  the  same  time  elegant  in  its 
simplicity. 

Dana  Chandler  likewise  emphasized  the  liberating 
power  of  education  in  his  1971  mural  Knowledge  Is  Power: 
Stay  in  School  next  to  the  Dudley  elevated  station  in 
Roxbury.  But  it  is  distinctly  Black  education,  and  in  this 
respect  it  does  not  depart  from  the  theme  of  the  earliest 
murals  like  the  Wall  of  Respect  in  Chicago  that  celebrated 
Black  cultural  and  social  leaders.  However,  it  is  a  shift  of 
emphasis  from  the  mural  calling  for  community  self- 
defense  that  he  had  done  with  Rickson  three  years  ear- 


78 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  79 


Gary  Rickson:  Africa  Is  the  Beginning,  1969,  VMCA, 
Roxbury,  Boston.  (Photo  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art) 


Dana  Chandler  (Summerthing):  Knowledge  Is  Power: 
Stay  in  School,  1971,  Roxbury,  Boston. 


»Ak-.i^ 


Her.  Ihe  mural  shows  Black  people,  books  in  hand, 
breaking  out  of  a  white  egg  that  has  confined  them.  The 
egg  is  shattered  by  fire  that  comes  from  the  mouths  of 
Dr.  King,  Malcolm  X,  and  Medgar  Evers  at  one  side  and 
the  hand  of  a  multieyed  African  ancestor  figure  who 
hovers  over  a  young  man  of  today  at  the  other. 

The  problem  of  violence  against  Black  people  and  how 
to  deal  with  it  remained  a  major  concern  of  muralists, 
particularly  in  Chicago.  The  police  killing  of  Panther 
leader  Fred  Hampton  there  in  1969  prompted  a  poem  to 
him  on  the  mural  .Mitchell  Caton  did  in  an  alley  of 
Chicago's  South  Side  the  following  year  where  other 


murders  had  occurred.  The  image  shows  a  huge  silver 
pistol  that  penetrates  the  bodies  of  two  Black  men  with 
their  hands  raised  in  terror.  The  ribbons  of  color  of  the 
pistol's  handle  and  smoke  were  intended  to  recall  Africa, 
Caton  says,  describing  the  scene  as  "up  against  the  wall, 
mutha  fucka."  Below  are  a  pair  of  black  dice  and  a  very 
white  skull  with  a  peace  sign  on  its  forehead.  The  mural 
was  titled  Ripoff  and  in  1974  was  repainted  and  extended 
down  the  alley. 

In  1970  William  Walker  also  was  grappling  with  the 
problem  of  racial  violence.  He  had  already  secured  a  wall 
just  down  the  street  from  the  Cabrini  Green  housing 


80  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Mitchell  Caton  (CMG):  Rip-Off,  1970,  rene^u:ed  and 
extended  as  Universal  Alley,  1974,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


project  when  two  police  officers  were  shot  there  and  the 
authorities  in  response  besieged  the  neighborhood.  When 
Wallier  could  get  on  with  the  mural,  he  painted  Peace  and 
Salvation,  Wall  of  Understanding.  Although  he  did  the 
painting  himself,  he  was  aided  by  a  residents  group  that 
sponsored  the  work,  gang  members  and  a  local  priest 
who  helped  raise  the  scaffolding  as  well  as  the  regular 
watchers  who  talked  about  the  imagery  with  him  and 
kept  an  eye  on  the  materials  that  he  could  leave  out 
during  the  two  months  that  he  painted  there. ^  The 
four-story-high  work  on  the  side  of  a  tenement  shows  at 
ground  level  a  march  of  Black  leaders,  including  Malcolm 
and  King,  together  with  a  column  of  Panthers  and  other 
local  Black  organizations  moving  forward  out  of  the  wall 
toward  you.  As  at  Saint  Bernard's  Church  in  Detroit  in 
1968,  Walker  was  looking  to  such  concerted  nonviolent 
demonstrations  as  the  means  to  meet  racism.  But  what  is 
new  about  this  mural  is  the  way  he  attempts  to  raise  the 
consciousness  of  viewers.  That  is  what  the  title  and  most 
of  the  upper  imagery  are  about.  At  Detroit  he  and  Eda 


had  dwelt  on  the  analogy  with  the  biblical  Exodus.  Here 
Walker  is  more  direct.  A  giant  hand  issues  from  the 
marchers  upward  to  the  alternatives  that  lie  before  them. 
The  first  is  the  confrontation  of  a  rank  of  angry  Black 
faces  and  White  figures  with  helmets,  hoods  and  a  swas- 
tika, each  group  accusing  the  other.  Slightly  behind  is  a 
standoff  between  an  armed  police  officer  and  a  Panther 
and,  just  above  them,  the  corpses  of  John  Kennedy  and 
King.  Meanwhile  pistols  are  pointed  at  each  other  from 
surrounding  brick  walls,  which  reflects  what  was  hap- 
pening locally  and  nationally.  But  the  possibility  of  a 
solution  is  indicated  by  another  large  hand  that  reaches 
down  from  a  globe  suggesting  both  a  light  bulb  and  the 
world,  inside  of  which  people  of  the  different  races  join 
together  beneath  a  dove.  The  mural  seems  to  call  for 
solidarity  among  Black  people  like  that  expressed  by  the 
marchers  at  the  bottom  but  with  their  minds  fixed  on 
peace.  What  is  especially  imaginative  is  the  manner  in 
which  Walker  expresses  the  understanding  he  wants  to 
encourage.  It  occupies  five-sixths  of  the  wall  and  is  like 
an  enormous  vision  or  a  comic-strip  balloon.  Moreover, 
to  convey  his  effects  Walker  ingeniously  u.sed  the  actual 
brick  surface,  heightening  and  darkening  sections  to 
suggest  many  embattled  buildings  and  painting  simu- 
lated posters  on  them. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  81 


William  Walker  (CMG):  Peace  and  Salvation:  Wall  of 
Understanding,  1970,  near  Cabrini  Green,  Chicago. 


82  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Kugene  Eda  also  dealt  with  the  issue  of  strategies 
against  racism  the  same  year  in  Chicago,  and  he  used  a 
method  Hke  Walker's  to  project  the  stages  of  his  thinking. 
These  were  the  most  advanced  methods  yet  that  the  new 
moralists  had  devised  to  give  visual  expression  to  a  train 
of  thought.  At  the  bottom  of  his  Wall  of  Meditation  a 
figure  with  his  forehead  in  his  hands  considers  the  alter- 
natives exhibited  about  him:  a  Molotov  cocktail  and  hand 
grenade  or  a  book;  and  above  them  a  portrait  of  Malcolm 
pointing  to  a  soldier  of  the  Black  Panthers  at  one  side, 
and  at  the  other.  King,  gesturing  to  ancient  Egyptians 
building  their  culture.  Eda  points  out  that  the  two  lead- 
ers were  very  close  in  their  ideas  toward  the  end  of  their 
lives:  King  had  become  more  militant  and  Malcolm  more 
tolerant  of  Whites  who  worked  to  end  racism.  Eda  says 
he  intended  to  show  both  of  them  crucified  and  w  anted 
viewers  to  think  about  why  this  had  happened.  In  the 
mural  the  movement  upward  is  dialectical:  the  incoher- 
ent violence  of  bombing  is  superseded  by  the  restrained 
but  armed  self-defense  by  the  Panthers,  which  is  shown 
as  not  inconsistent  with  the  effort  to  build  Black  culture 
and  soul.  Similarly,  in  Eda's  Wall  of  Dignity  in  Detroit, 
warriors  were  placed  on  a  par  with  culture.  Moreover, 
Eda's  analysis  was  similar  to  the  Panthers'  opposition  to 
unorganized  rioting  and  their  support  of  the  bearing  of 
unconcealed  weapons  to  ward  off  attack. 

In  his  paintings  on  the  stairwell  doors  of  Malcolm  X 
College  in  Chicago  in  1971  and  1972  Eda  combined 
images  of  militancy  and  culture.  On  one  door  he  created 


a  figure  that  was  part  West  African  mask  and  part 
modern  man  with  a  raised  fist.  On  other  doors  he  pre- 
sented images  of  Egyptian  scholars,  priests,  artists,  and 
craftsmen,  implying  the  education  that  was  necessary  for 
Black  people  to  match  and  excel  their  ancient  achieve- 
ments. In  giving  these  figures  an  elegance  borrowed  from 
ancient  wall  painting  and  sculpture,  Eda  seemed  to  point 
to  a  skill  and  refinement  he  hoped  students  could  learn. 
The  murals  contributed  to  the  solemn  ambience  of  the 
all-Black  community  college,  which  seemed  appropri- 
ately housed  in  an  elegant  Bauhaus-style  structure  of 
black  beams  and  tinted  glass,  designed  by  C.  F.  .Murphy 
Associates,  over  which  a  red,  black,  and  green  flag 
waved.  Under  the  guidance  of  President  Charles  Hearst, 
Black  art  flourished  at  the  college  with  students  doing 
murals  along  the  corridors  and  remnants  of  the  Wall  of 
Respect  and  Wall  of  Truth  mounted  outside.  Some  of 
Malvina  Hoffman's  sculpture  of  Africans  was  also  in- 
stalled. Eda  says  he  wanted  to  be  a  "people's  artist"  and 
took  a  salary  cut  to  be  able  to  paint  at  the  college  for  a 
year  and  a  half.  In  1971  he  also  did  a  large  mural  at 
Howard  University  in  Washington,  D.C. 

The  achievements  and  struggles  of  women  have  been  a 
persistent  theme  from  the  earliest  murals.  The  portraits 
of  Gwendolyn  Brooks,  Sarah  Vaughan,  and  Nina 
Simone  had  appeared  among  the  other  faces  of  Black 
leaders  and  artists  on  the  Wall  of  Respect  in  1967. 
Seventeen-year-old  Vanita  Gre^n  adopted  the  portrait 
genre  when  she  did  her  Black  Women  on  an  old  garage 


Eugene  Eda  (CMG):  Wall  of  Meditation,  1970,  North 
Side,  Chicago. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  83 


Eugene  Eda:  Staircase  door  murals,  1971-72,  Malcolm  X 
College,  Chicago. 


Eugene  Eda:  Staircase  door  murals,  Malcolm  X  College. 


1 


84  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Vanita  Green:  Black  Women  or  Racism,  1970, 
Cabrini  Green,  Chicago.  (©  Rosenthal  Art  Slides) 


wall  in  Chicago  in  1970,  close  to  where  William  Walker 
was  working  on  Peace  and  Salvation.  She  painted  the  faces 
and  names  of  Angela  Davis,  Mary  Bethune,  Harriet 
Tubman,  Aretha  Franklin,  Nina  Simone — and  Aunt 
Jemima.  Shortly  afterwards  it  was  splattered  with  white 
paint.  It  was  speculated  that  it  may  have  been  a  White 
person  who  defaced  the  portraits,  or  perhaps  a  Black  man 
with  strong  sexist  views  who  resented  the  honoring  of  the 
women  of  his  race.  Whatever  the  truth  of  the  matter,  no 


Don    Mcllvaine:     Black    Man's    Dilemma,     1970, 
Chicago. 


attempt  was  made  to  remove  the  white  splashes,  and  the 
portraits  were  left  with  the  drippings  as  a  sort  of  monu- 
ment to  the  struggle  for  racial  and  sexual  liberation. 
Green  retitled  her  work  Racism,  and  a  photograph  of  the 
wall  was  chosen  for  the  cover  of  the  first  book  on  the 
mural  movement.  Cry  for  Justice. 

The  violence  that  Black  people  suffered  and  inflicted 
in  response  on  themselves  absorbed  Don  Mcllvaine  in  a 
mural  he  did  on  a  brick  wall  facing  a  Chicago  alley  and 
empty  lot  in  1970.  He  called  it  Black  Man's  Dilemma  and 
showed  a  figure  stabbed  in  the  heart  with  the  Bill  of 
Rights  while  the  American  flag  goes  up  in  flames.  In 
despair  his  people  become  victims  of  a  hooded  white 
skeleton   with  a   syringe,   and   a   naked  couple   reach 


joylessly  toward  each  other — an  indictment,  Mcllvaine 
says,  of  prostitution.  Meanwhile  others  look  with  hope 
toward  a  winged  angel  who  points  to  an  African  effigy, 
suggesting  their  ancient  culture,  which  the  artist  says  he 
believed  Blacks  needed  to  turn  to  in  their  search  for 
meaning  and  unity.  The  previous  year  Mcllvaine  had 
painted  Into  the  Mainstream,  depicting  strong  black  faces 
coming  out  of  the  wall  just  outside  an  art  gallery  he 
operated.  And  in  1971  in  an  alley  near  Black  Man's 
Dilemma,  he  filled  another  wall  with  defiant  masked 
Africans.'* 

The  imposition  of  a  standardized  mass  culture  based 
only  on  White  experience  was  being  increasingly  under- 
stood as  a  kind  of  violence  by  students  and  a  few 
educators  at  this  time.  In  1971  Marie  Burton,  who  had 
studied  at  the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago  and  was  coor- 
dinator of  the  art  department  and  Street  Arts  Program  at 
Saint  Mary's  Center  for  Learning,  worked  with  students 
on  a  two-story  mural  at  the  center.  They  borrowed  kids' 
perennial  joke  about  "Bored  of  Education"  and  breathed 


Marie  Burton:  Bored  of  Education,  1971,  St.  Mary's 
Center  for  Learning,  Chicago.  (©  Public  Art  Workshop) 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  85 

new  meaning  into  it.  Taking  it  as  their  title,  they  de- 
picted the  mouth  of  a  Black  person  driven  by  chains  and 
a  clock.  From  the  mouth  pours  forth  an  assembly  line  of 
dead  or  sleeping  white  faces  with  American  flags  as 
mortar  boards  (or  shrouds).  These  seem  to  be  the  irrele- 
vant words  and  ideas  that  the  Third  World  students  felt 
they  were  compelled  to  repeat,  and  they  are  shown 
trying  to  stop  the  machinery.  The  student  painters 
A'orked  in  the  classroom  on  the  large  panels  that  were 
then  lifted  into  place  by  a  mobile  tower  truck  of  the  fire 
department.  In  later  years  Burton  went  on  to  .Milwaukee, 
where  she  directed  other  murals  such  as  the  Wall  of  Life 
and  Celebration  of  Cultures  in  1974  and  1975.^ 

The  different  approaches  to  the  theme  of  racism  itself 
and  particularly  the  problem  of  violence  represented  by 
the  Chicago  and  Boston  murals  done  by  Black  artists  and 
community  people  only  begin  to  suggest  the  variety  of 
opinion  within  the  Black  community  during  the  years  of 
disappointed  hopes,  rioting,  and  organizing  to  deal  with 
them.  Thus  it  is  understandable  why  murals  frequently 
called  for  solidarity,  such  as  Unity  of  the  People  in 
Chicago,  done  in  1970  by  Black  youths  guided  by  .Mark 
Rogovin,  a  professional  artist,  who  like  .Marie  Burton  and 


86  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

John  Wcbcr  was  one  of  the  first  Whites  to  share  his 
know-how  w  ith  ghetto  people.  It  ,showed  Dr.  King  and 
other  Black  leaders  joining  together  with  community 
people  in  a  march  into  the  future.  Rogovin  himself  had 
studied  at  the  Rhode  Island  School  of  Design  and  worked 
in  1967  and  1968  with  a  team  of  artists  directed  by 
Siqueiros  in  C^uernavaca  on  The  March  of  Humanity.  Back 
in  the  States  in  1969,  Rogovin  directed  his  first  mural 
with  inner-city  teenagers  in  Saratoga  Springs,  New 
York. 

One  of  the  masterpieces  of  the  mural  movement  is 
Mitchell  Caton's  Nation  Time.  Painted  on  the  side  of  a 
Chicago  mortuary  in  1971,  the  work  begins  with  a 
woman's  face  that  crowds  the  top  and  bottom  of  the 
one-story  wall  and  cries  out  "Home,"  in  block  capitals 
decorated  w  ith  stars  and  stripes  but  in  the  colors  of  the 
Black  liberation  flag  and  complementaries  of  Old  Glory. 
.Much  of  the  rest  of  the  mural  shows  scenes  of  devastation 
and  death — the  experience  of  Black  people  in  their 
nationwide  funeral  home.  A  great  fist  of  Uncle  Sam 
emits  lightning  as  wrecking  equipment  destroys  a 
neighborhood  and  drops  Black  people  from  its  jaw  s  w  hile 
skyscrapers  seem  to  be  tumbling  over  on  others.  .Mean- 
while a  haggard  w  oman  bends  over  children  encouraging 
them  as  they  do  their  lessons.  At  the  far  side  a  younger 
woman  w ith  a  "natural"  and  wearing  an  African  gow n 
with  great  dignity  contemplates  the  desolation  and  im- 
plies the  alternative  of  Black  Pride.  The  whole  mural  is 
broken  up  like  a  patchwork  of  African  textile  patterns, 
but  they  are  so  disjointed  that  it  takes  time  to  make  out 
the  forms,  w  hich  suggest  the  violent  shattering  of  Black 
people's  experience.  The  color  is  bright  but,  because  it 
was  painted  on  a  w all  that  had  been  tarred  for  w eather- 
proofing,  the  tones  are  somber,  even  sour.®  But  the  final 
impact  of  Nation  Time  is  of  a  very  moving  affirmation  of 
the  strength  of  Black  people  to  re-create  their  own  cul- 
ture. 

John  Weber's  Wall  of  Choices  oi  1970  represents  another 
approach  to  the  problem  of  racial  violence.  It  w  as  done 
on  the  wall  of  the  Christopher  Settlement  House  on 
Chicago's  North  Side  and  faces  a  children's  playground. 
This  was  a  predominantly  White  working-class 
neighborhood,  and,  according  to  Weber,  the  anxiety  of 
local  people  about  trouble  between  the  races  only  gradu- 
ally emerged  during  his  discussions  with  them  about 
doing  a  mural.  Together  artist  and  residents  agreed  that 
this  concern  required  public  airing.^  The  need  for  local 
people  to  decide  openly  the  direction  they  w  ere  to  go  is 
expressed  by  the  choices  the  mural  offers.  It  depicts  a 
number  of  .scenes  that  project  dramatically  from  the  wall. 
In  one,  daggers  and  guns  held  in  w  hite  and  dark-skinned 
hands  attack  each  other.  In  the  next,  a  dark  and  a  white 
hand  grip  each  other  in  a  radical  handshake  beneath 
portraits  of  John  Brow n  and  Frederick  Douglass,  both 
identified  as  "Freedom  Fighters."  Nearby,  White  and 
Brown  mothers  nestle  their  children.  Another  scene 
surrounds  a  real  window  with  painted  flames.  And  next 


to  it  women  of  different  races  watch  a  dove  above  them 
with  longing.  Yet  another  scene  presents  a  pair  of  mana- 
cled hands  with  the  caption  "Free  All  Political  Pris- 
oners." The  final  image  shows  factory  chimneys 
smoking — a  symbol  in  those  days  of  full  employment. 
An  additional  caption  asserts  "We  can  change  the 
World."  The  images  are  clear,  bold  and  simple.  Taken 
together  they  leave  no  doubt  about  the  message.  The 
mural  is  noteworthy  as  one  of  the  first  in  a  White 
neighborhood  to  deal  with  the  subject  of  racism.  Stylisti- 
cally it  is  also  interesting  as  a  further  development  of 
Weber's  chunky  figures  derived  from  the  Cubist  classi- 
cism of  Leger.  The  advantages  he  gained  by  this  style 
were  clarity  and  the  power  of  concision. 

Fhis  series  of  Boston  and  Chicago  murals  concerned 
with    overcoming    violence    illustrates    how    individual 
painters  used  w  all  paintings  to  help  people  think  through 
the  strategies  of  change.  Rickson  and  Chandler's  Boston 
murals  went  through  a  development  from  armed  self- 
defense  to  education  as  means  to  liberation.  The  Chicago 
paintings  openly  set  forth  alternatives  within  each  work. 
In  general  these  murals  of  struggle  were  not  only  calls  to 
action,  but  also  efforts  to  move  people  to  serious  thought. 
With  the  painting  of  fi/ac^  Low  in  1971  William  Walker 
turned  from  the  theme  of  grass-roots  political  activism 
that  he  had  pursued  in  his  early  murals  to  life  in  the 
community  itself.  Explicit  reference  to  racism  and  the 
battle  against  it  has  disappeared;  and  it  is  the  interrela- 
tions of  the  generations  of  local  people  that  are  celebrated 
in  one  of  the  most  moving  and  beautifully  executed 
murals  of  the  whole  movement.  The  mural  was  done  on  a 
wall  facing  a  playground  at  Cabrini  Green  public  hous- 
ing not  far  from  the  Peace  and  Salvation  Walker  had  done  a 
year  before.   Here  the  two-  and  three-story  gray  brick 
apartment  houses  look  like  slave  quarters.  The  painting 
simply  shows  children  and  adults  bending  over  a  checker- 
board,   preparing    for    a    ball    game,    listening   to   old 
timers'  yarns,  reading,  and  goofing  around.  The  strong 
sense  of  mutual  involvement  and  concern  is  achieved 
partly  by  the  gestures  of  the  old  and  young  reaching  out 
to  each  other  and  their  leaning  over  to  listen  and  watch. 
The  feeling  of  harmony  is  also  generated  by  the  blue 
tonality  and  the  repetition  of  circles  and  curves  that 
describe  the  heads  and  shoulders  of  the  figures.  In  spite 
of  all  the  bustle  in  this  crowd  of  about  sixty  persons, 
there  is  a  quiet  orderliness  created  by  a  generalizing  of 
forms  and  the  relating  of  everything  to  the  surface  by  the 
overlapping  figures  that  are  all  presented  in  profile  or 
frontal   views.    In   the   foreground   also  parallel   to  the 
surface  run  some  low  benches  and  a  fence  that  complete 
the  sense  of  a  self-contained  and  self-fulfilling  world.  The 
mural  is  a  remarkable  affirmation  of  the  community  of 
the  generations  in  spite  of  their  hardships.  In  fact  the  idea 
of  hardship  is  entirely  absent  from  the  painting  and  is 
replaced  by  a  scene  of  simple  but  profound  dignity.  The 
conception   presented   of  Black   life   is   not   the   racist 
stereotype  of  happy  mindlessness.  There  is  a  sobriety  as 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  87 


Mitchell  Caton  (CMG):  Nation  Time  (detail),  1971, 
South  Side,  Chicago. 


John  Weber  (CMC):  Wall  of  Choices,   1970,  Morth 
Side,  Chicago. 


88  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


William  Walker  (CMG):  Black  Love,  1971,  Opportuni- 
ties Industrial  Center,  Cabrini  Green,  Chicago. 


well  as  warmth  that  the  images  project.  While  earUer 
Walls  of  Respect  had  sought  to  build  Black  self- 
confidence  by  portraits  of  their  leaders  and  achievers, 
Black  Love  reminded  local  residents  of  another  kind  of 
achievement — the  common  life  that  they  built  together. 

Early  Organizing  in  Chicago 

The  call  for  interracial  cooperation  that  Walker  and 
Weber  were  projecting  from  their  walls  was  matched  by 
their  efforts  at  organizing  muralists.  In  1970  they  wrote 
and  received  partial  funding  for  a  proposal  for 
community-based  murals.  Eda  joined  them,  and  each  did 
his  own  wall  that  summer.  They  had  wanted  to  paint 
with  community  assistants,  but  funds  were  insufficient. 
As  a  result  of  their  work,  they  were  invited  by  the 
.Museum  of  Contemporary  Art  in  Chicago  to  do  portable 
murals  in  public  at  the  gallery  which  would  later  be 
placed  in  neighborhoods.  With  the  help  of  Rogovin  and 
Caton  the  artist-in-action  show  was  held  from  February 
to  March  1971.  Afterwards  Eda  went  his  own  way  and 
Rogovin  began  organizing  the  Public  Art  Workshop  that 
opened  on  the  West  Side  in  1972.  Meanwhile,  in  the 
summer  of  1971,  Caton,  Walker  and  Weber  began 
meeting  with  a  view  to  shaping  a  permanent  artists' 


collective  that  was  later  called  the  Chicago  Mural  Group. 
They  did  nine  murals  and  were  joined  that  year  by  Ray 
Patlan  and  in  1972  by  Caryl  Yasko,  Astrid  Fuller,  Jim 
Yanagisawa,  and  Santi  Isrowuthakul.  Together  they 
were  making  a  fundamental  change  in  'what  it  was  to  be 
an  artist  in  the  United  States,  although  some  had  to 
maintain  outside  jobs  to  survive  and  some  continued  to 
do  their  private  art  for  exhibition  and  sale.  Their  inten- 
tion was  not  to  meet  a  temporary  need  for  political 
painting  but  to  make  a  commitment  that  was  often  more 
than  full-time  to  an  art  that  gave  people  who  had  no 
public  voice,  people  of  the  lower  middle  and  working 
classes,  the  chance  to  come  together  to  examine  and  give 
public  expression  to  their  ideas  about  their  community  as 
a  means  to  empowering  it.  Their  intention  was  more 
than  cultural,  it  was  "consciously  political,"  Weber 
says.*  It  was  "to  serve  as  an  active  organizing  role  ...  to 
win  people  over,  to  change  consciousness,  to  change  how 
people  saw  themselves  as  well  as  .  .  .  changing  their  view 
of  art  and  artists."  These  aims  were  shared  by  many 
other  muralists  around  the  country,  some  of  whom  were 
able,  like  the  CMG  and  the  PAW,  to  build  sustaining 
organizations. 


his  family  into  the  Pilsen  neighborhood  in  Chicago, 
which  was  then  occupied  mainly  by  residents  of  Lithua- 
nian descent,  that  one  night  a  torchlight  procession  of 
local  people  came  to  his  house.  He  was  delighted  at  the 
welcome  but  quickly  learned  that  it  was  just  the  opposite: 
the  neighborhood  had  come  to  demand  that  the  Patlans 
get  out.  But  they  stayed,  and  Ray  grew  up  there.  As 
older  residents  departed  and  more  Chicanos  came,  Pilsen 
became  a  barrio.  Since  he  was  ten,  Ray  went  to  Mexico 
every  year,  initially  to  visit  relatives,  but  he  became 
absorbed  with  art  and  in  1966  worked  on  a  fresco  mural 
under  the  direction  of  Siqueiros.  The  following  years  he 
was  in  Vietnam  and  in  1967  and  68  painted  a  Wall  of 
Brotherhood  in  the  chapel  of  Camp  Bearat  near  Saigon. 
After  his  return  from  overseas  he  was  hired  as  art  direc- 
tor for  young  people  at  the  old  Pilsen  settlement  house 
that  had  now  become  Casa  Aztlan  and  bustled  with  three 
generations  of  Chicanos.  It  was  the  home  of  the 
Neighborhood  Service  Organization,  which  by  the  early 
1970s  had  created  a  free  health  center,  a  well-baby  clinic, 
and  a  day-care  facility.  It  had  also  wrested  a  large 
playground  and  a  new  high  school  from  downtown.  And 
local  people  were  homesteading  old  houses  in  the  barrio 
that  they  secured  from  the  government  for  little  and  with 
further  funding  were  refurbishing,  using  their  own  skills. 
In  1970  Patlan,  who  was  studying  at  the  Art  Institute 
and  sharing  a  studio  with  Mario  Castillo  who  had  done 
the  first  murals  in  the  Pilsen  barrio,  began  painting  the 
auditorium  of  Casa  Aztlan.  The  building's  walls  were 
studded  with  plaques  with  the  names  of  those  who  had 
contributed  to  the  old  Howell  Settlement  House  since 
1905  when  it  was  founded  by  Jane  Addams,  but  the  only 
records  of  its  present  users  were  graffiti.  Patlan's  inten- 
tion was  to  remind  them  of  their  heritage.  He  began  in 
the  area  behind  the  stage  with  his  own  father  as  a  young 
man  springing  from  maiz  and  breaking  out  of  chains 
attached  to  machinery.  Patlan  says  that  he  wanted  to 
express  how  what  is  often  described  as  progress  impris- 
ons people.  In  a  series  of  stop-photography  images  be- 
ginning with  his  crucifixion  and  clenched  fists,  the  young 
worker  frees  himself  and  extends  his  hands  towards 
viewers  as  if  he  were  showing  and  offering  us  what  he  has 
achieved.  The  imagery  clearly  alludes  to  the  New  De- 
mocracy of  Siqueiros  in  which  a  bare-chested  woman 
breaks  out  of  the  Mexican  earth  like  an  erupting  volcano 
and  liberates  herself.  Patlan  then  turned  to  painting  the 
walls  on  either  side  with  panels  representing  Raza  history 
from  the  coming  of  the  Spanish  to  Mexico  through  the 
revolutionary  eras  to  the  current  struggles  of  Chicanos. 
He  borrowed  from  Siqueiros  in  a  scene  of  the  torture  of 
Cuauhtemoc,  the  last  of  the  Aztec  kings,  who  refused  to 
disclose  the  site  of  his  people's  treasure  to  the  Spanish. 
Tense  naked  figures  press  against  their  confinement  in 
other  panels,  and  pre-Columbian  patterns  that  are  usu- 
ally rectilinear  swell  with  organic  energy.  "Corky" 
Gonzales  of  the  Crusade  for  Justice  and  a  rank  of  Brown 
Berets  are  shown  with  Reies  Tijerina,  who  is  depicted 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  89 

behind  bars  because,  Patlan  says,  he  did  not  know  what 
he  looked  like.  In  another  panel  the  image  of  Cesar 
Chavez  is  presented  along  with  industrial  workers.  When 
completed,  the  murals  enveloped  the  auditorium,  the 
Sala  de  la  Raza,  and  Patlan  titled  the  ensemble  From  My 
Father  and  Yours.  The  painting,  which  he  did  entirely  by 
himself  and  w  hich  took  a  year  to  complete,  he  says  was 
an  education  for  him.  While  sometimes  borrowing  from 
the  composition  of  Siqueiros,  he  loaded  his  brush  and 
built  up  surfaces  with  broad  vehement  strokes  reminis- 
cent of  Orozco,  which  he  acknowledges.  Patlan  w  as  one 
of  the  few  community  muralists  to  work  in  a  "painterly" 
manner,  and  he  continued  to  use  it  powerfully  with  the 
naked  figures  struggling  up  the  stairwell  at  Casa  Aztlan 
and  in  his  later  work. 

Under  the  guidance  of  Patlan  barrio  young  people 
between  1971  and  1972  spread  murals  from  the  inside  of 
Casa  Aztlan  out  the  main  entrance  and  across  the  outside 
brick  of  the  first  two  floors  of  the  building.  Around  the 
doorway  they  painted  a  welcoming  .Mexican  hombre  and 
mujer  and  a'.mg  the  exterior,  pre-Columbian  masks  and 
architectural  patterns.  They  called  their  work  Hay  Cul- 
tura  en  Nuestra  Communidad  (There  Is  Culture  in  Our 
Community).  Also  in  1971  Patlan  and  his  young  people 
began  Reformay  Libertad  on  the  front  of  a  local  wcxxlwork 
factory,  reworking  and  extending  it  three  years  later. 
The  mural  commemorates  the  indio  heritage  of  maiz, 
pyramids,  ceremonial  masks  and  brightly  painted  mean- 
ders. But  then  it  offers  a  portrait  of  Hidalgo  and  Juarez 
and  the  motto  which  connects  past  struggles  for  inde- 
pendence and  social  justice  to  today's. 

As  elsewhere  gang  violence  in  Pilsen  was  one  of  the 
products  of  racism.  Cut  off  from  jobs  and  an  education 
that  could  prepare  them  for  promising  employment  and 
respected  their  culture,  the  young  took  their  frustrations 
out  on  each  other  and  the  community.  And  this  was 
inflamed  when  the  gangs  were  of  different  ethnic  groups, 
as  here  where  Chicano  and  Puerto  Rican  gangs  were  at 
each  other's  throats.  But  Patlan  was  able  to  bring  them 
together  with  the  prospect  of  doing  a  mural,  and  this 
provided  the  chance  to  get  them  to  think  about  the 
similarities  of  their  two  peoples,  particularly  their  strug- 
gles for  social  change,  and  its  relation  to  them.  The  result 
was  Mural  de  la  Raza,  a  work  that  was  in  imagery  very 
simple,  but  a  complex  achievement.  It  shows  Puerto 
Rican  revolutionary  leaders — Betances,  Albizu,  and 
Hostos  on  the  one  hand  and  the  Mexican — Zapata, 
Juarez,  and  Villa  on  the  other — superimposed  on  large 
maps  and  flags  of  their  lands.  Elsewhere  in  the  barrio,  a 
teenage  gang  painted  the  indictment  of  the  police  for 
condoning  and  actually  introducing  guns  and  drugs  into 
the  barrio,  which  was  described  in  the  introduction. 

In  1972  Patlan  worked  with  a  group  of  young  people 
on  another  painting  that  utilized  monumental  portraits  of 
leaders,  this  time  Cesar  Chavez  along  with  Juarez, 
Zapata,  and  Villa.  The  choice  was  significant,  for  all 
were  leaders  of  the  downtrodden  of  La  Raza:  Juarez,  the 


Ray  Patldii:  From  M\  l-ather  and  Yours  (partial 
viezv),  1970,  Casa  Aztldn,  Pilsen,  Chicago.  (Photo 
Harold  Allen) 


From  My  Father  and  Yours  (partial  view) 
Harold  Allen) 


Local  youth  directed  by  Ray  Patldn:  Hay  Cultura  en 
Nuestra  (>)munidad,  1971-73,  Casa  Aztldn,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  91 


Local  youth  directed  by  Ray  Patldn:  Reforma  v  Liber- 
tad,  1971  and  1974,  Pilsen,  Chicago. 


Local  Chicane  and  Puerto  Rican  gangs  assisted  by  Ray 
Patldn:  Mural  de  la  Raza,  1971,  Pilsen,  Chicago. 


92  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  youth  directed  by  Ray  Patldn:  La  Causa,  1972, 
Pilsen,  Chicago. 


nineteenth-century  land  reformer  who  became  Mexico's 
first  indio  president;  Zapata  and  Villa,  the  twentieth- 
century  revolutionary  fighters  for  tierra y  libertad.  It  was 
the  landless  who  had  come  to  Chicago  seeking  not  only 
work  but  a  home  and  a  community.  Although  the  faces 
of  leaders  may  have  been  suggested  by  Black  Walls  of 
Respect,  there  was  an  independent  tradition  of  such 
mural  portraits  in  Mexico  that  they  were  more  closely 
related  to.  Below  the  portraits  the  mural  team  painted  a 
bound  figure  with  the  three  faces  of  La  Raza — indio, 
Spanish,  and  mestizo — each  of  which  expresses  anguish  as 
their  common  body  tries  to  lift  itself  from  a  skeleton 
covered  by  the  stars  and  stripes.  An  actual  window  on 
the  field  of  stars  is  painted  with  bars.  The  mural  seems  to 
climax  at  the  left  with  a  horseman  in  the  garb  of  a  campesino 
follower  of  Zapata  or  Villa  throwing  back  his  head  and 
arms  in  a  cry  of  exultation — el  grito — which  comes  from 
him  as  the  words,  Im  Causa — the  liberation  of  farm- 
workers and  residents  of  the  urban  barrios. 

.Murals  were  part  of  the  effort  of  the  Pilsen  barrio  to 
overcome  its  deprivation.  Families  came  out  to  watch  the 
painting  and  to  share  in  it.  These  people  who  had  been 
arriving  from  Mexico  and  the  Southwest  during  the  past 
twenty  years  could  strengthen  their  sense  of  community 
by  refreshing  their  knowledge  of  a  common  past  and 
talking  about  its  relevance  to  their  present  struggles.  And 
elders  could  look  with  satisfaction  at  the  talent  of  their 
youngsters  being  drawn  out  and  their  taking  pride  in 
their  heritage. 

Early  Puerto  Rican  Murals 

As  we  saw,  there  was  a  tradition  of  Puerto  Rican 
outdoor  community  wall  painting  that  predates  the  use  of 
murals  to  express  special  social  and  political  messages. 
These  early  works  were  backdrops  for  fiestas  as  well  as 
decorations  of  the  neighborhood  to  remind  people  of 
their  homeland.  But  the  example  of  Black  and  Chicano 
murals  in  the  late  sixties  seems  to  have  encouraged  the 
extending  of  these  efforts  to  politically  activist  composi- 


tions. The  Puerto  Rican  nationalist  mural  at  Merritt 
College  in  Oakland  followed  quickly  on  the  first  work 
done  there  in  1969,  Leaders  and  Martyrs,  which  was  a 
product  of  the  "Free  Huey"  agitation.  Comparable 
Puerto  Rican  works  were  soon  done  elsewhere. 

While  small  groups  of  Puertoriqueiios  came  to  the 
mainland  since  annexation  in  1899,  the  principal  wave 
began  in  1941,  forced  by  poverty  at  home  and  attracted 
by  the  economic  recovery  that  World  War  II  brought  to 
the  continental  United  States.  After  the  war  they  came  in 
even  larger  numbers  in  spite  of,  or  because  of,  the 
economic  development  strategy  of  North  American 
business,  which  could  escape  taxes  and  strong  labor 
organization  on  the  island,  where  wages  were  one-third 
to  one-half  what  they  were  on  the  continent.*  While 
runaway  industry  that  relocated  in  Puerto  Rico  could 
reap  profits  three  and  four  times  those  they  earned  on  the 
mainland,  unemployment  on  the  island  increased  from 
1950  to  1975,  when  it  was  40  percent  in  the  cities  and 
as  high  as  95  percent  in  the  countryside.  Meanwhile  the 
migration  to  the  mainland  made  for  1.7  million  Puerto 
Ricans  there  in  1970,  the  majority  remaining  in  New 
York,  their  port  of  entry.'"  Most  of  those  who  found 
work  had  to  be  satisfied  with  the  lowest-paying,  menial 
jobs.  In  1975  21  percent  of  Puerto  Rican  workers 
in  New  York  were  unemployed,  nearly  two  and  one- 
half  times  the  city  rate.  When  those  who  had  given 
up  looking  for  jobs  were  counted,  more  like  50  percent 
were  out  of  work.  A  third  of  all  Puerto  Ricans  on  the 
mainland  lived  below  the  poverty  level  as  against  11.3 
percent  of  all  U.S.  families,  and  a  fourth  were  on  welfare 
compared  to  5  percent  of  Americans  as  a  whole.  What 
statistics  described  impersonally  was  borne  out  by  drug 
addiction,  street  crime,  anger,  and  despair.  As  Pedro 
Pietri,  who  lived  in  New  York,  put  it  in  "Broken  English 
Dream," 

To  the  united  states  we  came 

to  learn  how  to  misspell  our  name 

to  lose  the  definition  of  pride 

to  have  misfortune  on  our  side 

to  live  where  rats  and  roaches  roam 

and  sing  a  house  is  not  a  home 


to  be  trained  to  turn  on  television  sets 

to  dream  about  jobs  you  never  get 

to  fill  out  welfare  applications 

to  graduate  from  school  without  an  education 

to  be  drafted  distorted  and  destroyed 

to  work  fulltime  and  still  be  unemployed 

to  wait  for  income  tax  returns 

and  stay  drunk  and  lose  concern 

for  the  heart  and  soul  of  our  race 

and  the  weather  that  produces  our  face. 

One  response  to  their  worsening  condition  was  for 
Puerto  Ricans  on  the  mainland  to  organize.  It  was  the 
revolt  of  a  street  gang  against  police  brutality  on  the 
Northwest  Side  of  Chicago  in  1966  that  was  the  begm- 
ning  of  Puerto  Rican  activism  across  the  country  which 
protested  discrimination  not  only  in  civil  rights  but  also 
in  employment,  housing,  and  education.'^  There  were 
draft  resistance,  prison  revohs,  and  community  self-help 
undertakings.    By    1968    the    Chicago    gang   that    had 
touched  this  off  had  become  the  Young  Lords  Organiza- 
tion which  linked  up  with  a  New  York  group  the  fol- 
lowing year  that  formed  the  Young  Lords  Party.  With 
the  example  of  the  Black  Panthers  and  the  Cuban  Revo- 
lution, the  YLP  called  for  self-determination  of  Puerto 
Ricans  on  their  island  and  on  the  mainland,  "community 
control  of  our  institutions,"  and  "true  education  of  our 
Afro-Indio  culture  and  Spanish  language."  To  them  it 
seemed  that  this  required  a  socialist  society,  armed  self- 
defense,  and  struggle.'*  They  piled  up  uncollected  gar- 
bage in  the  streets  of  New  York  blocking  traffic  and 
compelling  the  authorities  to  provide  service  in  their 
neighborhoods.   They  surveyed  tenements  to  identify 
poisonous  lead  paint  on  walls.  They  commandeered  a 
church  and  distributed  free  food,  blankets,  and  clothing 
until  evicted  by  the  police,  and  they  opened  a  drug 
rehabilitation  center  in  the  South  Bronx.  It  was  the  face 
of  Che  Guevara  that  .Mark  Rogovin  painted  on  a  mural 
for  their  national  headquarters  in  Chicago.  Police  repres- 
sion and  their  own  divisions  finally  destroyed  them  in 
New  York,  though  the  Chicago  group  hung  on  longer. 
However,  some  of  their  aims  and  efforts  were  shared  by 
other  organizations. 

One  was  the  Puerto  Rican  Nationalist  Party  that  had 
been  formed  on  the  island  in  1922  and  had  supported  all 
means  including  guerrilla  warfare  to  achieve  indepen- 
dence. >'•  Under  the  leadership  of  Harvard-educated  Don 
Pedro  Albizu  Campos  during  the  thirties,  the  party 
pressed  for  workers'  legitimate  share  in  foreign  business 
profits,  taxation  of  nonresident  firms,  and  an  end  to 
absentee  landlordism  and  dependence  on  foreign  loans. 
When  the  chief  of  police  was  assassinated  in  1936,  A  [jizu 
and  many  rebels  were  imprisoned.  Freed  in  1947,  Albizu 
again  organized  an  insurrection,  which  broke  out  in 
1950  '5  An  attempt  was  made  on  the  life  of  President 
Truman,  but  both  failed,  and  Albizu  was  returned  to 
prison  and  released  in  1965  mortally  ill,  three  weeks 
before  his  death. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  93 
Meanwhile  in  1952  Puertoriquenos  were  granted  a 
referendum  and  voted  for  a  commonwealth  over  their 
current  colonial  status.  Independence  was  not  on  the 
ballot. '•*  In  1954  four  Nationalists,  Lolita  Lebron,  Rafael 
.Miranda,  Andres  Cordero,  and  Irvin  Flores,  entered  the 
U.S.  Capitol  and  from  the  visitors'  gallery  shot  and 
wounded  five  Congressmen  while  Lebron  unfurled  a  flag 
and  called  for  the  independence  of  Puerto  Rico.  The  four 
were  arrested  and  imprisoned.  Claiming  that  they  were 
fighting  for  the  liberation  of  their  people  and  should  have 
been  tried  before  a  world  court,  Lebron  and  her  com- 
panions after  a  quarter  century  of  incarceration  were  to 
become  in  the  eyes  of  many  the  longest  held  political 
prisoners  in  the  Western  Hemisphere.  They  were  finally 
released  by  President  Carter  in  1979. 

Their  cause  was  summed  up  in  the  Crucifixion  of  Don 
Pedro  Albizu  Campos,  which  Mario  Galan  and  the  Puerto 
Rican  Art  Association  painted  on  a  Chicago  wall  in  197 1 . 
In  the  mural  he  hangs  from  a  cross  in  a  suit  and  tie  but 
with  bare  feet,  and  calmly  awaits  the  spear  thrust  of 
Muiioz  Marin,  the  governor  of  the  island  who  earlier  had 
revoked  his  pardon.  On  the  two  lateral  crosses  hang 
Lolita  Lebron  and  Rafael  Miranda  in  the  black  and  white 
of  mourning,  which  were  also  the  colors  of  the 
Nationalists'  uniform.''  Across  the  top  is  a  series  of 
portraits  of  other  liberation  leaders.  Coinciding  with  the 
cross  of  the  Nationalist  flag  that  fills  the  background, 
Don  Pedro's  slim  body  looks  at  once  terribly  vulnerable 
but  also  as  compelling  as  a  Byzantine  Christ.  This  is 
achieved  by  presenting  the  revolutionary  leader  in  the 
formal  manner  of  a  Puerto  Rican  santos,  a  folk  image 
customarily  of  a  saint  or  Christ,  a  tradition  that  ulti- 
mately derives  from  Mediterranean  Christian  art.  Don 
Pedro  in  fact  seems  not  so  much  a  victim  as  affirmatively 
spreading  his  arms  to  welcome  beholders  to  the  cause  he 

died  for.  •       .    • 

After  completing  this  work  Galan  painted  in  the 
courtyard  of  the  Puerto  Rican  Congress  on  North  Ave- 
nue and  was  to  do  some  nineteen  murals  up  to  1979, 
when  he  was  working  on  a  B.A.  in  art  education  at  the 
Art  Institute  and  surviving  by  sign  painting. 

John  Weber  throughout  most  of  the  seventies  also 
worked  with  Puerto  Rican  residents  in  Chicago  on  mu- 
rals that  called  for  cooperation  with  other  ethnic  groups 
to  fight  racism,  gang  violence,  drugs,  and  the  exploita- 
tion of  workers.'* 


Urban  Renewal 

During  this  second  stage  of  the  development  of  com- 
munity murals  artists  and  communities  began  to  con- 
centrate on  particular  aspects  of  discrimination,  such  as 
gang  violence,  drugs,  and  urban  renewal.  While  the 
Chicago  Wall  of  Respect  was  painted  in  protest  to  the 
condemnation  of  a  Black  neighborhood,  its  imagery  did 
not  bear  directly  on  this.  It  was  only  about  1970  that 


94  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

murals  began  to  turn  directly  to  this  theme,  and  then  it 
became  a  prevailing  one  throughout  the  country. 

Urban  renewal  was  a  government-coordinated  and 
subsidized  means  of  "upgrading"  aging  districts,  usually 
in  the  innercity,  and  making  way  for  more  profitable 
upper-income  high  rises,  new  office  towers,  trade  and 
convention  centers,  expanding  educational  and  medical 
institutions,  facilities  for  sports  and  high  culture,  as  well 
as  the  freeways  and  bridges  to  connect  them  with  new 
suburbs.  It  was  a  key  strategy  of  the  transformation  of 
cities  during  the  sixties  and  seventies  from  manufactur- 
ing centers  to  hubs  of  corporate  administration,  the 
services  and  entertainment,  while  factories  moved  to  the 
suburbs  for  more  space  and  lower  taxes. '^  The  process 
was  carried  out  under  the  supervision  of  a  redevelopment 
authority  appointed  by  the  mayor.  It  used  the  city's  right 
to  condemn  property,  bought  it  w  ith  federal  money,  had 
it  cleared  and  sold  it  to  private  developers.  In  the  course 
of  this  little  consideration  w  as  given  for  the  breaking  up 
of  neighborhoods,  small  businesses  and  the  ties  of  com- 
munity. Nor  was  there  the  possibility  to  relocate  people 
at  rents  they  could  afford.  .More  often  they  were  left  to 
fend  for  themselves  and  crowd  into  other  aging  buildings 
that  landlords  could  subdivide,  neglect,  and  raise  rents 
for,  w  ith  the  expectation  that  their  properties  would  soon 
be  purchased  by  the  development  authority.  The  dein- 
dustrializing  of  the  cities  also  left  increasing  numbers  of 
working  people  with  obsolete  skills  and  the  untrained 
young  without  jobs,  not  only  because  of  new  technology 


but  also  because  many  especially  among  the  minorities 
did  not  have  access  to  education  or  to  the  high-priced  and 
segregated  suburbs  near  the  new  industry.  Unemploy- 
ment in  turn  contributed  to  the  ghettoizing  of  their 
neighborhoods  and  a  recurring  vicious  circle. 

One  of  the  first  murals  specifically  to  protest  urban 
renewal  was  Protect  the  People's  Homes,  painted  in  1970  by 
Mark  Rogovin  and  local  assistants.  Done  on  a  two-story 
wall  in  a  Chicago  neighborhood  of  Puerto  Ricans  and 
Appalachian  Whites,  it  showed  a  monumental  dark- 
skinned  man  fending  off  a  wrecking  crane  with  one  arm 
as  he  threw  the  other  around  neighborhood  houses  to 
save  them.  Meanwhile  a  White  woman  lurched  forward 
to  prevent  the  jaws  of  the  crane  from  closing  on  other 
houses  over  which  luxury  high  rises  already  loomed.  The 
simplicity  of  the  design  and  the  rendering  of  everything 
in  unmodeled,  flat,  angular  forms  that  hold  to  the  surface 
of  the  wall  in  spite  of  their  seeming  to  burst  out  of  it 
made  for  an  extraordinarily  bold  composition  that  con- 
veyed the  urgent  need  for  concerted  action  by  people  of 
different  races  if  they  were  not  to  become  refugees. 
However,  the  mural  itself  was  destroyed  when  the 
building  changed  ownership. 

One  way  to  reshape  your  living  space  was  to  paint  its 
walls,  and  members  of  other  ethnic  groups  were  begin- 
ning to  reaffirm  their  identity  at  this  time.  In  197 1  Sachio 
Yamashita  swamped  a  three-story  apartment  building 
with  a  wave  borrowed  from  the  nineteenth-century 
Japanese  woodcuts  of  Hiroshige.   His  ambitions  were 


Mark  Rogovin,  director,  and  local  youth:  Protect  the 
People's  Homes,  1970,  destroyed.  North  Side,  Chicago. 
(©  Public  Art  Worbhop) 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  95 


Sachio    Yamashila 
Chicago. 


even  grander,  and  he  announced  that  he  wanted  to  paint 
all  the  runways  and  buildings  of  O'Hare  Airport,  the 
largest  in  the  world. ^^ 

Growth  Cut  Short  in  Boston 

As  the  murals  of  Chicago's  Pilsen  barrio  illustrate  what 
happens  when  local  people  try  to  take  control  of  their 
own  development,  including  their  housing,  so  in  Bos- 
ton's North  End  wall  paintings  are  to  be  seen  on  its  main 
street  and  in  its  park,  schoolyards,  and  apartment-house 
courts.  There  they  mark  the  vitality  of  the  Italian 
working-class  and  shopkeeping  district  and  its  success  in 
having  fended  off  the  ravages  of  redevelopment.  Origi- 
nally condemned  for  renewal,  by  1959  it  was  renewing 
itself  by  strong  local  organizing,  putting  together  its 
small  savings,  and  depending  on  the  "sweat  equity"  of  its 
own  skilled  craftsmen.^'  However,  this  was  a  commu- 
nity that  did  not  suffer  the  burden  of  racism  and  had 
modest  resources.  Its  murals  in  the  early  1970s  were 
often  pastoral  scenes  of  fields,  flowers,  and  animals, 
well-behaved  graffiti  arrangements,  or  more  "profes- 
sional" supergraphics  in  contrast  to  the  painting  in  Black 
neighborhoods. 

The  militant  and  later  more  culturally  oriented  murals 


of  Gary  Rickson  and  Dana  Chandler  in  the  late  sixties 
were  only  some  of  the  work  that  either  protested  racial 
injustice  or  affirmed  racial  pride.  One  of  the  most  im- 
aginative and  moving  of  these  w  as  among  the  first  wo- 
men's murals  done  in  the  country.  It  was  painted  in  1970 
on  the  side  of  a  three-story  brick  apartment  house  in  the 
South  End  by  Sharon  Dunn,  a  voung  Black  woman, 
who  is  said  to  have  been  pregnant  at  the  time.  Titled 
Maternity,  it  shows  the  ten-foot-high  angular  silhouettes 
of  women  who  are  pregnant  or  hold  infants  in  their  arms 
or  stand  proudly  alongside  a  child.  The  paint  has  been 
laid  on  in  flat,  unmodeled  color  without  detail;  the 
women's  flesh  is  simply  black  and  their  dresses  plain 
bright  colors.  Above  them  are  a  band  of  stylized  naked 
and  X-rayed  women  with  their  breasts  or  wombs  sym- 
bolically outlined  in  color.  At  the  very  top  and  bottom 
are  decorative  echoing  bands  of  more  abstract  symbols, 
suggesting  eyes,  mouths,  breasts,  and  vulvas.  By  leaving 
large  areas  of  the  brown  brick  unpainted,  the  artist 
alluded  not  only  to  skin  color  but  also  the  hardship  of 
motherhood  in  these  tenements. 

Another  powerful  work  was  done  in  1971  by  James 
Brown  on  the  two-story  remnant  of  a  wall  that  projected 
from  a  drug  rehabilitation  center  in  a  deserted  area  of 
Roxbury  laced  by  highways  and  apparently  awaiting 
renewal.  The  mural  shows  a  reclining  child,  almost  the 
color  of  the  brick,  shooting  himself  up,  but  in  the  heart. 
It  is   its   large  simple  forms,   its  absolute  clarity   and 


96  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


SJjuroii  Uunii  {Suminci thing).  Maternity,  1970,  South 
End,  Boston.  (Photo  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art) 


James  Brown  (Summerthing):  The  Third  Nail,  1971, 
Roxbury,  Boston. 


minimizing  of  means  that  make  it  compelling.  Its  title 
suggests  crucifixion:  The  Third  Nail. 

Meanwhile,  the  Chinese  community  in  Boston  had 
begun  to  take  an  interest  in  murals.  In  1970  Dan  Hueng 
and  Bob  Uyeda  did  a  stylish  semiabstraction  of  a  Chinese 
junk  on  a  structure  of  the  Chinese  Merchants  Associa- 
tion, and  Pietro  Ferri  painted  a  decorative  dragon  on  the 
Chinese  Christian  Church. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  97 

Most  of  the  murals  in  Boston  continued  to  be  spon- 
sored by  Summerthing,  which  was  not  an  organization  of 
muralists  or  artists  at  all,  but  an  agency  of  the  Mayor's 
Office  of  Cultural  Affairs  that  coordinated  art  projects 
for  the  disadvantaged  in  the  inner  city.  By  1971  its  staff 
had  grown  wary  of  socially  conscious  murals,  and  its 
support  turned  increasingly  to  chic  abstractions  and 
supergraphics. 


Dan  Hueng  and  Bob  Uyeda  (Summerthing):  Untitled, 
1970,  Chinatown,  Boston. 


98  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  youth  directed  by  Susan  Shapiro-Kiok  (City arts): 
Anti-Drug  Abuse  Mural,  1970,  Alfred  E.  Smith 
public  housing,  Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


New  York 

Cityarts  Workshop,  says  its  founder  and  first  director, 
Susan  Shapiro-Kiok,  began  because  she  wanted  to  de- 
velop a  creative  arts  program  that  was  responsive  to  the 
desires  of  low-income  residents  of  the  Lower  East  Side, 
who  were  "discovering  their  unique  ethnic  identity  and 
power."^^  She  had  worked  as  a  pottery  instructor  in 
community  arts  projects  in  the  area  since  1962  and 
organized  Cityarts  in  1968  under  the  auspices  of  the  New 
York  City  Department  of  Cultural  Affairs.  With  two 
teenagers  who  had  an  interest  in  the  arts  and  knew  the 
neighborhood,  Susan  Caruso-Green  and  James  Jannuzzi, 
she  set  about  helping  the  racially  mixed  residents  of  the 
Alfred  E.  Smith  housing  project  create  a  mural  for  the 
entrance  hall  of  its  recreation  center.  Over  a  hundred 
mostly  Black  people  of  all  ages  were  involved  in  making 
cement  sand-casted  tiles  that  they  had  individually  de- 
signed and  then  assembled  in  the  mural.  Their  first 
outdoor  painted  mural  was  done  two  years  later  in  1970, 
again  with  local  residents,  on  a  two-story  wall  facing  a 
playground  of  "the  Smith."  In  preparation  the  three  staff 
members  took  their  team  of  young  assistants  to  Boston  to 
see  the  murals  that  had  been  done  in  Roxbury  and  talk 
with  the  painters.  When  they  returned,  the  inexperi- 
enced members  were  concerned  about  producing  a 
good-looking  image  because  their  drawing  was  not  up  to 
it.  The  Cityarts  staff  had  them  take  Polaroid  photos  of 
one  another  acting  out  what  they  wanted  to  express. 


These  were  then  shown  from  an  opaque  projector,  and 
their  figures  were  reduced  to  simple  silhouettes  from 
which  the  composition  was  assembled  and  transferred  to 
plywood  panels.  The  process  was  simple,  it  involved  the 
youngsters  in  the  whole  operation  of  formulating,  draw- 
ing, and  finally  painting  the  images,  and  it  had  a  "profes- 
sional" look  to  it.  What  the  finished  mural  on  the  recrea- 
tion center  wall  shows  is  a  three-story-high  youth  giving 
the  Black  Power  salute  as  he  faces  the  Black  Olympic 
winners  at  iMexico  City  in  1968  who  defied  the  rules  to 
assert  their  pride.  At  the  same  time  he  turns  his  back  on 
vignettes  of  gang  fighting,  drug  addiction,  and  a  cop 
taking  a  payoff.  The  latter  detail  provoked  serious  con- 
troversy, which  moved  Cityarts  to  seek  independence 
from  City  Hall,  its  funding  source,  and  to  become  a 
non-profit,  tax-exempt  corporation. 

Using  the  Polaroid  procedure,  Cityarts  and  Smith 
residents  in  1971  did  a  more  complex  work  made  up  of 
elegant  green  and  brown  silhouettes  of  women  looking 
toward  the  big  shadow  of  Africa  calling  it  Black  Women  of 
America  Today. 

The  following  year  Alan  Okada,  a  young  professional 
artist  and  draftsman  who  had  joined  Cityarts,  organized 
a  team  of  local  teenagers  to  do  the  History  of  Chinese 
Immigration  to  the  United  States  at  a  major  intersection  in 
Chinatown.  At  its  center  are  monumental  faces  of  local 
people  surrounded  by  historical  vignettes  of  Chinese 
working  on  the  railroad,  being  massacred  by  Whites, 
bending  over  sewing  machines  in  sweatshops,  and  per- 
forming traditional  music.  In  the  midst  of  commercial 
billboards,  here  was  a  statement  by  local  people  about 
what  they  had  suffered  and  their  continuing  dignity. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  99 


Local  youth  directed  by  Alan  Okada  (Cityarts):  History 
of  Chinese  Immigration  to  the  United  States,  1972, 
Chinatown,  New  York. 


Local  residents  and  Cityarts:  Black  Women  of  America 
Today,  1971.  Alfred  E.  Smith  public  housing.  Lower 
East  Side,  New  York. 


When  Cityarts  did  a  poll  of  viewers,  they  found  general 
approval,  but  also  uncertainty  as  to  the  political  direction 
of  the  work;  they  promised  themselves  to  avoid  am- 
biguity in  the  future.^* 

This  they  succeeded  in  powerfully  with  Arise  from 
Oppression,  which  they  also  completed  in  1972.  Directed 
by  Susan  Caruso-Green  and  James  Jannuzzi,  some  sixty 
local  teenagers  worked  nine  months  on  it.   Again  the 


composition  was  produced  by  Polaroid  photos  of  team 
members  acting  out  what  they  wanted  to  express.  It  fills 
the  side  of  the  four-story  Henry  Street  Settlement 
Playhouse  on  Manhattan's  Lower  East  Side  and  shows 
local  people  breaking  out  of  the  boxes  that  trap  them — 
drugs,  unwanted  pregnancy,  and  the  oppression  of 
tenement  life.  One  figure  trapped  inside  a  hypodermic 
needle   is  all   veins  and  arteries.   Gradually  they   pull 


100  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

themselves  up,  helping  each  other  climb  above  the  rubble 
of  the  slums.  The  power  of  the  mural  arises  not  only 
from  the  scale  but  also  from  the  imaginative  X-raylike 
bodies  of  the  tenement  dwellers,  whose  straining  green, 
yellow,  and  purple  bones  and  muscles  express  their 
struggle.  The  painters  clearly  did  not  attempt  anatomical 
accuracy,  but  rather  the  impression  of  extreme  effort. 
The  central  image,  now  an  ankh,  the  Egyptian  symbol  of 
life,  emerging  from  a  fire  in  which  Black  and  White 
people  are  being  destroyed,  had  been  changed  from  a 
cross,  which  had  produced  protests  from  Jewish  resi- 
dents who  lived  in  apartments  facing  the  mural.  This  was 
one  of  the  most  powerful  murals  that  had  yet  been  done, 
largely  because  of  the  rough-hewn  vigor  of  the  rising 
X-rayed  figures.  Here  even  the  awkward  drawing  rein- 
forces the  humaneness  of  the  conception  which  over- 
comes the  difficulty  of  rendering.  However,  one  criti- 
cism can  be  made:  the  movement  of  the  figures  across  the 
surface  from  left  to  right  is  weakened  by  the  recession  of 
the  street  up  the  center  so  that  the  viewer's  attention  is 


Arnold  Belkin  (City arts):  Against  Domestic  Colonial- 
ism (detail),  1972,  HelFs  Kitchen,  New  York. 


not  concentrated  in  one  direction  but  divided.  But  a  work 
of  this  power  can  endure  such  flaws. 

Untypical  of  the  methods  of  Cityarts  but  consistent 
with  its  social  consciousness  was  its  commissioning  of 
Arnold  Belkin,  a  mature  artist  who  had  painted  im- 
portant murals  in  Mexico,  to  do  a  work  on  a  tenement 
wall  facing  a  playground  in  Hell's  Kitchen  in  1972.  This 
was  a  racially  mixed,  working-class  neighborhood  west 
of  Times  Square  that  w  as  threatened  with  demolition  to 
make  way  for  office  towers  and  luxury  high  rises.  Work- 
ing in  a  style  that  he  says  he  borrowed  from  New  Deal 
art,  Belkin  depicted  the  threat  by  a  bulldozer  decorated 
with  a  federal  eagle  and  new  high  rises  looming  behind  it. 
In  the  foreground  a  figure  w  ith  a  needle  is  being  carried 
off,  suggesting  that  it  is  a  society  that  pushes  people  aside 
that  produces  addiction.  This  scene  is  contrasted  with 
the  residents'  dreams  of  new  homes  of  human  scale 
surrounded  by  greenery.  These  garden  dwellings  are  at 
the  end  of  a  rainbow ,  w  hich  springs  from  the  gray  flags 
of  the  nationalities  that  immigrated  to  this  country  and 
now  live  in  Hell's  Kitchen.  The  cooperation  and  mixed 
heritage  of  the  residents  are  also  suggested  by  the  differ- 
ent complexions  cubisticly  combined  in  each  of  the  faces 
of  the  central  four-story-high  figures.  With  arms  about 


each  other's  shoulders,  they  stride  out  of  the  w  all  with 
leaflets  announcing,  "  Ihe  Neighborhood  Is  For  People 
Not  Big  Business"  and  "We  The  People  Demand  Control 
Of  Our  Communities."  The  title  is  Against  Domestic 
Colonialism. 

Philadelphia 

During  the  late  sixties  grass-roots  public  art  sprang  up 
in  Philadelphia  as  elsewhere  around  the  country.  There 
are  some  locals  who  take  pride  in  claiming  that  the 
contemporary  wave  of  graffiti  in  the  United  States  began 
there  between  1967  and  1969  with  the  wall  art  of 
Cornbread,  Cool  Earl,  and  Hi  Fi.  Justine  DeVan,  who 
later  was  to  paint  with  the  Chicago  Mural  Group,  recalls 
that  in  the  late  sixties  she  was  commissioned  by  Fellow- 
ship House,  a  Quaker  social  service  agency,  to  paint  six 
"interior  portable  murals,"  each  four  feet  square,  on  Black 
heroes  and  events.  The  panels,  exhibited  at  local  paro- 
chial schools,  were  similar  to  the  Wall  of  Respect,  she  says. 


Ron  Pierce  and  local  youth  (DUO):  Untitled,  1971,  Mill 
Creek,  Philadelphia. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /  101 
and  done  in  the  style  of  Black  artists  Hale  Woodruff  and 
Charles  Alston,  who  had  painted  murals  in  public 
buildings  since  the  thirties. 

In  1969  the  Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art,  seeking  to 
respond  to  the  rising  interest  in  community  art,  hired 
David  Katzivc  to  head  its  Department  of  Urban  Out- 
reach, and  two  years  later  he  secured  as  staff  two  artists, 
Clarence  Wood  and  Don  Kaiser,  the  first  Black,  the 
second  White,  to  assist  people  in  making  public  art  in 
their  own  neighborhoods  and  at  the  museum.  Wood  and 
Kai.ser  undertook  a  wide  variety  of  projects  but  in  par- 
ticular coordinated  mural  teams  of  inner-city  youngsters 
and  local  painters.  They  regarded  themselves  as  "en- 
vironmental artists"  and  still  insist  that  they  bring  no 
preconceptions  to  a  mural  as  to  what  it  should  be  apart 
from  it  being  what  local  people  ask  for.  DUO  received 
some  of  the  first  National  Endowment  for  the  Arts 
funding  for  murals  in  1971,  and  the  first  work  was  done 
by  Ron  Pierce  and  teenagers  in  the  Mill  Creek  neighbor- 
hood in  June.  On  what  had  been  a  concrete  baseball 
backstop  a  group  of  racially  mixed  young  people  are 
shown  demonstrating  the  pleasures  of  reading,  dance, 
music,  gardening,  and  sports.  The  style  is  what  used  to 
be  called  "primitive,"  but  perhaps  "vernacular"  is  better 


102  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

because  this  acknowledges  such  work's  indigenous 
character  and  the  careful  efforts  at  formal  arrangement 
and  pattern.  The  figures  may  appear  stiff  to  an  eye  used 
to  "correct"  drawing,  but  the  painters  make  their  state- 
ment in  a  straightforward  and  engaging  way. 

Later  that  summer  artist  Sam   Maitin  designed  for 
DUO  an  abstract  mural  for  the  side  of  the  Fleisher  Art 


Memorial,  a  school  and  gallery.  He  explained  the  design 
to  the  inner-city  teenagers  whom  he  was  working  with 
and  local  residents,  w  inning  them  over,  and  the  wall  that 
faced  a  pocket  park  was  painted  with  lilting  colors  and 
forms  that  flickered  through  the  trees.  That  year  DUO 
made  possible  murals  done  by  community  people  in  a 
drug  rehabilitation  facility,  a  school,  and  recreation  cen- 


Gene  Davis,  designer,  painted  by  Parkway  School  students 
and  local  people,  coordinated  by  Don  Kaiser  and  Clarence 
Wood  (DUO):  Franklin's  Footpath,  1971-72, 
Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art. 


Sam  Maitin  assisted  by  local  people  (DUO):  Untitled, 
1971,  Fleisher  Art  Memorial,  Philadelphia. 


tens.  In  December  it  began  what  was  literally  a  street 
painting,  Franklin's  Footpath,  on  the  parkway  in  front  of 
the  museum  and  finished  it  in  the  spring.  It  was  a  carpet 
of  color  larger  than  a  football  field  and  composed  of 
eleven-inch  parallel  stripes,  which  if  placed  end  on  end 
would  have  stretched  six  miles.  Designed  by  Gene 
Davis,  it  was  painted  by  students  of  the  experimental 
Parkway  School  and  other  community  residents  super- 
vised by  Kaiser  and  Wood.  Also  in  1972  the  first  au- 
thorized moving  mural  in  Philadelphia  was  completed  by 
Graffiti  Alternatives  Workshop,  which  was  funded  by 
DUO.  Under  the  direction  of  Sandy  Ruben,  former 
graffitists  in  teams  of  up  to  thirty  had  their  energies 
redirected  to  designing  and  painting  transit  authority 
buses  with  supergraphics.  Later  they  painted  a  six-car 
subway  train. 

That  year,  too,  one  of  the  first  of  the  Philadelphia 
Walls  of  Respect  was  painted  on  the  end  wall  of  a 
two-story  row  house  in  Haddington.  Actually  called  the 
Wall  of  Consciousness,  it  brought  together  portraits  of 
Satchmo,  Wilt  Chamberlain,  Dick  Gregory,  Black  Jesus, 
George  Jackson,  Jesse  Jackson,  and  Malcolm  X.  Wood 
coordinated  the  project,  Bernard  Young  did  the  design, 
and  it  was  painted  by  local  artists.  Their  placing  of 
portraits  in  decorative  geometrical  frameworks  was  to 
become  characteristic  of  other  walls  dedicated  to  Black 
heroes  in  the  city. 

DUO  also  made  possible  in  the  summer  of  1972  four 
children's  murals  on  the  end  walls  of  aging  row  houses 
along  Sickles  Street  in  West  Philadelphia.  There  kids  ten 
years  old  and  younger  did  portraits  of  their  homes  and 

Bernard  Young  assisted  by  Haddington  Leadership  Associa- 
tion and  West  Philadelphia  artists,  coordinated  by  Clar- 
ence Wood  (DUO):  Wall  of  Consciousness,  1972. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  103 

each  other.  Later  Wood  sketched  in  the  faces  of  contem- 
porary Black  heroes  on  a  nearby  playground  wall  that 
were  completed  by  youngsters. 

The  activity  of  DUO  stimulated  other  artists  like 
Wayne  Tate  and  Gary  Bloom,  w  ho  painted  a  mural  on 
the  two-story  facade  of  the  Haddington  Redevelopment 
Authority  and  Leadership  Organization  in  West 
Philadelphia  that  year.  In  it  they  contrasted  a  well-laid- 
out  African  village  beneath  an  umbrella  of  trees  with  a 
street  of  local  run-dow  n  row  houses,  and  next  to  them 
the  more-than-life-size  head  of  a  Black  man  looks  towards 
the  names  of  the  sponsoring  organizations  for  something 
adequate  to  his  heritage.  ,\cross  the  street  on  a  wall 
facing  a  pocket  park,  Tate  and  Bloom  painted  a  Wall  of 
Respect  with  faces  of  Black  leaders  from  Frederick 
Douglass  to  .Martin  Luther  King. 

Washington 

In  the  nation's  capital,  community-based  murals  were 
supported  during  the  early  years  of  the  movement  not 
only  by  private  service  organizations  but  also  by  a  gov- 
ernment program.  Youth  Pride  Inc.  sponsored  the  long 
frieze  that  wrapped  around  its  corner  job-training  center 
that  William  Battle,  Chico  Hall,  and  local  artists  painted 
in  1972  indicting  racism  and  calling  for  education  (de- 
scribed in  the  introduction).  And  the  D.C.  Commission 
on  the  Arts  and  the  Department  of  Environmental  Ser- 
vices operated  a  Wall  Mural  Program.  With  its  help  Dan 
Wynn  the  same  year  depicted  a  Black  Moses  bringing 
down  a  new  tablet  inveighing  against  racism,  war,  and  a 
heroin  monkey.  The  mural  also  indicts  w  hat  it  describes 
as  a  "politics  made  simple"  kind  of  racial  cooperation 
and  shows  demonstrators  trampling  a  Confederate  flag 


104  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


and  joining  a  Black  Panther.  With  similar  fury  Wynn  in 
another  work  that  year  struck  out  against  drugs.  Pocket 
parks  and  playgrounds  were  also  painted  with  social 
statements,  such  as  a  supergraphic  fist  clutching  a  ques- 
tion mark.  A  large  and  impressive  project  was  the  paint- 
ing of  the  outside  walls  of  the  Shaw  Community  Health 
Center  illustrating  the  activities  going  on  inside  (see 
chapter  4  for  further  description). 

New  Orleans 

One  of  the  achievements  of  urban  renewal  here  was 
the  demolition  of  Treme,  a  neighborhood  next  to  the 
French  Quarter  that  also  had  many  historic  houses  but 
was  occupied  largely  by  Black  people.  What  was  to  re- 
place them  was  a  performing  arts  center  and  a  park 
named  for  Louis  Armstrong.  In  protest  Bruce  Brice,  a 
self-trained  "folk-artist"  who  had  grown  up  in  the  Quar- 
ter, took  to  the  old  brick  across  the  street  from  the  re- 
newal site  in  1971  with  a  panorama  of  marionettelike 
figures.  (He  once  had  made  marionettes.)  He  showed  a 
bulldozer  and  wrecker's  ball  knocking  down  houses  and  a 


Dan  Wynn:  Thou  Shalt  End  Racism 
Washington,  D.  C. 


1972, 


Wayne  Tate  and  Gary  Bloom:  Untitled,  1972,  Hadding- 
ton Leadership  Organization  and  Redevelopment  Author- 
ity, Philadelphia. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  105 


Bruce  Brice:    Untitled,    1971,    Treme,   New  Orleans. 
(Photo  Bruce  Brice) 


three-armed  cop  between  flags  of  the  Union  and  Confed- 
eracy ordering  residents  out  of  their  community.  The 
mood  is  one  of  sadness  but  also  an  indomitable  buoy- 
ancy, as  in  a  jazz  funeral,  as  they  depart.  The  dis- 
placed were  headed  for  the  public  housing  in  Desire 
(where  a  bus  not  a  streetcar  now  runs),  a  remote  area 
distant  from  where  most  worked.  There  Brice  the  same 
year  did  another  mural  about  a  young  tenant  who  had 
been  left  to  bleed  to  death  by  the  police  after  they  shot 


Bruce  Brice:  Untitled  (partial  view),  1971,  Desire,  New 
Orleans. 


him.  Next  to  this  scene  Brice  set  a  depiction  of  White 
slave  traders  brutalizing  Africans  who  take  their  revenge. 
Meanwhile  he  was  also  embellishing  the  walls  of  a  play- 
ground and  frame  houses  in  the  French  Quarter.  But, 
embittered,  he  left  what  he  calls  his  "charity  work"  to 
do  easel  painting  and  posters  of  the  old  ways  of  the 
Quarter — the  social  clubs,  their  impromptu  jazz  blasts, 
and  Mardi  Gras.  Like  the  musicians  who  hire  themselves 
out  while  still  doing  their  own  thing  when  the  spirit 
moves  them,  he  believes  he  can  preserve  his  integrity  and 
survive  by  his  art. 

San  Diego 

With  a  metropolitan  population  of  over  a  million,  the 
city  is  a  home  port  of  the  Navy  and  a  tuna  fishing  fleet, 
the  site  of  fish  canneries  and  boat,  aircraft,  and  missile 
manufacturing,  as  well  as  a  winter  and  summer  tourist 


106  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

resort.  Almost  at  the  Mexican  border,  it  is  the  home  also 
of  an  old  and  large  Chicano  population  and  the  haven  of 
undocumented  workers,  who,  as  elsewhere,  are  taken 
advantage  of  and,  not  wanting  to  be  noticed,  do  not 
organize  to  protect  themselves.  The  power  structure  is 
Anglo.  In  1968  an  ad  in  Life  by  a  local  utility  company 
that  showed  a  fat,  moustached  ".Mex"  with  his  taco 
w  agon  brought  together  the  few  local  Chicano  groups  to 
demonstrate  against  the  firm.^'*  Demanding  fair  hiring 
practices,  training  programs,  and  opportunities  for  ad- 
vancement, these  groups  realized  the  power  of  unity  and 
organized  themselves  into  the  Chicano  Federation  of  San 
Diego  County  with  the  intention  of  acting  as  the  perma- 
nent advocate  for  all  the  barrios,  overseeing  community 
development  and  the  delivery  of  social  services. 

Local  Chicano  artists  were  also  getting  themselves 
together  at  this  time.  During  the  sixties  Los  Artistas  de 
los  Barrios  had  organized  to  exhibit  distinctly  Chicano 
art  in  both  commercial  and  public  places,  including  the 
neighborhoods.^^  Some  of  its  members  were  students 
associated  with  MECHA  (.Vlovimiento  Estudientil 
Chicano  de  Aztlan)  and  in  1970  they  were  stimulated  by 
a  symposium  on  Chicanos  in  the  Southwest  at  San  Diego 
State  College  to  form  a  new  group,  Los  Toltecas  en 
Aztlan,  named  for  the  pre-Aztec  civilization  famous  for 
its  craftsmen.  They  organized  to  bring  art  to  the  barrios 
by  creating  a  cultural  center  where  they  could  work 


Gilberto  Ramirez  assisted  by  Guillermo  Aranda  and  Ruben 
de  Anda:  Conquest  of  the  Americas,  Joining  of  the 
Chicano  and  Mexican,  and  Birth  of  the  New  Man, 
1970,  Aztec  Center,  San  Diego  State  College  (later 
University). 


together  and  teach.  Within  the  year  they  were  to  suc- 
ceed. 

Also  in  that  year  two  Toltecas,  Guillermo  Aranda  and 
Ruben  de  Anda,  became  assistants  to  Gilberto  Ramirez, 
a  Mexican  artist  who  was  doing  a  triptych  of  murals  in 
the  Aztec  Center,  the  student  union  of  San  Diego  State. 
The  first  panel  pictures  the  holocaust  of  the  Spanish 
conquest  of  .Mexico  but  the  survival  of  the  mestizo  spirit, 
symbolized  by  naked  figures  rising  from  skulls  and  de- 
bris. In  the  central  panel  it  is  modern  machinery  that 
crushes  people,  but  it  is  presided  over  by  a  rabbit  god, 
suggesting  fundamental  weakness.  The  two  victims,  one 
Mexican,  the  other  Chicano,  are  united  by  a  bond  that 
connects  the  corazon  of  each — their  heart  and  heritage. 
This  seems  to  be  the  basis  of  their  triumph  in  the  final 
panel  which  shows  a  group  of  people,  hands  joined, 
rising  from  the  rubble  of  the  past  and  looking  hopefully 
toward  an  approaching  dove.  The  mural  clearly  ad- 
dresses the  growing  consciousness  of  local  Chicanos  and 
is  carried  out  in  a  carefully  rendered  manner.  In  fact,  its 
good  manners  are  a  shortcoming  of  the  triptych;  the  nude 
figures  are  handled  in  an  academic  way,  in  contrast  to  the 
sections  where  human  suffering  is  laid  bare,  where  the 
stylization  is  convincing.  There  the  artists  gained  most 
from  their  borrowing  from  Orozco's  visions  of  diaster 
and  their  adaptation  of  his  "painterly"  handling  of  grays 
and  pinks.  In  spite  of  its  defects,  this  was  an  auspicious 
beginning  for  murals  in  San  Diego.  During  these  years 
Ramirez  did  a  similar  scene  of  conflict  at  the  Centro 
Teatro  of  the  National  University  in  .Mexico  City,  but 


his  figures  were  bolder.  And  he  was  to  continue  to  bring 
the  Mexican  mural  tradition  to  young  Chicano  artists  and 
give  them  chances  to  paint  with  him. 

Logan  Heights  was  the  Anglo  name  for  what  Chicanos 
called  el  ombligo  (the  navel)  of  San  Diego.  It  was  the 
county's  oldest  barrio.  You  did  not  have  to  live  there  in 
order  to  identify  with  el  Barrio  de  la  Logan.  Some  could 
count  four  generations  of  their  families'  residence  in  the 
white  frame  cottages  that  huddled  close  to  the  bay,  fish 
canneries,  National  Steel,  and  a  hulking  power  plant. 
One  of  the  residents  said  of  his  neighbors,  "We  are  a 
more  gregarious  people  than  most.  The  whole  barrio  is 
our  living  room.  We  have  a  strong  family  organization 
and  strong  families  lead  to  strong  communities."^®  How- 
ever, in  the  sixties  the  barrio  was  bisected  by  Interstate  5, 
then  by  the  construction  of  the  Coronado  bridge  across 
the  bay.  Its  ramps  cut  through  the  center  of  the  barrio, 
driving  out  a  third  of  the  residents,  so  that  by  1970  there 
were  about  five  thousand  people  who  remained  and  had 
only  their  dispersal  to  look  forward  to,  because  the  area 
was  rezoned  as  industrial.  Slumlords  let  their  houses  fall 
into  decay,  and  auto  junk  yards  owned  by  Anglos  were 
inundating  the  area,  providing  no  jobs  for  locals  and 
filling  the  air  with  the  hammering  and  cutting  of  metal. 
The  area  beneath  the  bridge  was  also  becoming  the  place 
to  make  a  connection  with  drug  dealers. 

Young  people  resisted  the  blight  with  their  graffiti  on 
the  support  columns  of  the  bridge,  and  these  were  fol- 
lowed by  more  elaborate  symbols  and  imagery,  carefully 
watched  and  photographed  by  a  local  artist,  Salvador 
"Queso"  Torres,  who  had  done  portable  paper  murals  in 
San  Francisco  in  1967.  A  year  later,  Torres,  Guillermo 
Aranda,  Mario  "Torero"  Acevedo,  also  a  painter,  poet 
Alurista,  and  others  began  to  develop  a  vision  of  the 
revival  of  Barrio  Logan  around  what  had  threatened  to 
destroy  it.  A  number  of  them  attended  the  Youth  Liber- 
ation Conference  in  Denver  sponsored  by  the  Crusade 
for  Justice  in  1969  where  the  Spiritual  Plan  of  Aztldn  was 
drafted,  and  they  returned  excited  by  its  affirmation  of 
their  "bronze  culture"  and  "the  independence  of  our 
mestizo  Nation."  They  talked  about  murals  on  the  pylons 
and  retaining  walls,  about  transforming  the  bridge  engi- 
neer's building  underneath  into  a  community  center, 
creating  a  park  that  would  extend  all  the  way  to  the  bay 
and  a  marina  at  its  end.  Torres  says  the  idea  of  a 
user-developed  and  -maintained  park  was  partly  inspired 
by  the  People's  Park  of  Berkeley.  They  discussed  the 
need  for  a  neighborhood  clinic  and  drew  up  plans  for  a 
barrio  university.  Local  business  was  to  be  developed  on 
adjacent  streets,  including  shops  where  local  art  could  be 
sold.  Sharing  their  ideas  with  the  barrio  and  the  Chicano 
Federation,  they  drew  residents  into  the  planning.  Re- 
peatedly they  asked  the  city  for  a  park  beneath  the  bridge 
and  were  promised  one. 

Their  dreams  were  caught  up  short  when  on  April  22, 
1970,  bulldozers  arrived  to  prepare  the  site  for  a  parking 
lot  for  three  hundred  State  Highway  Patrol  cars  and  a 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  107 

police  substation.  That  day  Mario  Solis  went  from  door 
to  door  rousing  residents.  High  school  and  college  stu- 
dents and  the  Brown  Berets  joined  them.  Together  they 
confronted  the  bulldozers.  Some  of  the  drivers  were 
Chicanos  themselves,  and  the  work  stopped.  Police 
headquarters  was  also  picketed.  That  day  a  new  kind  of 
work  began:  barrio  residents  and  Chicanos  from 
elsewhere  in  the  county  began  building  their  park  with 
their  own  picks  and  hoes.  The  confrontation  succeeded. 
An  area  of  5.8  acres  beneath  the  bridge  ramps  was  given 
to  the  people  of  Barrio  Logan  by  the  state  and  city,  and  it 
became  Chicano  Park.  Grass  and  shrubs  were  planted 
and  maintained  by  the  city,  but  locals  have  continued  to 
donate  trees  and  flowers  and  to  work  in  the  park.  Play- 
ground equipment  was  provided,  and  the  building 
alongside  the  bridge  that  had  been  designated  for  the 
police  station  became  a  neighborhood  center  and  the 
office  of  the  Chicano  Federation.  It  was  the  continuation 
of  the  collective  action  that  saved  and  created  the  park 
that  was  to  begin  the  extraordinary  murals  on  the  abut- 
ments and  columns  of  the  bridge  three  years  later. 

Part  of  the  confrontation  of  April  1970  was  the 
takeover  of  the  old  Ford  exhibition  building  in  Balboa 
Park,  the  city's  central  park,  by  Los  Toltecas  en  Aztlan. 
Salvador  Torres  had  been  given  space  there  by  the  city  to 
do  a  large  portable  mural,  and  he  invited  other  Chicano 
artists  to  work  in  the  building.  One  of  them,  Victor 
Ochoa,  a  San  Diego  State  art  student,  w  as  turning  out 
leaflets  for  the  fast  breaking  events.  The  city  tried  to 
force  them  out,  but  it  w  as  maintained  by  the  artists  as  a 
cultural  center  for  nearly  a  year.  The  artists  lobbied  city 
hall  and  gave  them  a  short  course  on  Chicano  history  and 
culture,  Ochoa  says.  They  wanted  a  location  in  Balboa 
Park  to  balance  the  status  of  the  city's  fine  arts  museum 
there.  Finally  they  were  given  an  abandoned  water  tank 
in  the  park  that  had  been  previously  used  as  a  stable 
during  World  War  II  and  as  the  storage  shed  for  park 
gardeners  since  then.  The  city  contributed  an  initial 
twenty-two  thousand  dollars  to  help  renovate  what  was 
to  become  El  Centro  Cultural  de  la  Raza  with  workshops 
for  children  and  adults  in  the  visual  and  performing  arts. 
The  forty  artists  who  worked  there  teaching  and  doing 
their  own  art  were  members  of  Los  Toltecas.  The  paint- 
ers among  them  took  as  their  name  El  Congreso  de  Artistas 
Chicano  en  Aztldn,  the  acronym  of  which  is  equivalent  to 
"shit,"  a  humorously  bitter  characterization  of  them- 
selves. 

The  first  collective  work  of  the  painters  at  the  Centro 
Cultural  was  a  large  mural  on  the  curved  wall  of  the 
interior,  which  was  begun  in  1971  and  coordinated  by 
Guillermo  Aranda.  Work  was  intermittent,  but  by  1974 
it  covered  about  a  fifteen-by-fifty-foot  area  and  main- 
tained its  appearance  until  1978,  when  Aranda  returned 
to  it  with  a  Native  American  painter,  and  they  began 
changing  it  in  substantial  ways.  Aranda's  initial  design 
begins  with  a  more-than-life-size  indio  crucified  on  a  huge 
silver  dollar  which  is  also  a  machine  made  of  meshed 


108  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Guillermo  Aranda  assisted  by  other  artists:  La  Dualidad, 
1971-79,  Centra  Cultural  de  la  Raza,  San  Diego. 


gears,  suggesting  clockworks  and  modern  industry  in 
general.  He  also  suggests  Cuauhtemoc,  last  of  the  Aztec 
rulers  and  symbol  oi  indio  resistance.  The  dollar  further 
serves  as  the  shield  of  a  militarized  monster  that  has  a  gas 
mask  for  a  head  and  leads  a  phalanx  of  similar  creatures. 
He  holds  in  an  armored  hand  a  dagger  in  the  shape  of  a 
cross  with  which  he  pierces  his  other  arm  that  is  bared 
and  plunges  out  of  the  surface  as  a  sculptured  fist  grasp- 
ing its  own  chains.  It  is  as  if  he  is  shooting  himself  up 
with  Christianity.  The  heart  of  the  indio  is  ripped  out  by 
a  bird  that  has  the  talons  of  a  vulture  and  the  deceptive 
head  of  a  timid  quail,  the  state  bird  of  California.  The 
bird  of  prey  also  suggests  the  national  eagle,  while  the 
indio  is  tormented  by  a  torch  that  is  lifted  from  the 
bottom  of  the  painting  in  a  huge  hand,  ironically  alluding 
to  the  Statue  of  Liberty.  .Meanwhile  off  to  one  side,  a 
nude  young  woman  flees  from  the  military  machine.  She 
escapes  across  a  rainbow  towards  a  pyramid  suggesting 


the  revival  of  ancient  culture.  The  mural  is  a  nightmarish 
indictment  of  Anglo  "civilization"  and  a  call  to  rebuild 
Aztlan. 

This  account  was  written  before  an  explanatory  chart 
was  placed  before  the  mural  for  viewers.  The  artists' 
power  to  communicate  is  demonstrated  by  the  legibility 
of  the  composition  alone.  What  the  accompanying  dia- 
gram adds  is  a  connection  of  the  symbols  he  employs  to 
Mayan,  Toltec,  and  Aztec  symbols.  The  bird  of  prey, 
for  instance,  is  identified  as  Cozcautil,  a  vulture,  the 
despoiling  principle  of  the  Toltecs.  The  rabbit  (with  the 
U.S.  shield),  the  chart  says,  was  regarded  by  the  indios  as 
"afraid  of  nearly  everything  and  consequently  extremely 
harmful  in  a  position  of  power."  The  flaming  rubble 
beneath  the  fist  is  described  as  "capitalism's  fall, 
materialism."  The  nude  woman  is  identified  as  "the 
earth"  and  "the  mother  who  brings  life  to  the  world  .  .  . 
running  away  from  the  material  destruction  of 
men.  .  .  ."  Above  is  the  emblem  of  the  Centro  in  tiles 
with  el  corazon  (the  heart  symbolic  of  life,  spirit,  love  and 


courage)  at  its  core.  The  caption  observes  that  this 
signified  the  philosophy  of  art  of  Chicanos'  ancestors  as 
well  as  the  Centro:  "He  who  divines  things  in  his  heart  is 
open  to  inspiration  bringing  him  close  to  truths."  Be- 
neath is  a  tree  of  life  in  the  shape  of  a  woman,  an  indio 
symbol  of  the  unity  of  the  world  and  its  people.  Aranda 
calls  the  work  La  Dualidad. 

His  and  his  fellow  artists'  vision  of  Aztlan  gained 
plausibility  as  more  San  Diego  Chicanos  were  beginning 
to  take  part  in  making  it  real.  The  mural  was  an  extraor- 
dinarily vehement  statement,  and  yet  it  was  precise  in  its 
analysis  of  the  threats  to  La  Raza.  The  beautiful  fleeing 
girl,  the  rainbow,  and  the  visionary  pyramid  were  heav- 
ily romantic,  yet  their  message  had  credibility.  Local 
Chicanos  understood  that,  if  Aztlan  was  to  be  rebuilt,  it 
had  to  be  done  in  practical  terms,  as  their  concrete 
achievements  showed.  Considering  the  obstacles  that  lay 
before  them,  we  may  be  tempted  to  dismiss  their  plans 
and  dependence  on  art  as  quixotic,  but  their  ability  to 
extract  concessions  from  the  establishment  and  create 
their  own  institutions  demonstrated  what  could  happen 
when  people,  strengthened  by  a  sense  of  community  and 
heritage,  took  common  action.  Speaking  of  the  revival  of 
Logan  Barrio,  Abran  Quevedo,  a  local  professional  plan- 
ner, has  admitted  that  "taken  in  terms  of  land-value 
planning,  as  urban  planners  do,  this  idea  would  never 
work.  But  as  a  planner  I  concentrate  on  human-value 
planning. "^'^  The  efforts  of  the  Chicanos  of  Logan  Barrio 
and  those  at  Centro  Cultural  achieved  so  much  only 
because  they  appealed  to  human  values,  and  this  appeal 

Las  Vistas  Nuevas  directed  by  Judy  Baca:  Mi  Abuelita 
(My  Grandmother),  1970,  Hollenbeck  Park,  East  Ij)s 
Angeles. 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  109 

was  carried  by  their  art.  This  was  to  be  confirmed  by  the 
murals  that  were  to  follow  in  later  years. 

Los  Angeles 

As  in  New  York  and  Boston,  so  in  Los  Angeles 
employment  by  a  public  agency  became  the  means  by 
which  some  young  artists  were  able  to  get  funds  to  do 
community  murals.  One  of  these,  Judy  Baca,  was  hired 
by  the  city  Department  of  Recreation  and  Parks  in  the 
summer  of  1970  as  an  art  instructor  and  salaried  through 
the  federally  funded  Emergency  Employment  Act.  Her 
assignment  was  to  take  on  twenty  teenagers  from  feuding 
barrios  who  would  be  paid  by  the  Neighborhood  Youth 
Corps  to  do  public  service  work.  In  this  way  she  became 
probably  the  first  artist  in  Los  Angeles  to  involve  gang 
members  in  murals.  Her  own  purpose  was  not  the  same 
as  the  city's  intention  of  cool-out.  She  understood  very 
clearly  what  many  barrio  murals  were  later  to  make 
explicit — that  gang  violence  was  a  product  of  the  racism 
of  schools,  discriminatory  hiring,  and  police  harassment 
that  cut  young  Chicanos  off  from  their  natural  develop- 
ment. Baca  observes  that 

generally  art  is  thought  of  as  a  frivolous  luxury.  People 
nave  got  to  express  tnemselves;  that's  a  necessity,  not  a 
luxury.  Unless  we  begin  to  tap  people's  creativity, 
we'll  have  to  continue  to  try  to  control  their  expres- 
sion. And  that  kind  of  solution  is  not  a  good  bet.^ 

It  seemed  to  her  that  murals  would  provide  them  the 
chance  to  say  important  things  publicly  and  to  have  some 
concrete  effect  on  changing  the  conditions  of  their  lives. 


1 10  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

It  was  from  the  gangs — the  White  Fence,  Primera 
Flats,  Quatro  Flats,  and  Evergreen — that  her  crew  of 
painters  came.  Baca  recalls  that  she  had  to  spend  a  great 
deal  of  time  helping  them  relate  to  each  other,  doing 
small-scale  art  first,  then  banners,  and  finally  murals  on 
the  vandalized  Costello  Recreation  Center  in  East  Los.^^ 
They  struggled  to  keep  ahead  of  the  graffiti  writers,  and 
by  1971  when  they  finished,  they  had  demonstrated  to 
them  and  themselves  that  murals  were  better.  One  of  the 
young  artists,  Pepe  Hernandez,  a  former  junkie,  had 
introduced  imagery  from  tattoos.  Other  visual  ideas  like 
that  of  an  old  bogeywoman  came  from  tales  that  were 
seldom  talked  about  except  in  the  family.  Baca  regards 
the  turning  of  this  intimate  folklore  into  public  art  as  a 
political  act. 

This  was  the  beginning  of  Las  Vistas  Nuevas  (New 
Vistas).  Its  next  project,  also  during  1970/71,  was 
painting  the  bandshell  in  Hollenbeck  Park.  Using  an  old 
photograph  of  her  grandmother,  Baca  and  her  crew 
painted  a  monumental  image  of  Chicano  motherhood  in  a 
manner  reminiscent  of  a  Byzantine  madonna  in  the  apse 
of  a  cathedral,  but  her  arms  reach  out  tenderly  around 
the  stage  to  embrace  performers  and  audience. 

The  anger  of  the  barrio  is  most  eloquent  in  the  work  of 


William  F.  Herron  III  and  local  youth:  The  Wall 
That  Cracked  Open,  1972,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Willie  Herron,  a  professional  sign  painter  whose  ties 
have  been  with  the  young  people,  often  gang  members,  of 
the  barrios.  At  twenty-one  he  had  worked  out  his  own 
strong  style  by  using  enlarged  grotesque  or  tormented 
masklike  faces  reminiscent  of  Orozco.  A  work  he  did  in 
1972  at  the  end  of  an  alley  shows  a  coiling  Quetzalcoatl 
lifting  itself  proudly  above  a  cluster  of  faces  that  look  up 
at  it  with  growing  respect.  Herron  invited  neighborhood 
kids  to  add  their  graffiti,  and  among  them  are  a  cross  and 
the  name  of  one  who  had  been  killed.  The  mural,  which 
he  titled  The  Plumed  Serpent,  seems  to  call  for  an  end  of 
gang  violence  and  a  new  awareness  of  what  unites  barrio 
people.  Down  the  alley  he  did  another  work  the  same 
year.  His  younger  brother  had  been  beaten  up  there,  and 
Herron  says,  "I  wanted  to  show  the  experience  of  the 
blood,  of  him  being  loaded  on  drugs  and  the  whole  gang 


William  F.  Herron  ILL  and  local  youth:  Plumed  Ser- 
pent, 1972,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /111 


William  F.  Herron  III  and  ''Gronk":  Untitled,  1973, 
City  Terrace  Park,  East  Los  Angeles. 


situation,  and  of  him  trying  to  break  through  the  barrier 
that's  always  been  there  holding  him  back."^"  The  mural 
depicts  people  trying  to  bust  out  of  the  wall  and  among 
them  is  a  grieving  old  woman  with  rebozo  and  beads.  In 
1973  Herron  painted  the  convex  wall  behind  a  basketball 
court  in  City  Terrace  Park  with  a  crowded  mass  of 
blown-up  grimacing,  angry  faces,  fists,  and  feet  that 
assault  the  viewer,  w  hile  a  huge  calavera  is  splayed  out  in 
the  foreground.  The  wall  is  like  a  sustained  howl.  Again 
Herron  invited  local  kids  to  add  their  placas.  These 
graffiti  on  every  part  of  the  surface  intensify  the  affirma- 
tion of  Chicanos'  existence  and  their  protest  against  it.  In 
the  following  years  Herron  was  to  elaborate  these  public 
indictments. 

At  the  same  time,  murals  were  beginning  to  express 
the  effort  of  Chicano  teenagers  to  understand  the  anger 
they  turned  against  each  other  in  gang  warfare.  In  1972 
there  were  four  gang  killings  in  Lil'   Valley,  a  small 


canyon  in  East  Los.  The  parents  of  gang  members 
proposed  a  mural  project  as  a  means  of  reducing  the 
violence  and  secured  the  help  of  a  social  w  orker  and  artist 
Bill  Butler.  One  of  their  murals  was  on  the  side  of  Ken's 
Market,  the  boundary  between  two  turfs.  The  painting 
was  a  memorial  for  two  of  the  dead.  The  youngsters 
painted  a  body  lying  in  the  road  and  covered  by  a  sheet  as 
candles  burn  around  it.  Most  telling  is  a  pair  of  white 
arms  that  come  from  the  top  edge  and  press  down  the 
heads  of  one  group  of  boys.  Between  the  arms  is  a  set  of 
unbalanced  scales  of  justice.  .Meanwhile  another  group  of 
faces  and  arms  reach  upwards.  The  mural  seems  to 
charge  that  the  ultimate  cause  of  the  gang  warfare  is  the 
oppression  of  the  White  establishment.  The  boys  under- 
stood that  the  frustration  of  their  energies  by  the  Anglo 
world  had  turned  them  against  each  other.  The  caption 
reads: 

In  memory  of  our  two  brothers  whose  youthful  lives 
were  destroyed  brutally.  Out  of  the  outrage  commit- 
ted against  them  has  emerged  a  new  era  of  love  and 
brotherhood  in  our  community — Their  deaths  were 
unwarranted  but  not  in  vain. 


112  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Gang  youth  assisted  by  Bill  Butler:  Untitled,  1972,  Ken's 
Market,  LiV  Valley,  East  Los  Angeles. 


In  the  center  of  the  mural  two  cocks  with  boys'  faces  grip 
a  single  ribbon  of  the  Mexican  national  colors  in  their 
mouths  as  a  symbol  of  unity.  Other  captions  affirm  the 
solidarity  of  La  Raza,  and  towards  each  side  there  are 
symbols  of  their  heritage — the  Virgin  of  Guadalupe,  a 
huge  Olmec  head,  pyramids,  and  temples  of  the  ancient 
past.  Among  them  are  a  pair  of  school  graduates  in  caps 
and  gowns  and  a  family.  The  mural  served  to  bring  the 
gangs  together,  to  help  them  understand  the  cause  of  this 
hostility  and  what  their  possibilities  were. 

A  second  project  of  the  gang  muralists  was  painted  the 
following  year  on  another  market  a  short  way  down  the 
street.  They  called  it  Madres  and  depicted  a  pietalike 
mother  weeping  over  her  stabbed  son,  while  a  crucified 
boy  hovers  in  the  background.  Elsewhere  on  the  wall 
mothers  are  shown  caring  for  their  children  while  girls 
are  growing  to  young  motherhood  again.  These  scenes 
are  embraced  by  painted  arcades  on  which  forty  gang 
members  inscribed  their  graffiti  signatures.  The 
nicknames  of  five  dead  youngsters  are  listed  at  the 
front — Cruz,  Turtle,  Smokie,  Blackie  and  Doc.''  In  the 
front  window  of  Ken's  Market  it  became  customary  to 
record  the  killings  of  "home  boys"  by  painting  crosses 
and  gravestones.  Fourteen  names  had  been  added  be- 
tween 1973  and  \91%.^'^ 


Gang  youth  assisted  by  Bill  Butler:   Untitled  (detail). 
1972,  Ken's  Market,  LiV  Valley,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /  1 1 3 


Gang  youth  assisted  by  Bill  Butler:  Madres,  1973,  UP 
Valley,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Santa  Barbara 

The  sides  of  boarding  houses,  groceries,  eating  places, 
the  post  office,  and  the  People's  Center  in  Isla  Vista,  the 
University  community  here,  were  gradually  muralized 
by  students  during  the  seventies  with  beachscapes  and 
countercultural  paradises.  Meanwhile  at  City  College 
probably  the  first  Raza  mural  in  Santa  Barbara  was 
painted  in  watercolor  by  Manuel  Unzueta  in  1970  for 
Chicano  Studies  and  later  mounted  under  glass  outdoors. 
It  shows  a  naked  young  man  grasping  a  key  with  a 
flaming  eye  as  he  leaps  from  a  morass,  suggesting  the 
present,  toward  a  better  life.  It  was  rendered  in  a 
shadowy  Baroque  style  that  Unzueta  had  brought  back 
from  a  trip  to  Europe  and  was  to  use  through  most  of  the 
decade.  By  1972  he  was  at  the  University  directing  a 
team  of  fellow  students  in  a  mural  commemorating  the 
Isla  Vista  riots  of  two  years  earlier  when  the  Bank  of 
America  branch  was  burned  down  because  of  its  parent 
company's  involvement  in  California  agribusiness  and 
Vietnam.  In  the  painting  fists  were  breaking  through 
bars,  people  were  rising  before  the  ruins  of  the  bank,  and 
students'  eyes  and  mouths  were  wide.  The  portable 
panels  remained  hanging  until  1980,  when  they  were 
destroyed  by  the  administration  without  notifying  the 
painters. 

Back  in  1971  Unzueta  began  embellishing  the  inside  of 
the  new  Casa  de  la  Raza,  a  social  service  and  cultural 
center  that  served  Chicanos  throughout  the  city.  After 
nine  years  all  of  the  big  walls  of  what  was  formerly  a 
warehouse  were  covered  by  him  and  his  assistants.  His 
first  work  there  was  in  the  library  and  titled  A  Book's 


Memory.  It  shows  the  Chicano  heritage  issuing  from  a 
great  volume  while  a  figure  with  the  torso  of  a  man  sends 
roots  into  the  earth  and  reaches  out  with  three  arms  in 
the  hues  of  the  mestizo  race  as  its  v\  ing  displays  the  colors 
of  the  Mexican  flag.  Above  a  corazon  is  bleeding.  While 
continuing  his  painting  here,  Unzueta  completed  the  first 
master  of  fine  arts  degree  in  Chicano  art  awarded  by  the 
University  and  taught  there  and  at  City  College. 


Fresno 

Fresno  is  in  the  heart  of  the  San  Joaquin  Vallev 
vineyards,  and  it  was  here  and  in  Delano,  seventy  miles 
away,  that  Cesar  Chavez  and  the  farm  workers  began 
organizing  in  the  early  sixties.  Nearby  some  of  the  first 
community  murals  were  painted  at  the  Centro  Cam- 
f>esino  Cultural  in  Del  Rey  in  1968.  Three  years  later  the 
first  in  Fresno  was  done  by  Ernesto  Palomino  and  Lee 
Orona.  Palomino  had  grown  up  there  and  was  hired  by 
Fresno  State  as  a  result  of  students'  protests  at  the  lack  of 
Chicano  teachers,  although  the  university  served  a 
population  of  200,000,  half  of  whom  were  Chicano.  The 
mural  he  and  Orona  collaborated  on  was  down  the  street 
from  where  farm  workers  before  they  organized  gathered 
each  morning  while  it  was  still  dark  with  the  hope  of 
being  hired  by  bosses  who  would  bus  them  to  the 
vineyards  for  the  day.  In  the  center  of  the  wall  there  is  a 
flatbed  truck  on  which  a  mother  sits  with  her  child  while 
field  hands  hunch  over  at  each  side.  Embracing  them  is  a 
blazing  UFW  thunderbird  with  a  calavera  and  an  ancient 
indio.  All  of  this  was  painted  by  Palomino,  while  Orona 
is  responsible  for  the  flanking  mask  and  Quetzalcoatl. 
The  mural  is  a  big  flatly  painted  heraldic  symbol  of  the 
life  and  hope  of  migrant  families,  mixing  affirmation  with 


Manuel  Unzueta:  \  Book's  Memory  (partial  view), 
1971,  Casa  de  la  Raza,  Santa  Barbara. 


Ernesto  Palomino  and  Lee  Orona:  Untitled,  1971,  Tulare 
Street,  Fresno. 


Manuel  Unzueta:  I.  V.  Riots,  1972,  Student  Union, 
University  of  California,  Santa  Barbara.  (Photo  Manuel 
Unzueta) 


some  defensive  self-irony.  There  is  humor  in  the  carica- 
tured calavera  and  indio,  including  the  looping  design  of 
the  skeleton's  ribs,  the  India's  costume,  the  bunches  of 
grapes,  and  the  hoses  on  the  truck's  underside.  Palomino 
was  to  continue  to  do  other  important  works  in  the  area 
during  the  decade  and  came  to  be  regarded  the  father  of 
muralists  there. 

Santa  Fe 

Like  other  early  muralists  the  Chicano  painters  of 
Santa  Fe  began  in  response  to  a  crisis.  But  in  this  instance 
it  was  a  personal  tragedy — the  death  by  drug  overdose 
of  the  twelve-year-old  brother  of  Samuel,  Albert,  and 
Carlos  Leyba  in  1971.^"  The  three  decided  to  do  a  mural 
as  a  memorial  and  painted  a  scene  of  African  animals  in 
front  of  a  playground.  But  the  personal  tragedy  was  part 
of  a  much  larger  one.  Encouraged  by  the  response  of  the 
Chicano  community  and  funded  by  a  $3,600  Office  of 
Economic  Opportunity  grant,  the  brothers  joined  with 
Geronimo  Garduno  and  Gilberto  Guzman  to  work  with 
nineteen  addicts  on  a  methadone  maintenance  program 
to  do  murals  and  crafts.  Only  Samuel  Lebya,  who  had 
been  working  on  the  wall  of  La  Clinica  de  La  Gente 
earlier,  and  Gardufio  had  formal  art  training.  They 
called  themselves  Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan. 
Then  the  money  ran  out,  and  in  1972  they  were 
employed  to  do  large  signs  by  an  independent  slate  of 
candidates  in  opposition  to  the  local  Democrats  and 
Republicans.  The  result  was  a  mural  on  two  sides  of  a 
tool  shed  owned  by  the  Chicano  candidate  for  mayor. 


Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan:  Lady  of  Justice, 
1972,  Santa  Fe. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /  1 15 

The  shed  faced  Canyon  Road,  one  of  the  centers  of  Santa 
Fe's  fashionable  arts  and  crafts  colony  where  tourists 
from  all  over  the  world  shopped.  The  controversy  that 
arose  duplicated  the  relation  of  community  muralists 
around  the  country  to  the  respectable  "art  world."  The 
Santa  Fe  establishment  had  sought  to  enforce  all  over  the 
city  their  conception  of  what  an  Indian  pueblo  was — 
low-slung  caramel,  not  adobe-colored,  structures  with 
dark  beams.  But  here  were  local,  indigenous  people  who 
were  no  longer  content  to  play  the  role  of  "good  Indians." 
Los  Artes  saw  their  work  as  an  expression  of  their  protest 
of  unemployment,  poor  housing  and  the  humiliation  of 
welfare,  which  resulted  in  drugs  and  alcoholism.^*  What 
they  painted  was  an  indio  goddess  of  justice  breaking  the 
chains  of  an  over  life-sized  Chicano  rising  from  the  earth. 
With  her  other  hand  she  holds  water  out  to  him  while 
with  a  massive  arm  he  lifts  up  a  basket  carrying  a  mestizo 
family.  What  is  aesthetically  original  about  the  mural  is 
that  it  is  centered  on  the  projecting  corner  of  the  shed's 
walls  so  that  the  image  is  forced  out  towards  viewers  like 
a  ship's  prow.  When  observed  flat  on  from  one  side,  the 
figures  appear  to  be  on  a  receding  pavement.  But  when 
you  move  out  to  the  corner  where  both  sides  can  be 
viewed,  the  pavement  suddenly  stands  up  and  becomes  a 
pyramid  that  reaches  from  ground  to  eave.  Although 
most  indio  pyramids  were  not  pointed,  perhaps  the  art- 
ists' intention  was  to  suggest  the  rebirth  of  Aztlan  by  this 
optical  illusion.  In  any  event,  the  mural  on  the  small  tool 
shed  and  its  message  burst  into  the  benign  landscape  of 
Canyon  Road. 

Even  more  powerful  was  a  small  adobe  Los  Artes  did 
also  in  1972  alongside  a  well-traveled  highway.  Similarly 
painted  on  two  adjoining  walls,  a  bare-chested  miner 


1 16  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

carrying  a  book  titled  Viva  La  Raza  plunges  tow  arc!  you  at 
the  corner.  To  his  right  raising  both  her  fists  is  again  an 
indio  goddess,  probably  Tonantzin,  the  indio  mother  of 
the  gods,  source  of  the  black  madonna,  after  whom  a 
school  was  named  that  Los  Artes  helped  organize.  She 
presides  over  a  Raza  family,  and  a  son  rushes  forward 
with  a  pencil,  suggesting  education.  On  the  left-hand 
wall  another  ;«^zo  god  embraces  Chicanos  who  join  in  the 
clenched-fist  salute.  Heavy  black  outlines  delineate  fists, 
muscles,  clouds,  and  flowers  as  if  to  express  their  deter- 
mination to  exist.  The  artists  have  clearly  borrowed  their 
images  from  a  number  of  murals  of  Siqueiros — For  the 
Complete  Safety  of  All  Mexicans  at  Work,  the  New  De- 
mocracy, and  The  People  to  the  University,  the  University  to 
the  People.  They  have  used  their  allusions  to  their  tradi- 
tion effectively,  but  what  is  inventive  is  their  perspective. 
As  with  the  Canyon  Road  mural,  the  composition  com- 
pels you  to  take  a  position  opposite  the  prow  of  the 
converging  walls.  From  there  the  two  walls  open  up  into 
a  conventional  picture  box  of  space.  But  the  effect  is 
unusual  because  the  spatial  recession  moves  in  the  oppo- 
site direction  of  the  actual  walls.  The  vanishing  point  of 
the  perspective  lines  that  rush  into  depth  a  little  uncer- 
tainly is  on  the  corner  of  the  walls,  which  is  nearest  to 


Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztldn:  St.  Francis  Road 
Mural,  1972,  Santa  Fe. 


you.  The  space  is  at  once  deep  and  turned  inside  out  by 
the  actual  walls  so  that  the  whole  scene  is  forced  forward 
onto  you.  The  sun  at  the  vanishing  point,  which  should 
be  farthest  away,  is  in  fact  closest.  Its  beams  push  the 
miner  and  the  gods  towards  you  and  seem  to  energize 
their  thrusting  motion.  Along  the  upper  edges  of  the  two 
walls  clouds  attach  the  scene  to  the  real  sky.  But  the  total 
effect  of  the  small  adobe  seen  against  the  sky  is  of  an 
enormous  space  at  once  cut  into  the  real  world  and  at  the 
same  time  coming  at  you  with  tremendous  force.  The 
effectiveness  of  the  mural  is  immediate,  and  the  result 
reflects  a  leap  of  imagination. 

Seattle 

Probably  the  only  and  certainly  the  largest  walls  built 
specifically  for  a  community  mural  were  constructed  by 
the  city  of  Seattle  in  1972.  The  idea  for  the  project  came 
to  Royal  Alley-Barnes  in  1970  while  she  was  teaching  a 
seminar  at  the  University  of  Washington,  where  she  had 
been  discussing  with  her  students  the  need  for  Black 
artists  to  revitalize  the  spiritual  and  political  conscious- 
ness of  their  communities.^^  She  and  her  husband,  Cur- 
tis, who  taught  painting  in  the  city's  public  schools  and 
community  college,  pressed  the  idea  on  Seattle's  Parks 
and  Recreation  Commission,  which  was  apprehensive 
that  the  work  would  be  propaganda  but  finally  approved 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /  1 17 


Curtis  Barnes  and  Royal  Alley-Barnes:  Omowale,  1 972 , 
Garfield  Park,  Seattle.  (Photo  the  Barneses) 


the  proposal,  the  Barnesses  feel,  "to  do  something  for 
Black  people"  after  racial  violence  had  hit  the  city.  Blacks 
made  up  about  10  percent  of  Seattle's  population  of  half 
a  million.  It  was  decided  to  do  an  outdoor  work  adjacent 
to  the  Medgar  Evers  Pool  and  Garfield  High  School,  but 
by  1971  the  project  was  still  pending.  In  order  to  get  on 
with  it  the  Barneses  undertook  a  survey  in  the  Black 
community  and  found  that  over  90  percent  of  those 
questioned  approved  the  idea  of  a  mural  to  enliven  the 
bare  concrete  of  the  pool  site.  This  persuaded  officials  to 
the  extent  that  they  agreed  to  the  construction  of  a 
concrete  entry  court,  the  sides  of  which  would  serve  as 
the  structural  support  of  the  mural's  two  panels.  By  the 
time  the  project  was  completed  $175,000  had  been  ex- 
pended on  it,  $3,000  of  which  came  from  the  Arts 
Commission,  the  same  amount  from  Pacific  Northwest 
Bell,  and  additional  funding  from  Model  Cities.  The 
artists'  fee  was  $10,000,  which  they  calculate  came  to 
$1.25  an  hour  when  their  actual  time  they  gave  to  the 
project  was  figured  in.  Their  sketches  were  approved  in 
the  spring  of  1972,  and  painting  was  completed  that  year. 
Although  the  artists  had  surveyed   the  neighborhood 


concerning  the  desirability  of  a  mural,  they  did  not  feel  it 
was  appropriate  to  check  their  designs  with  local  people. 
They  had  grown  up  and  continued  to  live  there  and 
believed  they  understood  the  area  and  what  was  needed. 
Although  the  work  was  to  be  complex  in  its  details, 
alluding  to  African  folklore  and  myth,  they  w  anted  it  to 
be  clear  enough  to  be  understood  by  residents. 

The  result  was  a  pair  of  panels  rendered  in  a  sophisti- 
cated, painterly  manner  unique  in  outdoor  work.  The 
title  is  Omowale,  Yoruba  for  "Children  Turn  Home."  As 
the  artists  describe  it,  the  panel  at  the  left  begins  with  the 
creation:  out  of  chaos  and  the  fire  and  passion  of  beget- 
ting, a  child  is  given  to  a  barren  woman  by  the  spirit 
force  embodied  in  the  man.  The  human  figures  are 
shown  in  harmony  with  the  jungle  and  whole  natural 
world,  and  tree  forms  are  humanized.  People  are  en- 
veloped in  the  roots  and  trunks  of  the  baobab  tree, 
symbol  of  the  family  and  the  communal  way  of  life.  But 
suddenly  the  forest  is  invaded  by  white  centaurs  with  a 
tangle  of  blood  vessels  or  hair  instead  of  heads;  though 
white-skinned,  they  were  meant  to  represent  not  only  the 
Caucasians,  but  all  oppression,  the  Barneses  say. 

The  second  panel  illustrates  the  violent  wresting  of 
Africans  to  the  New  World  where  they  are  chained  in  an 
uprooted   tree.    The   faces   are   those  of  the   Barneses' 


Omowale  (detail).  (Photo  G.  Carlsen) 


parents  and  grandparents.  A  man  is  freed  from  the 
chained  tree  by  self-knowledge  inherent  in  the  touch  of  a 
woman  seated  on  a  royal  stool.  But  he  is  cast  into  the 
harsh  environment  of  the  cities.  Overhead  broods  the 
hornbill,  a  bird  of  freedom  which  presides  over  the 
defeat  of  the  oppressive  forces,  and  at  the  end  there  is 
a  huge  honeycomb,  signifying  the  unification  of  Afro- 
Americans. 

City  officials  attended  the  dedication,  and  Jacob  Law- 
rence, one  of  the  nation's  great  artists,  who  was  teaching 
at  the  University  of  Washington,  spoke.  A  plaque  and 
booklet  explaining  the  work  were  to  be  produced  by  the 
city,  but  the  artists  never  saw  either.  The  city  had  not 
provided  for  the  sealing  of  the  mural,  and  in  time  it 
suffered  damage.  In  spite  of  the  imaginativeness  and 
brilliant  execution  of  the  work,  there  has  been  no  re- 
sponse by  the  art  establishment.  The  Barneses  feel  that 
they  were  not  taken  seriously,  partly  because  they 
painted  as  a  husband-wife  team.  But  the  mural  was  well 
received  by  the  neighborhood  and  has  served  as  a 
background  for  rock  concerts.  The  artists  went  on  to 
do  a  series  of  eight-foot  works  for  the  Black  Community 
Church  Library  and  portable  panels  contributed  to  Black 
organizations  about  the  city.  But  in  1979  the  Barneses 
said  that  Omowale  remained  the  sole  mural  by  Black 
artjsts  to  be  seen  in  the  streets  of  Seattle. 

Becoming  increasingly  disillusioned  with  the  narrow- 
ness of  officials   and   the  unresponsiveness  of  the   art 


Students  directed  by  Nancy  Thompson:  Untitled  mosaic 
mural,  1970,  Alvarado  School,  San  Francisco. 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  119 
world,  they  decided  to  abandon  painting  temporarily  in 
order  to  acquire  enough  capital  to  free  themselves  from 
dependency  on  the  art  system.  Curtis  became  a  con- 
struction manager  for  a  city  agency  rehabbing  housing. 
Royal  insists  that  this  is  art  also  because  he  is  putting  his 
talents  to  work  to  provide  low-income  people  with  at- 
tractive spaces  that  meet  their  needs.  She  works  as  a 
financial  analyst  in  the  city's  Office  of  Management  and 
the  Budget,  learning  skills  they  will  need  when  they 
strike  out  on  their  own.  Together  they  have  been  invest- 
ing their  savings  in  real  estate  so  that  by  1982  they  will  be 
able  to  leave  their  current  positions  and  open  their  own 
firm,  which  will  combine  rehab  work  with  murals — 
"integral  symbols,"  they  say,  "on  inner  and  outer  walls," 
adding,  "If  you  build  a  wall,  you  can  paint  it."  They 
want  to  be  independent  of  public  funding  and  foundation 
grants.  They  also  want  to  help  create  with  others  a 
fine-art  center  that  will  make  art  a  part  of  the  everyday 
environment  of  ordinary  people. 

San  Francisco 

A  new  focus  of  community  murals  appeared  in 
1970 — elementary  schools.  Although  murals  had  been  a 
customary  part  of  school  activities  for  decades,  they  had 
usually  been  treated  as  an  occasional  exercise  on  butcher 
paper  in  which  kids  in  the  same  class  cooperated  on  a 
decoration  for  Thanksgiving  or  Christmas.  They  would 
remain  hanging  for  a  week  or  perhaps  a  semester  and 
then  be  discarded.  They  were  seldom  treated  with  the 
seriousness  with  which  works  that  were  to  be  mounted 


120  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


for  semipermanent  viewing  would  be  regarded.  They 
hardly  ever  dealt  with  controversial  social  issues.  But  all 
this  was  changed  by  a  program  initiated  in  San  Francisco 
in  1968  by  twenty  parents  with  children  in  the  Alvarado 
Elementary  School,  who  included  sculptress  Ruth  Asawa, 
then  a  city  art  commissioner.  The  program  grew 
out  of  the  concern  of  parents  that  the  art  instruction  their 
children  received  was  neglected.  One  of  the  long-term 
effects  of  Sputnik  and  the  space  age  was  that,  as  science 
and  math  gained  in  importance  in  the  curriculum,  hardly 
any  schools  were  left  with  art  teachers.  But  the  Alvarado 
parents  "believed  that  the  skills  of  art  are  as  useful  as  any 
others  taught  at  the  primary  level. "^®  The  parents 
realized  that  there  were  many  artists  and  craftsmen  living 
in  the  neighborhood  who  would  be  willing  to  volunteer  a 
few  hours  a  week  in  the  schools.  The  program  was 
initially  so  successful  that  within  a  few  years  public 
funds  were  allocated  for  local  artists  to  work  with  stu- 
dents. While  it  gave  children  experience  in  all  the  visual 
arts,  it  stimulated  wall  paintings  and  mosaic  murals  in 
schools  throughout  the  city. 

Under  this  program  in  1970  sixth-graders  with  the 
help  of  artist  Nancy  Thompson  did  a  mosaic  portrait  in 
the  Alvarado  School  yard  of  their  neighborhood  that 
shows  the  children  of  all  races  posing  beneath  the  high- 
pitched  gables  of  their  homes  that  rise  above  each  other 
on  the  steep  hills  of  the  city.  The  images  are  ingeniously 
built  up  from  found  objects:  a  roof  gable  is  constructed 
from  shells,  the  shirt  of  a  guitar  player  from  broken 
crockery;  a  dog  w  ith  spots  is  shaped  from  discarded  tiles; 
faces  are  formed  from  modeled  and  baked  clay.  Local 
merchants  contributed  mosaics,  and  the  students  com- 
posed these  materials  in  a  delightful  but  carefully  de- 
signed way.  The  importance  of  this  collective  self- 
portrait  lay  not  only  in  its  beauty  but  equally  in  the 
children's  cooperative  effort  and  their  celebration  of  their 
life  together.  In  this  respect  it  was  comparable  to  the 
murals  being  done  elsewhere  around  the  country  that 
affirmed  community. 

Just  as  powerful  are  the  murals  that  were  painted  in 
1972-73  by  kindergartners  to  fourth-graders  on  the  long 
retaining  wall  in  the  lower  yard  under  the  direction  of 
Perci  Chester.  Here  portraits  combine  with  mermaids, 
dragons,  caterpillars,  giraffes,  and  a  range  of  imaginative 
inventions,  some  joyous,  some  terrifying.  They  are  in- 
credibly intense  and  densely  packed  against  each  other, 
creating  a  visionary  world. 

The  significance  of  these  children's  projects  is  that 
young  people  had  been  given  the  opportunity  to  share 
their  ideas  and  skills;  they  had  had  the  chance  to  express 
in  a  common  enterprise  what  was  profoundly  important 
to  each  of  them,  and  it  was  recognized  as  a  serious 
contribution.  It  is  this  that  builds  community,  and  it  was 
important  that  they  continued  to  get  such  chances  as  they 
grew  older.  There  are  many  tales  told  by  teachers, 
parents,  and  kids  about  how  these  art  projects  have  made 
school  exciting  for  children — how  youngsters  who  were 


Alvarado  School  mosaic  mural  (detail). 


discipline  problems  or  who  were  apathetic  have  been 
"turned  on"  by  murals.  Peter  Coyote,  the  chairman  of 
the  California  Arts  Council,  says  that  he  is  also  im- 
pressed by  the  transfer  of  attentiveness,  skills,  and  the 
ability  to  work  together  that  occurs  from  such  art  proj- 
ects to  other  studies. 

The  decoration  of  school  yards  by  children's  murals  is 
not  peculiar  to  San  Francisco.  Although  the  Alvarado 
project  had  a  nationwide  impact,  William  Walker  early 
had  helped  youngsters  paint  murals  over  the  exterior  of  a 
school  portable  and  on  the  asphalt  yard  around  it  in 
Chicago,  and  other  artists  and  teachers  independently 


[Aharado  School  mosaic  mural  (detail). 


Alvarado  School  mosaic  mural  (detail). 


122  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


in  ^  ^\   ^  ^  ^  ^ 


Students  directed  by  Perci  Chester:  Untitled,  1970,  Al- 
varado  School,  San  Francisco. 


had  begun  working  with  kids  on  murals  elsewhere.  In 
time  these  projects  spread  to  high  schools,  which  took  up 
the  subject  of  racism  and  most  of  the  other  public  issues 
that  were  dealt  with  by  professional  muralists. 

The  impact  of  early  Chicago  murals  is  to  be  seen 
around  the  country.  Dewey  Crumpler,  a  young  Black 
artist  from  San  Francisco,  had  gone  there  to  see  the  Wall 
of  Respect  and  come  back  impressed  as  well  by  Eugene 
Eda's  use  of  ancient  Egyptian  design.  The  result  was 
Truth  and  Education,  a  mural  he  did  in  1970  for  an  outdoor 
wall  of  an  elementary  school  at  Hunter's  Point,  a  district 
of  Black  people  many  of  whom  still  worked  in  the 
shipyards  nearby.  Beneath  the  spreading  hawk  wings  of 
the  Egyptian  god  of  light,  Horus,  he  depicted  over-life- 
sized  students  reading  books  with  pictures  of  W.  E.  B. 
Du  Bois,  Harriet  Tubman,  Malcolm  X,  King,  and  Ali. 
Later  Crumpler  supervised  students'  murals  depicting 
city  scenes  around  the  whole  inner  yard  of  the  school. 

Truth  and  Education  was  probably  the  first  and  it 
remained  probably  the  only  Black  Pride  mural  done  by 
an  adult  in  the  city  for  the  next  two  years.  The  con- 
tinuous urban  renewal  and  displacement  of  the  Black 
population  in  the  district  where  most  lived,  the  Fillmore 
(also  called  the  Western  Addition),  explains  the  scarcity 


of  Black  murals  in  the  early  seventies  when  wall  paint- 
ings were  beginning  to  be  taken  up  by  Latinos. 

The  main  migration  of  Black  people  to  San  Francisco 
from  the  South  had  occurred  during  World  War  II. 
They  found  work  particularly  in  the  shipyards.  By  1972 
there  were  about  100,000  or  14  percent  of  the  city's 
population. ''  During  the  late  forties  and  fifties  the 
Fillmore  shopping  area  was  second  only  to  downtown.  It 
was  the  hub  of  the  city's  nightlife,  particularly  its  jazz. 
Blacks  in  the  fifties  were  beginning  to  buy  some  of  the 
stores  that  they  had  long  patronized,  and  the  community 
was  thriving.'*  But  the  city  establishment  decided  that 
the  Fillmore  was  a  blighted  area  and  ripe  for  redevelop- 
ment. This  became  a  self-fulfilling  prophecy:  as  demoli- 
tion proceeded,  people  were  forced  out  of  their  apart- 
ments into  the  shrinking  number  of  residences,  thereby 
ghettoizing  the  area.  In  1970  there  were  five  thousand 
more  families  whom  urban  renewal  had  removed 
throughout  the  city  than  it  had  provided  new  housing 
for,  in  spite  of  federal  regulations  to  protect  the  dis- 
placed.'' The  disappearance  of  jobs  in  the  Fillmore, 
together  with  the  decline  of  local  shipbuilding  and  other 
industries  in  which  Blacks  had  worked,  the  shift  of 
industry  to  the  suburbs  and  the  development  there 
especially  of  electronics,  for  which  few  Blacks  could  get 
training,  explains  why  21  percent  of  Black  families  in 
San  Francisco  in  1970  lived  below  the  poverty  level, 
while  for  the  city  as  a  whole  the  figure  was  four 
percent.* 


Development  (1969170-72)  /  123 


ey  Grumpier:  Truth  and  Education,  1970,  Hunt- 
Point  School,  San  Francisco. 


When  redevelopment  demolished  old  structures  in  the 
Fillmore,  it  replaced  them  with  luxury  high  rises,  a 
multiblock  trade  center,  a  cathedral,  and  a  diminished 
quantity  of  housing  that  former  residents  could  afford. 
For  years  block  after  block  was  left  empty  until  a  private 
developer  could  be  found. 

In  spite  of  the  blight  inflicted  on  the  Fillmore,  its  first 
outdoor  mural  was  painted  in  1972  when  Bob  Gayton,  a 
boxer  turned  portrait  painter,  was  commissioned  for  one 
thousand  dollars  by  the  San  Francisco  Museum  of  Art 
(later.  Modern  Art)  to  do  a  work  on  the  Hayes  Recreation 
Center.  Gayton's  design,  similar  to  Walls  of  Respect 
elsewhere  in  the  country,  brought  together  portraits  of 
Black  notables  including  Frederick  Douglass,  Joe  Lewis, 
Malcolm  X,  and  Angela  Davis  along  with  local  children. 
All  were  seen  against  a  large  peace  symbol,  and  Gayton 
called  his  proposal  Cultural  Black  Folks.  But  the  city 
Recreation  and  Park  Commission  was  disturbed  because 
the  visage  of  local  Black  Assemblyman  Willie  Brown  was 
also  included.  Skirting  this  obstacle,  Rolando  Castellon, 
who  headed  the  Museum  Inter-Community  Exchange 
sponsoring  the  work,  arranged  for  Gayton  to  paint  on  a 
nearby  warehouse  wall,  which  was  condemned  for  de- 
molition but  gave  the  mural  two  years  of  life. 

Also  during  1972  Black  artists  mounted  "Black 
Quake,"  a  summer  art  festival  at  Black  Light  Explosion, 


the  community  cultural  center  in  the  Fillmore.  A  series 
of  indoor  murals  showed  musicians,  dancers,  "bad" 
street  dudes  and  their  women.  David  Mora  and  Camille 
Breeze  did  a  large  work  in  a  rough  cartoon  style  showing 
a  huge  bald-headed  White  businessman  holding  a  rocket 
in  one  hand  like  a  dagger  or  scepter  and  sucking  up 
nourishment  through  an  industrial  pipe  from  naked 
Blacks  rounded  up  by  armed,  gas-masked  troopers.  In 
another  mural.  Mora  created  a  vehement  scene  of  Third 
World  figures,  who  were  intended  to  suggest  the  Viet- 
namese in  particular,  firing  at  U.S.  soldiers  with  pig  and 
skull  faces  and  dollar  signs  and  swastikas  for  insignia. 
.Mora,  a  .Mexican  of  Afro-American  descent,  had  painted 
a  similar  set  of  angry  works  in  a  clinic  and  bar  in  Mexico 
City.  Although  his  expressionism  was  intense,  he  had 
control  of  his  means. 

Among  the  casualties  of  redevelopment  in  the  Fillmore 
were  fourteen  murals  depicting  the  Stations  of  the  Cross 
in  the  Emmanuel  Church  of  God  in  Christ,  which  had  a 
Black  congregation.  They  had  been  the  work  of  Aaron 
Miller,  a  local  Black  artist  who  was  a  familiar  figure  on 
the  Beat  scene  and  had  done  a  Wailing  Wall  in  the  Bagel 
Shop,  a  popular  gathering  place  in  North  Beach.  He  also 
shined  shoes  at  the  .Mark  Hopkins  Hotel.  Beginning  on 
the  nine-by-fourteen-foot  panels  in  1950,  he  had  worked 
for  eighteen  months,  borrowing  his  design  and  colors 
from  early  Italian  Renaissance  painting,  but  his  personal 
vision  and  self-taught  skill  intensified  everything,  making 
the  composition  angular  and  twisting  the  mouths  of 
Christ's  tormentors.  In  1974  the  city  Art  Commission 


124  /  COiMMUNITY  MURALS 


Robert  Gayton:  Cultural  Black  P'olks,  1972,  Fillmore 
San  Francisco. 


Aaron  Miller:  Fourteen  Stations  of  the  Cross  (frag- 
ment), 1950-51,  Twelve  panels  destroyed  1974.  Fill- 
more, San  Francisco. 


David  Mora:  Untitled,  1972,  Black  Light  Explosion, 
Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


126  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

determined  that  the  murals  were  not  of  sufficient  artistic 
merit  to  justify  saving  in  spite  of  the  protests  of  a  few 
local  artists.  One  of  the  charges  against  the  murals  was 
that  Jesus  was  presented  as  a  White  man,  an  ironic 
criticism  made  in  1974  by  people  who  in  the  fifties  would 
have  thought  it  either  impious  or  naive  to  have  made  him 
Black.  As  it  was,  one  scene  showed  a  Black  Simon  of 
Cyrene  coming  to  the  aid  of  Jesus,  who  has  faltered 
under  the  weight  of  the  cross  and  the  beating  of  his 
White  captors.  Figures  representing  the  other  races  oc- 
curred throughout  the  panels.  The  Redevelopment  Au- 
thority did  make  a  concession  and  saved  two  panels, 
which  since  then  have  been  packed  away  in  a  warehouse. 
In  1976  local  muralists  viewing  slides  of  all  fourteen 
recognized  their  power. 

The  first  outdoor  mural  to  be  painted  in  the  Mission 
District  of  San  Francisco,  soon  to  become  the  center  of 
this  activity  in  the  city,  was  done  in  1971  on  the  store- 
front of  Horizons  Unlimited,  a  job-training  center.  It 
offered  four  black-and-white  comic  strip  scenes  of  local 
Raza  life  drawn  by  underground  cartoonist  "Spain"  Rod- 
riguez, with  green  florid  lettering  and  decorations  by 
Jesus  "Chuy"  Campusano  and  Ruben  Guzman.  Bob  Cuff 
assisted.  One  panel  showed  the  densely  packed  shops 
and  signs  of  Mission  Street;  another,  a  caricatured  crowd 
of  local  faces;  the  third  a  biker  and  his  girl;  and  finally 
conga  players  in  Dolores  Park.  All  of  this  floated  proudly 
but  with  some  self-amusement  over  a  heap  of  golden 


clouds.  In  1977  the  mural  was  renewed  and  more  color 
was  added. 

The  .Mission  District  is  the  bustling  focus  of  Latino  life 
in  San  Francisco,  where  in  1970  there  were  about  one 
hundred  thousand  Spanish-speaking  people.  Since  the 
eighteenth  century  they  had  settled  around  Mission  Do- 
lores, but  from  the  time  of  the  gold  rush  their  proportion 
to  Anglos  dwindled.  After  World  War  II,  immigrants 
from  Central  and  South  America,  particularly  from 
Nicaragua  and  El  Salvador,  chose  San  Francisco  as  their 
port  of  entry,  so  that  by  1970  it  was  these  people,  not 
those  of  Mexican  descent,  who  were  the  largest  compo- 
nent of  La  Raza  in  the  Mission.*'  The  district  was,  like 
the  Fillmore,  under  siege  by  downtown  planners  and 
developers  who  were  only  partially  balked  by  local  or- 
ganizations. 

While  many  of  the  immigrants  of  the  fifties  and  sixties 
were  city  people  with  machinists'  skills,  they  found  it 
difficult  to  use  their  talents  because  of  the  departure  of 
industry  from  San  Francisco  and  the  growth  of  white- 
collar  employment.  Access  to  training  and  education  for 
Latinos,  as  for  Blacks  was  remote,  and  teenagers  were 
tracked  in  high  school  for  menial,  dead-end  jobs.  Un- 
employment in  the  Mission  in  1965  was  15  percent. 
Statistics  for  the  following  year  showed  that  36  percent 


''Spain"  Rodriguez,  Jesus  Campusano,  Ruben  Guzman, 
and  Bob  Cuff:  Untitled,  1971,  Horizons  Unlimited, 
Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Development  (1969170-72)  I  127 


of  the  youth  looking  for  Jobs  could  not  find  any.'*" 
Vandalism,  robbery,  and  drugs  flourished.  It  v\as  par- 
ticularly young  people  in  the  Mission  who  responded  to 
the  organizing  of  Brown  people  elsewhere  in  the 
Southwest — the  farm  workers  in  the  Central  Valley  and 
the  Brown  Berets  in  Los  Angeles.  Ihe  Berets  carried 
their  activities  to  the  Bay  Area  in  1968,  spreading  their 
ideas  of  political  and  cultural  self-determination  and 
encouraging  students  to  demand  bilingual  education. 
That  year  in  the  auditorium  of  Mission  High  School  a 
Brown  Beret  read  Corky  Gonzales'  /  Am  Joaquin  while 
brothers  played  a  guitar  and  congas  and  showed  slides  of 
Mayan  ruins. ''^  That  year  also  at  San  Francisco  State 
College  Latino  and  other  Third  World  students  were 
trying  to  develop  ethnic  studies  departments,  the  block- 
ing of  which  provoked  the  strike  there  in  1968  and  1969 
in  which  community  people  participated.  Police  ha- 
rassment of  teenagers  w  as  an  everyday  experience  in  the 
Mission,  so  that  w  hen  seven  young  Latinos  were  charged 
with  the  murder  of  a  patrolman  in  1969,  local  support 
rallied  to  Los  Siete  de  la  Raza,  w  ho  gave  their  name  to  a 
storefront  organization.  It  was  not  only  occupied  with 
legal  defense.  Vv'henlos  Siete  were  acquitted  after  eighteen 
months  in  jail,  it  continued  to  put  out  a  newspaper,  Basta 
Ya!  (Enough!),  do  draft  counseling  and  college  recruit- 
ment and  run  a  breakfast  program.'''' 

Artist  groups  also  responded  to  the  concerns  of  the 
Mission.  One  of  these  was  the  Galeria  de  la  Raza, 
organized  in  1969,  which  became  the  focus  of  mural 
activity.  It  was  a  storefront  exhibition  space  run  by 
Mission  artists  and  served  as  conduit  of  public  funds  to 
muralists.  The  painting  on  Horizons  Unlimited  was  its 
project  and  one  of  the  first  uses  of  federal  manpower 
money  for  murals.  Rene  Yanez,  codirector  of  the 
Galeria,  made  the  arrangements,  helped  artists  adapt 
suitable  designs  and  did  surveys  of  community  response. 
Yaiiez  was  particularly  concerned  that  the  murals  ad- 
dressed the  problems  of  the  Mission. 

The  cartoon  approach  adopted  for  the  Horizons'  mu- 
ral was  utilized  by  other  artists  in  1972,  though  thev 
employed  different  styles.  Kobert  Crumb,  the  best 
known  of  the  "Comix"  cartoonists,  did  a  light-hearted 
panel  for  the  facade  of  the  Mission  Rebels  in  Action,  an 
organization  that  provided  local  youth  with  tutoring,  job 
training,  and  recreation,  put  on  cultural  events,  and 
offered  some  political  education.  Local  artists  added  the 
indio  motifs  to  the  building's  front.  It  was  at  this  time  also 
that  Mike  Rios  painted  fourteen  comic-strip  panels  for  a 
local  legal-aid  office,  using  the  animal  heads  oi El  Topo  to 
compare  the  people  of  the  Mission  District  to  under- 
ground moles. 

On  the  strength  of  his  part  in  the  Horizons  Unlimited 
and  Mission  Rebels  works,  "Chuy"  Campusano  was 
asked  to  assemble  a  team  to  do  panels  in  the  corridor  at 
the  Jamestown  Community  Center,  w  hich  offered  spe- 
cial classes  and  recreation  for  .Mission  District  youth. 
Campusano  invited  fellow  students  from  the  Art  Insti- 


Robert  Crumb:  cartoon;  Jerry  Concha,  Jesus  Campusano, 
Ruben  Guzman,  Thomas  and  Michael  Rios:  design  and 
lettering,  1972,  Mission  Rebels  Headquarters,  Mission 
District,  San  Francisco. 


tute  and  Art  Academy  to  join  him,  and  around  the 
scaffolding  tViey  decided  to  grapple  with  what  seemed  to 
them  the  most  important  issues.  In  one  panel  Consuelo 
Mendez  showed  a  youth  wrapped  in  the  stars  and  stripes 
shooting  himself  up,  while  a  diabolic  Aztec  god  and  skull 
watch.  Nearby  with  a  needle  are  other  young  addicts  in 
hallucinatory  colors  with  hollow  insides;  three  more  are 
stretched  in  graves.  All  are  rendered  in  a  wiry  style  like 
the  swelling  veins  in  the  arm  of  the  first.  In  the  next  panel 
Campusano  and  Ruben  Guzman  found  a  way  of  express- 
ing how  police  harassment  wrenched  local  life:  every- 
thing is  splayed  out — the  arms  and  legs  of  the  cop,  the 


128  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Consuelo  Mendez:  Untitled,  1972,  Jamestown  Commu- 
nity Center,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Jesus  Campusano  and  Ruben  Guzman:  Untitled,  1972, 
Jamestown  Community  Center. 


Students  of  Santa  Ana  College,  California,  at  work  on  the 
mural  for  their  library.  Signature  corner  of  the  mural 
directed  by  Sergio  0' Cadiz  with  the  assistance  ofShifra  M 
Goldman. 


A 

il 

i 

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i^n^ 

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Mark  Rogovin  with  local  youth  (Public  Art  'Workshop): 
Break  the  Grip  of  the  Absentee  Landlord,  1973, 
V^est  Side,  Chicago. 


Tomie  Arai,  director,  Harriet  Davis,  Alfredo  Hernandez, 
Cami  Homann,  and  Phyllis  Seebol  (City arts  Workshop): 
Wall  of  Respect  for  Women,  1974,  Lower  East  Side, 
New  York. 


Nelson  Stevens:  I  he  Black  Worker  (detail),  United 
Community  Construction  Workers  Labor  Temple,  1973, 
Roxbury,  Boston. 


Jose  Montoya  (left)  and  Juanishi  Orosco  (right)  (Rebel 
Chicano  Art  Front):  Pylon  murals,  1975,  Chicano  Park, 
San  Diego. 


Leo  Tanguma,  director,  and  barrio  young  people:  The 
Rebirth  of  Our  Nationality,  1972,  Houston. 


Twenty-one  Black  artists:  Wall  of  Respect  1967,  some 
areas  repainted  1969,  destroyed  1971,  South  Side, 
Chicago.  (©  Public  Art  Workshop) 


Esteban  Villa  and  art  students  of  Sacramento  State 
College:  Emergence  .  .  .  ,  1968,  Washington  Neighbor- 
hood Center,  Sacramento. 


Sail  I  Solache,  Eduardo  Carrillo,  Ramses  Noriega,  and 
Sergio  Hernandez:  Chicano  History,  1970,  Chicano 
Studies  Office,    University  of  California  Los  Angeles. 


J*', 

1^ 

^m^ 

*     .                  J 

Mitchell  Caton  (Chicago  Mural  Group):  Nation  Time, 
1971,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


Carol  Kenna,  Stephen  Lobb,  and  local  residents  (Green- 
wich Mural  Workshop):  Floyd  Road  Mural,  1976, 
Greenwich,  London. 


^^^^^^^^^^^ 

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F'^'^^B 

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Mario  Galdn:  Crucifixion  of  Don  Pedro  Albizu  Cam- 
pos, 1971,  Northwest  Side,  Chicago. 


Susan  Caruso-Green  and  James  Jannuzzi,  directors,  and 
local  youth,  (Cityarts  Workshop):  Arise  from  Oppres- 
sion, 1972,  Lower  East  Side.,  New  York. 


Arnold  Belkin  (Cityarts):  Against  Domestic  Colonial- 
ism, 1972,  HeWs  Kitchen,  New  York. 


Guillermo  Aranda:  La  Dualidad,  1971-79,  El  Centro 
Cultural  de  la  Raza,  San  Diego. 


Dewey  Crumpler:  George  Washington  Ethnic  Mural 
(Black  Panel),  1974,  George  Washington  High  School, 
San  Francisco. 


James  Dong,  local  artists,  and  students:  International 
Hotel  Mural,  1974,  Manilatown,  San  Francisco.  The 
scaffolding  was  for  the  hotel's  demolition. 


Guillermo  Aranda,  Victor  Ochoa,  Ernesto  de  Paul,  Abran 
Quevedo,  Arturo  Roman,  Sal  Varjas,  and  others:  Un- 
titled, Chicano  Park,  1973,  San  Diego. 


Development  (1969/70-72)  I  129 


Jesus  Campusano  and  Ruben  Guzman:  Untitled,  1972, 
Jamestown  Community  Center. 


Tom  Rios:  Untitled,  1972,  Jamestown  Community  Cen- 
ter. 


130  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Jesus  Campusano  and  assistant:  Untitled,  1972,  James- 
town Community  Center. 


Jesus  Campusano:  Untitled,  1972,  Jamestown  Commu- 
nity Center. 


spread-eagle  limbs  of  a  youth  being  frisked  and  the 
straining  perspective  of  pavement  and  street.  The  artists 
put  this  scene  next  to  the  illusions  Anglo  culture  com- 
pensates youngsters  with:  a  boy  who  has  received  an  "F" 
on  schoolwork  dreams  of  being  a  brown-skinned  Super- 
man; a  girl  plays  with  a  white-faced  Goofy  doll,  and 
ano'^her  dreams  of  being  a  white  fairy.  Culture's  abuses 
are  then  compared  with  the  vitality  of  young  people 
enjoying  salsa  in  Dolores  Park.  On  the  wall  opposite, 
Tom  Rios,  a  Vietnam  veteran,  painted  the  suffering  of 
soldiers  and  civilians  alike.  Additional  murals  on  which 
Campusano  worked  with  Mendez  and  others  were  criti- 
cal of  some  in  Latino  community  organizations  v\ho 
manipulated  residents,  and  the  young  people  who  fought 
over  Neighborhood  Youth  Corps  money.  These  scenes 
are  set  against  a  day  in  the  country  u here  a  Jamestown 
bus  has  transported  Mission  kids  and  panels  showing 
racially  mixed  youngsters  playing  together.  The  James- 
town murals  were  the  most  outspoken  public  art  yet 
painted  in  the  Mission,  and  they  were  done  with  style. 

The  Vietnam  War  also  brought  together  a  group  of 
young  Anglo  artists — Miranda  Bergman,  Jane  Norling, 
Andrea  Cole,  and  Arch  Williams — who  were  to  call 
themselves  the  Haight-Ashbury  Muralists.  For  a  line  of 
march  of  a  1972  peace  demonstration,  they  painted  on  a 
boarded-up  storefront  an  image  anticipating  it.  "Unity  in 
Our  Community,"  announced  a  banner  borne  by  the 
front  rank.  The  march  descended  past  the  shops  of 
Haight  street,  while  in  the  foreground  people  of  all  races 
(one  in  a  hard  hat)  struggled  with  a  Nixon-headed  oc- 
topus. And  in  the  other  direction  music  and  the  pleasures 
of  peace  were  being  enjoyed  in  nearby  Golden  Gate 
Park.  The  artists  called  their  vision  Rainbow  People.  The 
reworking  of  this  mural  is  described  in  chapter  5. 


Summary 

The  beginning  of  community  murals  was  marked  by 
images  of  the  brutalizing  of  minority  people,  the  martyr- 
dom of  their  leaders,  and  in  response  scenes  of  militant 
self-defense  as  well  as  affirmations  of  their  historical 
accomplishments.  Black  and  Brown  Power  and  Pride 
were  expressed  by  the  imagery  of  guns  and  demon- 
strations along  with  portraits  of  leaders,  athletes,  and 
musicians  and  scenes  of  early  ethnic  civilizations.  In  the 
second  stage  of  the  murals'  development,  scenes  of 
human  suffering  as  the  result  of  racism  remained  in  the 
work  of  Caton,  Herron,  Mora,  and  others.  But  commu- 
nity armed  self-defense  receded  as  a  theme  as  it  lost 
viability  as  a  tactic  due  to  the  retaliation  of  the  police  and 
the  courts  against  groups  like  the  Panthers.  In  addition, 
both  sides'  unrealistic  talk  about  revolution  and  the 
media's  linking  of  self-defense  with  rioting  confused  the 
public.  However,  protest  against  police  harassment  and 
other  forms  of  social  injustice  continued  to  utilize  non- 
violent, though  often  disruptive,  demonstrations,   and 


Development  (1969/70-72)  /  131 

this  was  reflected  in  the  imagery  of  murals.  The  fist 
remained  a  w  idespread  motif,  and  marches  persisted  as  a 
central  subject.  The  demonstrators'  intention  of  gaining 
the  respect  and  eventual  cooperation  of  the  uncommitted 
and  their  opponents  was  emphasized  by  artists  like 
Walker.  And  the  need  for  the  different  races  to  work 
together  w  as  stressed  by  many  painters  and  communities 
both  as  a  theme  and  in  the  actual  creating  of  murals. 

The  generalized  protests  against  racism  by  the  early 
painting  became  more  specific  with  attacks  on  urban 
renewal  that  removed  people  rather  than  rehabilitating 
their  housing  for  them.  Murals  also  concentrated  on  gang 
violence  and  drugs  that  were  understood  as  products  of 
racism.  While  antiwar  sentiment  had  for  a  long  time  been 
expressed  by  posters  and  graffiti,  it  appeared  among  the 
early  murals  of  Black  and  Brou n  artists  who  saw  the 
disproportionate  role  of  their  brothers  in  Indochina  as 
another  instance  of  racism.  As  more  White  artists  turned 
to  murals,  peace  became  a  theme  for  only  a  few  of  their 
works,  partly  because  it  w  as  perceived  as  more  a  national 
than  a  neighborhood  issue.  Meanwhile  the  first  murals  on 
women's  concerns  were  done  as  part  of  the  Black  Pride 
movement. 

Ethnic  people  turned  increasingly  to  culture — images 
of  a  traditional  way  of  life  and  past  leaders  who  had 
supported  the  downtrodden — to  strengthen  their  sense  of 
community  and  their  jjower  to  change  local  conditions. 
Black  artists  looked  to  both  Egyptian  and  West  African 
civilization;  Chicanos  drew  on  their  resources  in  .Mexican 
culture;  and  the  new  groups  who  came  to  murals,  Puerto 
Ricans  and  Asians,  turned  to  their  heritage.  Moreover, 
murals  began  to  be  used  to  celebrate  the  present  life  of 
the  neighborhood,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Horizons  Unlim- 
ited facade  and  the  Alvarado  School  mosaic  in  San 
Francisco. 

As  a  form,  the  community  mural  remained  a  kind  of 
public  demonstration — one  that  lasted.  In  fact,  it  became 
more  so.  While  most  of  the  murals  of  the  first  period 
were  done  by  professional  artists,  lay  people  became 
increasingly  involved.  Because  murals  were  for  and 
about  the  community,  it  came  to  be  felt  that  they  should 
be  created  by  community  people — not  only  trained  resi- 
dents, but  also  the  untrained.  The  empowering  of  ordi- 
nary people  in  all  respects  required  that  they  be  able  to 
communicate  on  matters  of  common  concern  publicly 
and  directly  without  the  intermediary  of  professionals 
but  with  their  help.  It  was  felt  that  not  only  was  this  the 
only  way  that  their  real  concerns  would  get  aired,  but 
that  such  expression  was  necessary  for  each  person's 
well-being,  as  Judy  Baca  said.  And  techniques  were 
developed  to  help  the  nonprofessional  make  effective 
images. 

This  second  period  of  development  also  witnessed  the 
organizing  of  muralists  in  their  own  groups  or  their 
association  with  public  agencies.  Funding,  as  we  shall  see 
more  in  detail  later,  was  divided  between  what  muralists 
could  raise  locally,  out  of  their  own  pockets  and  from 


132  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

local  residents  and  merchants,  and  from  more  distant 
sources — federal  manpower  money,  the  National  En- 
dowment for  the  Arts,  state  arts  councils,  city  agencies, 
large  corporations,  and  a  few  foundations.  Some  money 
that  the  NEA  appropriated  for  emergency  summer  arts 
programs  in  1968  in  the  wake  of  ghetto  riots  reached 
muralists.  The  first  NEA  grants  earmarked  for  murals 
began  in  fiscal  year  1970  (that  is,  1969-70)  and  went  to 
Summerthing  in  Boston  and  the  Chicago  Mural  Group, 
in  1970  the  NEA  initiated  the  Inner-City  Mural  Pro- 
gram. And  already  restrictions  and  censorship  were 
being  experienced  by  those  who  depended  on  public 
funding,  as  the  dwindling  of  money  for  socially  con- 
scious murals  in  Boston  after  1971  demonstrated. 

During  this  second  period  important  advances  in  con- 
tent and  function  had  been  made;  new  groups  of  people 
particularly  nonprofessionals,  in  increasing  numbers 
turned  to  murals,  and  new  methods  were  adopted  to 
accommodate  them.  Community  murals  were  ready  for  a 
new  surge  of  growth. 

NOTES 

1.  Cf.  note  17  to  chapter  7. 

2.  Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  p.  73  f. 

3.  Ibid.,  p.  77,  and  "It  .Makes  You  Stop  and  Think,  The 
Way  It  Is  Now  "  Second  City,  December  1970,  p.  2. 

4.  In  1979  Mclivaine,  who  had  not  done  murals  for  years, 
was  editor  of  the  West  Side  Journal,  a  newspaper  with  a  circula- 
tion of  seventy  thousand. 

5.  Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  p.  131  f. 

6.  The  tar  expanded  and  contracted  w  ith  the  seasons  so  that 
in  the  winter  of  1979  the  painting's  surface  was  cracked  and 
curling,  but  the  color  was  still  fresh  and  brilliant. 

7.  Tom  Horowitz,  ".Vluralizing  in  Chicago,"  Chicago  Ex- 
press, }u\y  19,  1972,  p.  5. 

8.  Letter,  .March  1979. 

9.  Bergman  et  al.,  Puerto  Rico:  The  Flame  of  Resistance,  p. 
90  ff. 

10.  Ibid.,  p.  114. 

1 1 .  Pedro  Pietri,  Puerto  Rican  Obituary  (New  York:  Monthly 
Review  Press,  1973),  p.  13  f. 

12.  Catarino  Garza,  Puerto  Ricans  in  the  U.S.  (New  York: 
Pathfinder,  1977),  pp.  36,41. 

13.  "Thirteen-Point  Program  of  YLP,"  quoted  in  Bergman 
et  al.,  p.  127. 

14.  Bergman  et  al.,  p.  52  ff. 

15.  Ibid.,  p.  74. 

16.  Ibid.,  p.  80  ff. 

17.  Victor  A.  Sorell,  "Barrio  .Murals  in  Chicago,"  Revista 
Chicano-Riquena,  Autumn,  1976. 

18.  These  are  described  by  him  in  the  book  he  did  with  the 
Cockcrofts,  pp.  84-86,  100-105. 

19.  John  H.  Mollenkopf,  "The  Fragile  Giants:  The  Crisis  of 
the  Public  Sector  in  American  Cities,"  Socialist  Revolution, 
July-September,  1976,  pp.  11-37. 


20.  "Changing  Walls,"  Architectural  Forum,  May  1973,  p. 
21. 

21.  Jane  Jacobs,  The  Death  and  Life  of  Great  American  Cities 
(New  York:  Vintage,  1961),  p.  8  ff. 

22.  Susan  Shapiro-Kiok  and  Susan  Caruso-Green, 
"Cityarts  Workshop,  Inc.,"  Summer,  1974,  p.  3.  Also  Susan 
Shapiro-Kiok,  "Cityarts  Workshop,"  Cockcroft,  Weber,  and 
Cockcroft,  p.  173  ff. 

23.  Susan  Shapiro-Kiok  in  Cockcroft,  Weber  and 
(Jockcroft,  p.  179. 

24.  Chicano  Federation  of  San  Diego  County,  1979,  p.  5. 

25.  .Mildred  .Monteverde,  "Contemporary  Chicano  Art," 
Aztlan  75. 

26.  Abran  Quevedo,  quoted  by  Barbara  Herrera,  "Chicano 
Park  Needs  Planning  Power,"  San  Diego  Evening  Tribune,  Au- 
gust 8,  1974,  p.  D-4. 

27.  Quoted  by  Barbara  Herrera,  "Barrio  Idealists  Face 
Strong  Bamers,"  San  Diego  Evening  Tribune,  August  10,  1974. 

28.  Reported  by  Stewart  Dill  McBride,  "Mexican  American 
street  gangs  take  up  brushes,"  Christian  Science  Monitor, 
October  28,  1977,  p.  18. 

29.  Al  Goldfarb,  "The  Los  Angeles  Mural  Phenomenon," 
Parks  and  Recreation ,  December  1975-January  1976,  p.  9. 

30.  .Martin  Zucker,  "Walls  of  barrio  are  brought  to  life  by 
street  gang  art,"  Smithsonian,  CJctober  1978,  p.  108. 

31.  Frank  Del  Olmo,  "Chicano  Gang  Turns  to  Art,"  Los 
Angeles  Times,  September  9,  1973. 

32.  Zucker,  p.  105. 

33.  Geronimo  Garduno,  "Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan," 
in  (>x:kcroft,  Weber  and  (x)ckcroft,  pp.  203  ff  ,'\lso,  Eric  Kroll, 
"Folk  Art  in  the  Barrios,"  Natural  History,  .May  1973,  pp. 
56-65. 

34.  Garduilo,  p.  203. 

35.  Some  of  the  details  here  come  from  Alice  J.  King, 
"Omowale:  the  Black  Experience,"  Essence,  July  1973,  p.  51. 
The  rest  derives  from  an  interview  with  the  Barneses. 

36.  Joan  Abrahamson  and  Sally  B.  Woodbridge,  The  Al- 
varado  School-Community  Art  Program,  (San  Francisco:  Alvarado 
School  Workshop,  1973),  p.  9. 

37.  Frederick  M.  Wirt,  Power  in  the  City,  decision  making  in 
San  Francisco  (Berkeley;  University  of  California  Press,  1974) 
pp.  31-33. 

38.  Arnold  Townsend,  "Townsend  Talks  about  the 
Fillmore  Center,"  The  Fillmore  Voice  (San  Francisco),  March  3, 
1975,  p.  2. 

39.  Citizens  Emergency  Task  Force  for  a  Workable 
Housing  Policy,  "The  Shame  of  San  Francisco,"  undated. 

40.  Wirt,  p.  39. 

41.  Marjorie  Heins,  Strictly  Ghetto  Property  (Berkeley:  Ram- 
parts, 1972),  p.  18. 

42.  Ibid.,  p.  26. 

43.  Ibid.,  p.  52. 

44.  Ibid.,  p.  164. 


SCALE  (1913-15) 


If  nothing  else,  community  murals  between  1973  and 
1975  were  distinguished  by  their  scale.  Individual  works 
were  frequently  much  larger  than  before.  Groups  of 
muralists  often  worked  on  ensembles  of  outdoor  wall 
paintings  embracing  large  areas  like  construction  sites, 
courtyards,  parks,  and  whole  housing  projects.  Neigh- 
borhoods came  to  be  studded  with  murals,  and  their 
character  and  quality  of  life  were  perceptibly  changed. 
There  already  had  been  anticipations  of  this,  but 
these  years  were  particularly  marked  by  a  luxuriant 
flowering  of  the  movement.  New  groups  of  people,  some 
ethnic  but  also  White  working-class  and  counterculture 
communities,  began  doing  murals.  Although  they  had 
been  pioneered  in  a  few  public  institutions  during  the 
early  seventies,  they  now  were  appearing  more  com- 
monly in  high  schools  and  universities  as  well  as  prisons. 
In  addition,  new  issues  particularly  concerned  with 
labor,  health,  and  the  environment  came  to  occupy 
muralists.  The  growth  in  scale  brought  with  it  new- 
methods  of  working  together  on  the  walls  as  well  as  new 
organizing  by  muralists  locally  and  nationally.  Also  a 
major  source  of  public  funding  was  opened  up. 

San  Francisco 

The  earliest  works  of  the  community  mural  move- 
ment were  done  in  1967  and  1968  mainly  by  different 
artists  painting  each  his  or  her  own  panel  in  an  ensemble 
or  different  areas  of  a  wall.  In  San  Francisco's  Mission 
District  this  is  how  the  first  murals  were  done  in  1971 


and  1972  at  Horizons  Unlimited,  the  Mission  Rebels 
building,  and  indoors  at  the  Jamestown  Educational 
Center;  infrequently  two  artists  cooperated  on  a  section. 
It  was  the  artists  who  worked  on  these  paintings  and 
other  artists  they  set  an  example  for,  who  were  to  go  on 
to  do  much  larger  projects,  most  of  them  outdoors  and  a 
number  of  them  works  that  composed  an  ensemble  that 
enveloped  a  public  space.  By  1975  the  sheer  concentra- 
tion of  murals  in  a  square  mile  of  the  Mission  gave  a  new 
character  to  the  whole  district:  a  sense  of  community 
identity  and  self-respect  that  was  important  as  the  dis- 
trict continued  to  struggle  with  the  problems  of  outside 
developers,  unemployment,  undocumented  workers, 
drugs,  and  vandalism. 

While  most  of  the  murals  in  the  Mission  were  done  by 
young  professional  artists  or  art  students  who  lived  in  the 
community,  it  was  children  who  initiated  the  painting 
that  began  along  Balmy  Alley,  a  block-long  stretch  that 
lets  into  one  of  the  Mission's  main  streets.  The  kids  of 
Mia  Galivez's  Twenty-fourth  Street  Place,  a  day-care 
center,  packed  a  wall  with  flowers,  giraffes  and  airplanes 
well  above  the  level  of  their  heads.  Susan  Cervantes,  an 
artist  who  was  to  do  many  murals  in  the  Mission,  got  her 
start  by  helping  with  the  youngsters.  Since  that  begin- 
ning in  1973,  artists  and  children,  some  local,  some  from 
the  suburbs,  some  from  distant  places  have  come  to  paint 
the  garage  doors,  fences,  and  walls  along  Balmy  Alley. 
Some  of  the  earliest  work  was  simply  decorative  painting 
of  a  picket  fence  and  stairway.  But  to  these  were  added 
on  a  nearby  wall  indios  and  their  deities.  Artists  Patricia 


133 


1 34  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Rodriguez  and  Graciela  Carrillo  painted  a  fantasy  of 
tropical  vegetation,  birds,  and  fish  on  a  garage  door;  and 
nearby,  Irene  Perez  decorated  another  garage  with  a  pair 
of  boys  reclining  back  to  back  playing  horns.  Across 
from  it  there  is  the  intense  stare  of  an  indio  child  with  face 
paint  done  by  Anna  Montana,  and  above  it  attached  to 
the  wall,  low  relief  sculpture  of  found  objects.  There 
were  also  portraits  of  local  artists  against  a  Mexican  flag 
by  Ralph  McNiel  that  later  were  replaced,  and  visiting 
San  Diego  painters  offered  a  view  of  a  child  being  born, 
suggesting  the  rebirth  of  Aztlan. 

Balmy  Alley  reflects  an  impulse  that  has  recurred  as 
community  murals  have  appeared  cross  the  country,  an 
impulse  for  people  to  add  more  images  to  a  site.  Some- 
times the  original  artists  change  their  imagery;  frequently 
new  painters  do  work  alongside  it.  This  occurred  in 
Chicago  with  the  Wall  of  Respect  and  the  Wall  of  Truth 
across  the  street  between  1967  to  1971.  Similarly  in 
Detroit  the  Wall  of  Dignity  spawned  new  painting  by 
Walker,  Eda,  and  local  artists  nearby.  The  example  of 
one  work  encourages  others.  The  reluctance  of  people  to 
express  themselves  is  overcome,  or  they  feel  challenged 
to  add  their  statement.  The  sense  of  a  place  for  public 
dialogue  emerges,  or  the  notion  of  creating  an  environ- 
ment that  is  alive  with  images  and  ideas  grips  a  growing 
number  of  people.  The  impulse  to  create  a  visual  envi- 
ronment is  the  artist's  way  of  trying  by  the  means  he  has 
at  his  control  to  change  the  character  of  daily  life.  Most 
muralists  know  that  painting  is  not  enough,  but  the  more 


Patricia  Rodriguez   and  Graciela   Carrillo:    Untitled, 
1973,  Balmy  Alley. 


Children  of  24th  Street  Place  directed  by  Mia  Galivez  and 
Susan  Cervantes:  further  section  of  wall,  1973;  near, 
Susan  Cervantes:  Limpie  Su  Calle  (Keep  Four  Street 
Clean),  1978,  Balmy  Alley,  Mission  District,  San  Fran- 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  135 


Irene  Perez:  Untitled,  1973,  Balmy  Alley. 


Anna  Montana  and  assistant:   Untitled  1973,  Balmy 
Alley. 


% 


136  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Mario  ''Torero''  Acevedo,  Mam  Lima,  Tomas  ''Coyote'' 
Castaneda,  and  Balazo:  Untitled,  1975,  Balmy  Alley. 


people  become  involved  in  the  actual  painting  or  talking 
about  it,  change  begins  to  occur.  Muralists  frequently 
talk  of  saturating  a  neighborhood  with  art  to  revive  its 
spirit,  and  this  was  widely  undertaken  as  murals  gener- 
ated the  impulse  to  more  murals  and  a  "mural  move- 
ment" could  be  spoken  of.  In  the  Mission  District  this 
was  experienced  in  what  had  begun  as  a  modest  project 
of  day-care  kids  painting  together.  It  spread  along  both 
sides  of  the  alley  that  was  secluded  from  the  bustle  of 
Twenty-fourth  Street  with  its  shops  and  buses  but  acces- 
sible to  it.  It  was  with  greater  boldness  that  some  of  these 
artists  who  painted  there  joined  others  to  work  on  all 
three  walls  embracing  the  minipark  and  playground  a 
few  blocks  away,  and  on  additional  walls  on  this  and 
adjoining  streets,  including  a  housing  project  nearby. 

While  some  of  these  works  were  explicitly  political  in 
their  import,  more  were  efforts  to  reevoke  the  heritage  of 
the  residents  and  shopkeepers.  But  in  a  city  where  racism 
was  still  a  means  of  unequally  distributing  wealth  and 
opportunity,  heritage  was  political.  It  was  made  political 
by  those  who  did  the  hiring  and  decided  on  union 
memberships,  those  who  granted  loans  and  let  apart- 
ments, and  those  who  did  the  educating  and  policing  and 
operated  the  social  services.  Therefore,  when  people 
turned  to  murals  to  reaffirm  their  heritage  and  collective 
identity,  they  were  acting  politically  and  seeking  to  draw 
strength  from  what  the  dominant  society  had  tried  to 
make  a  stigma.  Heritage  murals,  by  reminding  people  of 
the  uniqueness  of  their  way  of  life  and  the  achievements 
of  the  past,  stimulated  energy  for  organizing  to  claim 
their  fair  share. 


The  forging  of  community  had  been  difficult  in  San 
Francisco's  Mission  District  where  the  majority  of  people 
derive  from  different  Latin  American  countries — some 
from  urban,  others  from  rural  backgrounds.  Four  young 
artists,  Irene  Perez,  Patricia  Rodriguez,  Graciela  Car- 
rillo,  and  Consuelo  Mendez,  who  organized  a  group 
called  Las  Mujeres  Muralistas  (The  Women  Murali.sts), 
wanted  to  do  something  about  this.  When  they  were 
commissioned  to  do  a  large  wall  of  the  Mission  Model 
Cities  office  in  1974,  they  sought  to  honor  the  heritage  of 
many  of  the  national  groups  and  also  to  show  what  they 
believed  was  the  common  focus  of  the  diverse  cultures. 
At  the  far  left  Peruvian  indios  weave  a  boat  of  reeds  and 
play  their  pipes  as  llamas  watch;  Mexican  women  chat 
above  their  pottery,  and  closer  in,  Venezuelans  have 
donned  devil  masks.  At  the  near  right  a  Bolivian  dancer 
throws  up  his  arms,  while  toward  the  edge  Guatemalan 
women  prepare  food  and  care  for  a  child.  Below  a 
modern  family  is  shown  against  an  allusion  to  the  Hori- 
zons Unlimited  mural  that  depicts  the  Mission  District 
today.  All  these  scenes  are  united  by  the  image  in  the 
center.  Floating  over  fields  of  maiz,  maguay,  and  banana 
palms  is  an  indio  symbol  of  the  sun  with  its  short  rays 
splaying  out.  Inside  the  sun  a  mother  and  father  are 
shown  embracing  their  children — imagery  that  could  not 
fail  to  reach  neighborhood  people  whose  preoccupation 
was  the  protection  of  the  family.  But  this  had  special 
relevance  because  the  Mission  was  threatened  by  rising 
rents,  unemployment,  drugs,  and  school  dropouts.  In 
spite  of  the  diversity  of  customs  represented,  the  image 
of  the  family  was  shared  and  affirmed  a  common  Raza. 
The  artists  called  it  Latinoamerica. 

The  same  year  Graciela  Carrillo  and  Consuelo  Men- 
dez, taking  as  assistants  Susan  Cervantes  and  Miriam 
Olive,  and  working  under  the  name  of  Las  Mujeres 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  137 


Graciela  Carrillo,  Consuelo  Mendez,  Irene  Perez,  and 
Patricia  Rodriguez  (Las  Mujeres  Muralistas): 
Latinoamerica  (detail),  1974,  Mission  District,  San 
Francisco. 


Graciela  Carrillo  and  Consuelo  Mendez  assisted  by  Susan 
Cervantes  and  Miriam  Olivo:  Para  el  Mercado  (To  the 
Market)  (partial  view),  1974,  Mission  District,  San 
Francisco. 

V  n— 


138  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Para  el  Mercado  (partial  view). 


Muralistas,  completed  Para  el  Mercado  (To  the  Market),  a 
vibrant  montage  of  Latin  American  scenes  of  people 
fishing,  harvesting,  kneading  dough  for  pastry,  and  sel- 
ling their  wares.  It  was  done  on  a  wall  that  faced  the 
parking  area  of  a  taco  stand.  They  regarded  their  work  as 
primarily  a  decoration  for  the  neighborhood.  But  it  did 
more:  it  again  affirmed  the  common  heritage  of  local 
residents  and  their  uniqueness  in  the  mixed  jX)pulation  of 
the  city.  This  was  topical  at  the  time  because  residents 
had  recently  fa'iled  in  their  campaign  to  prevent  a 
McDonald's  hamburger  franchise  from  opening  down 
the  street.  They  had  argued  that  only  locally  owned 
businesses  should  be  granted  a  license  so  as  to  keep  the 
money  of  local  people  in  the  Mission.  However,  pictur- 
esque murals  were  not  sufficient  for  one  of  the  painters, 
Consuelo  Mendez,  who  left  the  group  because  she 
wanted  to  do  more  overtly  political  painting. 

The  next  work  of  the  remaining  Mujeres,  Irene  Perez, 
Graciella  Carrillo,  and  Patricia  Rodriguez,  was  a  two- 
story  wall  in  the  minipark  on  Twenty-fourth  Street  in 
1975.   It  was  a  fantasy  of  lush  jungle  growth  with  a 


cheetah,  dinosaur,  and  young  people  in  loin  cloths  col- 
lecting food  while  gentle  gods  loom  behind  a  volcano. 
This  was  one  of  an  ensemble  of  murals  that  by  then 
enveloped  the  park  on  three  sides.  A  smaller  but  sensi- 
tively done  piece  by  Jerry  Concha  showed  a  young  man 
of  today  looking  over  his  shoulder  at  two  Mayan  heads 
from  a  stele  at  Bonampak.  This  explicit  connection  of  the 
achievements  of  the  past  and  possibilities  of  the  present  is 
a  theme  that  runs  through  most  of  the  other  panels  that 
embrace  the  park.  It  helps  a  little  in  understanding 
Domingo  Rivera's  large  mural  that  begins  with  two 
Toltec  columns,  one  with  a  farm  workers'  eagle  on  it, 
that  surround  an  enigmatic  hall  from  which  rises  a 
transparent  prism  and  desert  scene  with  two  figures 
reading  back  to  back  beneath  febrile  plants  and  a  caption 
"psychocybernetics." 

More  comprehensible  is  the  scene  of  ancient  craftsmen 
that  Tony  Machado  did.  It  includes  a  music  lesson  of  a 
dozen  loinclothed  youths  practicing  on  horns,  but  one  of 
them  wears  a  modern  white  "panama"  and  another  an 
Oakland  A's  cap.  Next  to  it  Mike  Rios,  Luiz  Cortazar 
and  Richard  Montez  offered  a  view  of  a  curving  earth 
from  which  temples  rise.  Atop  one  a  man  with  his  arm 
around  the  shoulder  of  a  child  points  upward  into  the  sky 
and  future,  and  a  girl  reads  an  ancient  codex.  Above 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  139 


Left:  Domingo  Rivera:  Psycho-Cybernetics;  center: 
Jerry  Concha:  Untitled;  right:  Graciela  Carrillo,  Irene 
Perez,  and  Patricia  Rodriguez:  Untitled;  all  works, 
1975,  Mini-Park,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Jerry  Concha:  Untitled,  1975,  Mini-Park. 


Anthony  Machado:  Untitled,  1975,  Mini-Park. 


Michael  Rios,   Louis  Cortazar,   and  Richard  Montez: 
Untitled,  197S,Mini-Park. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  141 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
Untitled,  1975,  Mini-Park. 


them  a  glyph  of  the  Aztec  calendar  glides  like  a  space 
ship  and  over  it  are  people  of  La  Raza  today  looking  up 
beyond  a  torch  one  of  them  holds  as  others  stride  out  of  a 
jumble  of  stones  of  the  past  and  perhaps  the  present.  It  is 
a  remarkable  visionary  piece  in  which  the  artists  handle 
perspective  in  a  highly  imaginative  way. 

The  entire  right  side  of  the  Mini-Park  is  a  series  of 
murals  done  by  Mike  Rios  with  Tony  Machado  and 
Richard  Montez.  Here  the  theme  of  past  and  present  is 
continued.  The  first  shows  ancient  and  modern  workmen 
fashioning  stones  for  squarish  structures  that  l(X)k  both 
old  and  new.  Next,  amid  scenes  of  indio  craftsmen  and 
their  buildings,  there  emerges  on  the  side  of  great  stone 
blocks  floating  above,  the  face  of  a  young  person  holding 
draftsman's  instruments,  and  on  another  the  planetary 
rings  of  the  atom  and  a  hand  holding  a  prism.  Finally 
moving  towards  the  street  is  the  huge  plumed  serpent 
Quetzalcoatl  with  verdent  scales  among  which  indios 
work,  learn  and  play — a  symbol  of  life  and  its  energies. 
But  it  is  also  something  produced  or  cultivated  by 
humanity  itself,  for  about  its  head  is  scaffolding  from 
which  workmen  give  it  shape.  It  is  not  merely  the  bright 
vividness  of  the  Mini-Park  murals  that  impresses,  it  is  the 
conception  that  unites  them  and  the  imaginative  way 
they  are  realized.  The  park  is  not  only  a  place  for  kids  to 
play  and  grown-ups  to  rest,  it  is  an  environment  that 
reminds  people  of  their  roots  and  provokes  thought  about 
how  to  live  today. 

In  1973,  a  year  before  the  Mini-Park  murals  got  under 
way,   the   Bank  of  America  offered   local   muralists   a 


commission  of  fifteen  thousand  dollars  to  do  a  twelve- 
by-ninety-foot  work  above  the  tellers'  cages  in  their 
remodeled  Twenty-third  and  Mission  Street  branch. 
The  artists  were  Jesus  "Chuy"  Campusano,  who  did  the 
design,  Mike  Rios,  and  Luis  Cortazar,  who  were  helped 
by  five  assistants.  Emmy  Lou  Packard,  who  had  worked 
with  Diego  Rivera  on  a  mural  in  San  Francisco  in  1939 
and  1940,  provided  advice.^  The  artists  had  serious 
doubts  about  painting  for  the  Bank  of  America  because  of 
its  role  in  agribusiness  that  exploited  farmworkers  in  the 
Central  Valley,  but  they  decided  to  go  ahead  as  long  as 
they  were  left  free  to  say  what  they  wanted.  (Of  this 
more  will  be  said  later.)  They  painted  the  one  thousand 
square  feet  of  panels  in  an  old  Bank  of  America  office  and 
mounted  them  when  they  were  finished.  On  a  nearby 
wall  a  plaque  bearing  Campusano's  words  explains: 

We  wanted  to  create  a  medley  of  scenes  depicting  the 
heritage,  life  and  hopes  of  the  Mission  District.  The 
mural  is  for  everybody — the  bank  personnel,  the 
people  on  the  other  wide  of  the  teller  counter,  and  the 
people  walking  outside  the  windows. 

In  the  center  of  the  mural  there  is  an  elderly 
farmworker  with  a  huge  sack  of  cotton  on  his  shoulder; 
Campusano  says  that  it  is  important  that  other  agricul- 
tural laborers  besides  those  who  work  in  vineyards  be 
recognized.  Beneath  him  an  indio  is  crucified  to  the 
land — a  symbol  explained  by  an  inscription  that  a  man  in 
the  foreground  extends,  the  words  of  Cesar  Chavez  in 
El  Plan  de  Delano,  which  was  signed  by  those  who  were 
about  to  begin  their  three-hundred-mile  pilgrimage  to 
Sacramento  in   1966:  "Our  sweat  and  our  blood  have 


142  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
Untitled,  1975,  Mini-Park. 


Mini-Park,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Jesus  Campusano,  Michael  Rios,  Luis  Cortazar  and  others: 
Bank  of  American  Mural,  1974,  Mission  District,  San 
Francisco. 


Bank  of  America  Mural  (partial  view). 

4  '  <-■ 

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^Mm/j^m^^.^  :  r 

A 

^B^ii^^yJm-. 

^__^            <^ail^^V^^^I[       ^^^SSKr^tt^'^^  .iJHI 

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^^^Ha  '^^B  ^^^H^^BP<^  #'  '     .^^^^^StBL  '  wt^                ^.m^^L    /  "^                       1 

144  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Bank  of  America  Mural  partial  view). 


fallen  on  this  land  to  make  other  men  rich."  The  crucified 
figure  recalls  an  indio  on  an  upright  cross  with  a  U.S. 
eagle  perching  on  top  that  Siqueiros  had  done  in  Los 
Angeles  in  1932  and  angry  citizens  had  had  white- 
washed. 

Flanking  the  center  are  a  pair  of  scaffoldings  around 
large  images,  one  of  a  Zapatalike  fighter,  the  other  of  a 
professional  man — perhaps  a  scholar,  because  of  his 
book.  These  appear  to  be  offered  as  role  models  for 
viewers  or  their  children.  (The  visual  idea  came  from  a 
Rivera  mural  at  the  San  Francisco  Art  Institute,  where 
the  scaffolding  is  around  a  monumental  worker  that 
Rivera  depicts  himself  painting.)  Close  by  the  warrior  is  a 
scene  of  .Mission  High  School  with  a  humorous  view  of 
graduates.  A  teenage  rock  saxophonist  with  a  street-gang 
jacket  is  placed  near  an  indio  with  a  Mayan  syrinx.  A 
prisoner  with  a  jail  number  across  his  back  is  a  reminder 
of  the  discriminatory  justice  system,  and  the  101  window 
refers  to  the  familiar  office  in  City  Hall  where  parking 
tickets  are  paid.  Further  to  the  left  are  black  children 
boarding  a  bus,  for  Mission  District  schools  were  being 
integrated.  At  the  far  left  a  calavera  embraces  Siqueiros, 
the  last  of  the  great  .Mexican  muralists,  who  had  recently 
died  and  who  holds  here  the  symbol  of  an  atom,  which 
Campusano  says  represents  knowledge  and  life.  Toward 
the  right  of  center  are  representations  of  the  careers 
Latinos  are  seeking  in  medicine,  engineering,  and  con- 


Bank  of  America  Mural  (partial  view). 


struction  work,  suggested  also  by  the  subway  train  that 
snakes  forward.  In  a  humorous  reference  to  opportunities 
in  art,  an  older  artist,  resembling  Siqueiros,  is  bending 
over  a  younger  one's  drawing  of  the  portrait  of  Siqueiros 
at  the  far  left.  And  at  the  corner  two  students,  one 
holding  a  book  with  a  .Mission  High  cover,  look  up  at  a 
great  hand  dispensing  light. 

The  mural  was  one  of  the  most  outspoken  political 
statements  that  muralists  were  to  make  and  it  was  made 
inside  the  belly  of  the  beast.  This  makes  the  painting 
almost  unique  among  works  of  the  community-mural 
movement,  except  for  some  done  in  colleges  and  univer- 
sities. Aesthetically  it  is  also  impressive.  It  is  a  montage  of 
scenes  that  are  organized  around  a  single  center,  and  can 
be  taken  in  as  patrons  wait  for  a  teller.  There  is  in  fact  a 
subsidiary  center  at  the  corner,  which  confronts  you  as 
you  approach  the  tellers  from  the  main  entrance.  The 
corner  is  handled  like  a  ship's  prow,  but  without  the 
dominating  emphasis  of  the  murals  of  Los  Artes  in  Santa 
Fe,  which  is  appropriate  here  since  the  main  focus  is 
elsewhere.  The  complexity  of  the  mural's  conception, 
the  clarity  with  which  it  projects  its  message,  its  mixture 
of  humor  and  seriousness  and  of  the  local  with  the 
universal,  and  the  moving  quality  of  its  central  image 
render  whatever  awkwardness  there  is  in  drawing  unim- 
portant and  mark  a  decided  advance  in  public  art. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  145 

After  completing  the  Bank  of  America  mural  in  the 
spring  of  1974,  Campusano  was  engaged  to  work  with 
teenagers  during  the  summer  by  Horizons  Unlimited, 
the  job-training  center  where  he  had  helped  paint  the 
first  mural  of  the  new  movement  in  the  .Mission.  There 
were  about  ten  of  them  who  worked  out  a  composition 
for  the  main  room.  In  the  foreground  is  an  over-size  cop 
turned  away  from  us  to  block  a  procession  of  determined 
young  people  treading  on  an  American  flag  as  they 
approach  him.  The  cop  is  connected  by  painted  pipes  to 
real  ones  that  hang  from  the  ceiling,  and  he  is  squatting 
on  the  back  of  a  Latino  who  turns  the  valve  that  inflates 
him,  making  clear  the  painters'  indictment  of  an  oppres- 
sive establishment  that  they  believed  Raza  people  were 
forced  to  maintain  with  their  labor.  A  massive  wall  cuts 
the  teenagers  off  from  the  prosperous  city  where  high 
rises  tower;  their  way  is  open  only  to  drugs  and  the  fields 
where  farmworkers  are  still  doing  stoop  labor.  Further 
off  are  lyrical  images  of  Raza  unity  and  the  ancient  past. 
Clearly  the  painters  were  intent  on  urging  on  the  young 
people  who  came  to  the  center  to  prepare  for  employ- 
ment the  need  for  political  awareness  and  solidarity.  This 


Jesus  Campusano  and  local  youth:  Untitled,  1974,  Hori- 
zons Unlimited,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


146  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
Untitled,  1975,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


was  perhaps  the  first  mural  project  in  the  city  in  which 
teenagers  collaborated  with  a  trained  artist. 

In  1975  Mike  Rios,  with  the  assistance  of  Tony 
Machado  and  Richard  Montez,  undertook  a  complex 
work  that  linked  politics  and  culture.  The  wall  was  not 
prepared  for  a  long-lasting  mural,  and  within  two  years  it 
was  in  such  bad  condition  that  it  was  painted  out,  but  it 
nevertheless  was  an  interesting  effort.  It  was  done  on  the 
side  of  a  Chinese  restaurant  in  the  .Mission  after  the 
victory  of  the  North  Vietnamese  and  Viet  Cong  and  at  a 
time  when  South  Vietnamese  refugees  were  being  relo- 
cated in  the  United  States.  It  showed  a  group  of  racially 
mixed  American  teenagers  watching  a  film  whose  large 
projected  image  filled  much  of  the  mural.  The  image  was 
of  a  Vietnamese  woman  carrying  a  child,  both  with 
bandaged  eyes,  fleeing  their  flaming  countryside.  But 
they  were  cut  off  by  sharpened  red,  white,  and  blue 
Punjab  stakes.  The  mother's  beleaguerment  and  clenched 
fist  suggested  the  liberation  struggles  of  Third  World 
jjeoples  against  imperialism.  The  painters  had  borrowed 
the  image  from  a  Chinese  poster  that  was  widely  distri- 
buted in  this  country;  however,  in  the  original  mother 
and  child  were  not  blindfolded,  and  some  viewers  ob- 
jected to  the  new  version  because  it  suggested  that  the 


Vietnamese  did  not  clearly  understand  their  struggle. 
But  the  woman's  determination  was  clear.  .Meanwhile, 
back  where  the  young  audience  was  watching  the  film, 
the  downtown  highrises  of  big  business  uere  quak- 
ing as  if  shaken  by  the  failure  of  overseas  ambi- 
tions. However,  the  space  the  kids  were  watching  from 
seemed  protected  from  the  catastrophe.  It  was  the 
portico  of  an  ancient  indio  temple,  and  the  children 
seemed  to  be  guarded  by  a  .Mayan  jaguar.  Behind  them 
was  the  sanctuary  with  its  images  of  gods  beneath  which 
other  young  people  were  working  on  new  sculptures. 
These  youthful  artists  were  both  ancient  and  modern — 
some  were  in  indio  garb;  one  wore  an  athlete's  shirt  with  a 
number.  The  mural's  meaning  gradually  emerged:  the 
heritage  of  Raza  and  the  arts  that  preserved  it  could  lead 
to  a  humane  world  today  in  the  face  of  downtown's 
oppression  of  people  at  home  and  overseas.  What  Rios 
was  trying  to  draw  his  viewers'  attention  to  was  the 
connection  of  domestic  and  foreign  colonialism,  and  the 
function  of  the  arts  and  heritage  to  provide  an  alternative. 
The  painting  demonstrated  that  murals  can  grapple  with 
complex  content  and  make  demands  on  viewers  to  think 
them  through.  But  the  problems  that  some  conscientious 
observers  had,  indicated  the  difficulty  of  legible  design. 

The  same  year,  1975,  Rios  again  with  the  help  of 
Machado  and  Montez,  did  a  mural  on  a  privately  owned 
wall  facing  the  entrance  to  a  Mission  District  subway 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  147 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
Untitled,  1975,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Michael  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  and  Richard  Montez: 
Bart  Mural,  1975,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


148  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

station.  It  was  about  BAR  I,  the  new  Bay  Area  Rapid 
Transit,  v\  hich  was  a  controversial  issue  in  the  Mission. 
The  mural  depicts  a  sleek  train  coming  up  from  the 
dov\  ntow  n  skyscrapers  and  rushing  over  the  heads  and 
backs  of  local  people  whom  it  seems  to  weigh  down  as  if 
they  w  ere  pylons.  (It  is  immaterial  that  the  train  does  not 
come  out  of  the  ground  at  this  station.)  But  are  the 
Mission  residents  v\  illingly  supporting  it,  or  does  the 
figure  in  the  foreground  twist  off  the  tracks?  Although 
the  bearers  of  the  rails  see;m  to  be  frovv  ning  and  wincing, 
there  is  an  ambiguity  that  leads  some  viewers  to  read  the 
mural  as  the  people  of  the  Mission  upholding  BAR  I. 
Rios  himself  says  ambiguously  that  he  wanted  to  show 
people  simply  holding  up  BART.  "They  support  it  by 
their  fares  and  taxes,"  he  adds.  Rene  Yanez,  who  has 
worked  closely  with  Rios  and  made  arrangements  for  a 
number  of  his  paintings,  says  that  this  is  w  hat  Rios  tells 
establishment  types  but  that  his  real  intention  was  to 
show  BART  on  the  backs  of  La  Raza.  A  preliminary  but 
careful  draw  ing  for  the  mural  shows  much  more  serene 
and  classic  faces  on  the  figures  that  hold  up  the  tracks. 
This  may  have  been  the  design  with  w  hich  Rios  sought 
approval  from  the  city  Art  Commission.  Although  some 
of  its  members,  he  says,  were  not  happy  w  ith  the  pro- 
posal, it  was  accepted.  The  only  ju.stification  for  am- 
biguity in  the  final  image  could  be  the  painters'  effort  to 
make  a  statement  that  they  hoped  would  be  understood 
differently  by  different  kinds  of  viewers,  strengthening 
local  resistance  to  urban  redevelopment,  but  protecting 


the  painters'  chances  of  more  mural  commissions  with 
public  funding.  Rios  was  a  CP'TA  worker. 

The  ambiguity  or  ambivalence  of  the  BAR  T  mural 
reHeets  the  general  relationship  or  murals  to  urban  rede- 
velopment. Many  Mission  residents  believed  that  BART 
w  as  not  built  to  meet  their  needs.  At  that  time  it  did  not 
run  at  nights  or  on  weekends.  It  w  as  not  routed  for  travel 
w  ithin  the  city  but  primarily  to  bring  corporate  person- 
nel and  shoppers  from  the  middle-class  suburbs 
downtown.  It  was  built  for  the  time,  many  residents 
feared,  when  the  Mission  would  become  a  tourist  center 
and  provide  apartments  for  people  v\ho  worked  in  the 
high  rises  depicted  in  Rios's  mural.  Since  the  mid-sixties, 
in  fact,  downtown  interests  had  been  planning  the  re- 
newal of  the  Mission  with  a  view  to  upgrading  it  as  a 
residential  area  to  attract  office  personnel  back  from  the 
suburbs,  build  up  the  city's  tax  base  and  generate  more 
business.  BART  would  make  two  stops  there  and  con- 
nect it  with  downtown  with  hardly  a  five-minute  ride. 
High  rises,  tow  n  houses,  and  new  office  buildings  were 
projected  by  the  Planning  Commission  for  the  district.^ 
A  plaza  with  Latin  American  restaurants,  craft  shops, 
and  a  pedestrian  mall  that  w  ould  connect  BAR  T  w  ith  the 
old  Spanish  mission  were  projected.  When  the  BART 
mural  was  painted  in  1975  palm  trees  were  already 
planted  along  the  main  thoroughfare,  and  sidewalks  were 
paved  with  Mexican  tiles.  New  bank  buildings  and 
apartment  houses  had  been  built,  and  many  of  the  old 
frame  Victorians  were  being  refurbished  by  speculators 


Gilberto  Ramirez  and  Anthony  Machado:  Untitled, 
1975,  LULAC  (League  of  United  Latin  American  Citi- 
zens), Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  149 


Sondra  Chirlton  and  friends:  Eddy  and  Divisadero, 
1973,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


and  well-to-do  new  owners.  All  of  this  "upgrading"  was 
forcing  up  property  values  and  rents  and  driving  out 
increasing  numbers  of  residents. 

Urban  renewal  in  the  Mission  was  slowed  not  only  by 
the  inflation  and  recession  of  the  early  seventies  but  by 
the  pressure  of  local  community  groups.  Also,  the  area's 
art  centers,  the  Galena  de  la  Raza,  Mission  Media  Arts, 
and  the  Mexican  Museum  played  important  roles  in 
educating  residents  and  creating  a  sense  of  collective 
identity  and  pride.  Rene  Yaiiez,  co-director  of  the  Galena, 
said  of  the  murals,  "We  were  working  to  define  the 
boundaries  of  the  community,  to  give  it  character.  By 
giving  the  community  a  character,  a  face,  it  would  be 
harder  for  bulldozers  to  tear  it  down."'* 

But  Yaiiez  was  also  concerned  that  the  murals  that 
brightened  the  walls  of  the  Mission  District  would  be 
exploited  by  the  tourist  industry.  Maps  of  their  location 
were  distributed,  walking  tours  by  public-spirited 
groups  were  available  on  a  regular  basis.  This  contrib- 
uted to  spreading  the  word  about  community  art  and 
getting  support  for  funding.  But  there  was  a  danger  that 
the  murals  would  become  merely  picturesque  like  official 
fiestas  and  street  fairs,  and  thereby  be  co-opted  by  the 
establishment  against  which  they  had  originally  been 
directed.  The  only  way  to  guard  against  this  was  for 
murals  to  be  outspoken.  Whether  the  BART  mural  could 
be  any  more  explicit  in  its  opposition  to  redevelopment  in 
the  Mission,  if  that  was  its  intention,  without  jeopardiz- 
ing future  commissions  for  the  artists  is  another  matter. 


Whether  it  could  be  as  explicit  as  Kios  and  the  others  had 
been  at  the  Bank  of  America  is  a  question  that  lingered. 

Meanwhile,  Gilberto  Ramirez,  the  Mexican  painter 
who  with  local  assistants  had  done  the  first  important 
San  Diego  mural  of  the  new  movement  in  1970,  came  to 
the  San  Francisco  Mission  District  in  1975  to  undertake  a 
much  larger  work  and  outdoors.  Anthony  Machado  as- 
sisted him  on  the  two-story  painting  on  LULAC  (League 
of  United  Latin  American  Citizens),  a  .Mission  District 
community  service  and  job  training  center.  The  scene  is 
the  military-industrial  inferno  where  chimneys  spew- 
dense  smoke,  cannons  threaten,  and  a  metal  proboscis 
snatches  up  a  victim,  while  other  figures  are  tortured  by 
machinery.  This  is  powerfully  painted  in  a  swirling, 
sooty  fire-glow  that  borrows  from  Orozco.  Against  this  a 
nude  young  man  and  woman  stand  in  the  foreground 
holding  hands,  apparently  intended  as  symbols  of  de- 
fiance. Their  bodies  are  brown  and  white,  suggesting 
Raza  solidarity.  But  they  are  dwarfed  by  the  machinery 
and  rendered  in  an  academic,  fine-arts  style,  suggesting 
hope  rather  than  struggle,  that  reduces  their  credibility. 
The  same  discrepancy  between  weak  nudes  and  strong 
background  occurred  in  the  panels  at  San  Diego  State 
University.  It  was  curious  that  Ramirez,  who  learned 
much  from  Orozco,  including  his  painterly  technique, 
was  not  inspired  by  the  powerful  naked  Prometheuses  of 
the  master. 

There  were  hardly  any  murals  done  by  Black  people  in 
San  Francisco  between  1973  and  1975.  The  upheaval 
that  urban  renewal  caused  in  the  Fillmore  District  had  to 
be  the  reason.  There  was  by  now  some  new  housing 
there,  and  it  was  probably  its  newness  that  prevented  the 
painting  of  murals  on  it.  There  was,  however,  a  very 


150  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

simple  and  moving  statement  of  human  relationships 
done  in  1973  along  the  bottom  of  a  wall  of  an  old  frame 
three-story  apartment  building  facing  an  empty  lot 
where  there  were  outcroppings  of  old  foundations. 
Strung  out  along  the  wall  are  full-length  life-sized 
portraits  of  local  people,  some  Black,  some  Asian,  some 
White,  all  of  whom  appear  to  have  worked  on  the 
painting  which  they  signed.  Their  own  self-confidence 
and  pleasure  in  being  together  overcomes  the  awkward- 
ness of  execution  and  results  in  a  strength  that  is  sym- 
bolized by  a  fire-spouting  dragon  that  rears  up  at  the 
side.  By  painting  its  feet  and  claws  on  stones  next  to  the 
wall  the  artists  have  given  the  dragon  the  quality  of  relief 
sculpture,  which,  together  with  the  sharply  frontal 
figures,  brings  them  all  into  close  contact  with  the 
viewer.  It  is  as  if  they  had  stopped  briefly  their  conversa- 
tions and  basketball  and  turned  to  greet  you.  The  way 
each  assumes  a  particular  stance  characterizes  them  as 
much  as  their  faces  and  clothes.  The  mural  is  presided 
over  in  good  weather  by  an  elderly  gentleman,  who 
moves  slowly  but  with  dignity  and  who  uses  the  yellow 
cane  and  wears  the  same  Army  field  jacket  with  the  name 
strip  to  be  seen  in  his  portrait.  He  is  Sergeant  Henderson 
and  explains  that  one  of  the  young  people  had  drawn  his 
figure,  but  that  he  had  filled  in  the  color. 

Meanwhile,  some  miles  to  the  west,  Dewey  Grumpier 
was  at  work  on  an  ensemble  of  murals  that  grew  out  of 
protests  begun  in  1966  by  students  at  George  Washing- 
ton High  School  against  a  series  of  WPA  murals  in  the 
school's  entrance  hall.  These  works  done  by  Victor 
Arnautoff  in  1935  show  Native  Americans  and  Blacks  as 


servile  and  of  little  account.  In  one  panel  Washington 
orders  frontiersmen  into  the  wilderness  who  appear  to  be 
walking  over  the  dead  body  of  a  murdered  Indian.  In 
another  the  father  of  our  country  directs  plantation  oper- 
ations while  a  slave  holds  his  horse  and  other  Blacks 
await  his  instructions  or  are  already  at  work  in  the  fields. 
Arnautoffs  intentions  had  been  ironic,  but  this  was 
misunderstood  by  many  of  the  students.  Rather  than 
have  the  paintings  destroyed,  as  they  first  demanded,  the 
Board  of  Education  agreed  to  fund  an  additional  set  of 
murals.  In  1969  a  committee  of  students,  parents,  and 
educators  interviewed  artists  before  selecting  Grumpier, 
who  had  recently  graduated  from  another  local  high 
school  where  he  had  completed  a  mural.  He  had  also 
done  a  small  one  at  a  community  health  center  in  1967. 
He  had  been  active  in  opposing  the  destruction  of  Ar- 
nautoffs murals  because  he  understood  that  they  had 
been  intended  as  a  satirical  indictment  of  White  racism. 
Grumpier  saw  that  they  were  misread  by  the  students, 
but  he  felt  that  positive  images  of  the  achievements  of 
ethnic  people  were  needed.  He  went  to  work  with  stu- 
dents to  select  a  theme,  and  they  decided  on  the  struggles 
of  Third  World  peoples.  Then  followed  years  of  study 
and  travel  before  Grumpier  felt  ready  to  begin.  He 
visited  artists  in  Chicago  and  Mexico,  among  them  Wil- 
liam Walker,  Elizabeth  Gatlett,  Pablo  O'Higgins,  and 
Siqueiros.  He  began  painting  in  1972  and  took  a  year  and 
a  half  to  complete  three  panels  comparing  the  liberation 
struggles  of  Blacks,  Native  Americans,  Chicanos,  and 
Asian-Americans,  all  groups  represented  in  the  student 
body. 


Victor  Arnautoff:  Life  of  Washington  (partial  view), 
19^5,  with  Dewey  Grumpier'' s  mural  seen  through  the 
door,  George  Washington  High  School,  San  Francisco. 


The  larger  and  central  panel  represents  two  bare- 
chested  Black  men  whose  arms  and  hands  become 
dramatically  enlarged  as  they  come  towards  us  in  a 
Siqueiros-like  perspective  to  break  their  massive  chains. 
Ihese  snap  at  bottom  center,  more  in  our  space  than  the 
picture's,  and  from  the  break  rises  a  naked  Black  mother 
in  flames  who  holds  her  child  above  them,  symbols  of  life 
and  the  future.  At  one  side  are  figures  of  Black  history 
from  West  Africa  and  ancient  Egypt,  w  hile  at  the  other 
are  modern  Black  scientists,  leaders,  and  educators.  To 
demonstrate  the  similiarities  of  Third  World  struggles, 
Grumpier  carefully  worked  out  analogies  in  the  design  of 
the  three  panels.  Besides  portraits  of  leaders  in  each,  he 
related  the  breaking  of  the  chains  in  the  Black  panel  to 
the  Aztec  eagle  destroying  its  serpent  in  the  Latino  and 
Native  American  panel  and  a  dragon  rearing  up  in  the 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  151 

Asian  one.  There  an  Oriental  ceremonial  gate  parallels  a 
similar  structure  in  the  Black  scene  and  the  lines  of  a 
pre-Columbian  pyramid  in  its  panel.  In  the  foreground 
of  the  Asian  mural  a  pair  of  fetuses  wrapping  about  each 
other  like  the  yin-yang  symbol  recalls  the  child  that  is 
raised  high  by  his  mother  in  the  Black  panel.  The 
ensemble  is  skillfully  drawn  and  executed  and  achieves  a 
powerful  representation  of  ethnic  achievements. 

While  Chicano  and,  to  a  lesser  extent,  Black  muralists 
had  been  working  in  San  Francisco  in  the  early  seventies, 
it  was  not  until  1974  that  the  Asian  and  Filipino  popula- 
tion that  accounted  for  over  14  percent  of  the  city's 
inhabitants  was  represented  by  a  mural.  But  finally  a 
work  was  done  that  spoke  for  them  and  came  to  be  a 
symbol  of  the  struggle  for  low-income  housing  in  the 
city.  It  was  the  block-long  painting  on  the  side  of  the 


Dewey  Grumpier:  Latin  and  Native  American  Panel, 
1974,  George  Washington  High  School. 


Dewey  Grumpier:  Asian-American  Panel,  1974,  George 
Washington  High  School. 


152  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

International  Hotel,  a  structure  that  dated  from  early  in 
the  century  and  provided  a  home  at  any  one  time  for  over 
one  hundred  residents  of  Asian  descent.  In  1974  there 
loomed  over  it  the  new  pyramid  of  the  Transamerica 
Corporation  and  the  tower  of  Holiday  Inn,  which  pro- 
vided one  of  its  twenty-seven  floors  as  the  city's  only 
"Chinese  Cultural  Center."  This  was  not  a  workshop, 
but  only  an  impersonally  modern  exhibition  and  per- 
formance space.  The  I-Hotel  was  at  the  point  of  contact 
between  the  city's  most  densely  inhabited  ghetto, 
Chinatown,  and  its  highest-priced  real  estate,  the  finan- 
cial district,  where  in  the  past  thirteen  years  more  than 
fifty  high  rises  had  sprung  up  to  make  San  Francisco  the 
corporate  headquarters  of  the  WesV.  The  hotel  was 
owned  by  a  Bangkok-  and  Hong  Kong-based  Four  Seas 
Investment  Company  and  seemed  doomed  to  replace- 
ment by  another  business  tower.  The  nine-year  struggle 
to  save  the  I-Hotel  was  to  be  central  to  the  effort  to  halt 
the  uprooting  of  the  poor  by  w  hat  was  called  ".Manhat- 
tanization."  With  their  fifty  dollar-a-month  rents,  the 
elderly  tenants  had  no  other  place  to  go,  for  the  vacancy 
rate  citywide  was  2  percent  and  in  Chinatown  even 
lower. ^  .Moreover,  they  wanted  to  remain  together  be- 
cause they  had  been  caring  for  one  another  over  the 
years.    While  the   building  was  aging,   it  was   not   its 


James  Dong,  local  artists,  and  students:  International 
Hotel  Mural,  1974,  Manilatown,  San  Francisco.  The 
scaffolding  was  for  the  hotel's  demolition. 


owners  but  its  tenants  who  put  nearly  one  hundred 
thousand  dollars'  worth  of  time  and  money  into  bringing 
it  up  to  code.® 

The  I-Hotel  mural  helped  focus  this  struggle  and  kept 
it  before  the  public.  But  it  was  at  first  intended  as  a 
celebration  of  the  hotel's  tenants  and  their  life  together.  It 
was  begun  in  1974  directed  by  Jim  Dong  and  a  core 
group  of  five  local  Asian  artists  operating  out  of  the 
Kearny  Street  Workshop,  which  occupied  a  storefront  in 
the  hotel  and  taught  art  skills  to  local  young  people. 
Neither  Dong  nor  the  other  core  members  had  worked 
on  a  mural  before.  They  consulted  with  the  tenants  of 
the  hotel  and  people  in  the  neighborhood,  and  Dong  put 
the  design  together.  It  recalls  the  back-breaking  farm 
work  of  people  of  Asian  descent  in  California  and  by 
extension  their  labor  in  the  old  country.  A  large  ven- 
tilating duct  is  incorporated  in  the  composition,  becom- 
ing a  basket  of  tomatoes  carried  by  a  young  man  and 
elderly  woman.  A  peasant  grasps  two  recessed  windows 
in  which  the  artists  intended  to  place  tilting  mirrors  so 
that  viewers  could  see  themselves,  with  the  implication 
that  the  present  is  borne  by  the  labor  of  the  past.  Further 
along  a  grate  in  the  wall,  another  window  and  doorway 
are  transformed  into  factories.  A  great  wave  borrowed 
from  the  Japanese  woodcut  artist  Hiroshige  curls  over  an 
entrance.  The  idea  of  oppressive  labor  is  further  ex- 
pressed by  a  white  bearded  man  in  tattered  garb  who 
holds  poisonous  serpents  that  it  was  the  custom  in  the 
sixteenth  century  to  capture  for  the  well-to-do  because  it 


was  supposed  that  eating  the  snakes  insured  viriUty  and 
long  life.  The  mural  is  done  in  flat,  muted  colors  and 
scalloped  contours  that  recall  Japanese  graphics,  as  well 
as  the  American  comic  strip.  Because  of  the  large  areas  of 
single  tones,  it  was  possible  with  a  little  instruction  for 
local  young  people  and  classes  from  around  the  Bay  Area 
to  join  in  working  on  the  mural.  Dong  says  that  it  was 
never  altogether  completed.  The  struggle  to  save  the 
I-Hotel  continued,  and  part  of  it  was  another  important 
mural  produced  by  Kearny  Street  later  in  the  seventies,  as 
we  shall  see. 

In  1973  three  young  White  women  from  the  Haight 
Ashbury  Muralists,  Jane  Norling,  Miranda  Bergman, 
and  Peggy  Tucker,  painted  a  relatively  small  mural  with 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  153 

a  big  impact  at  the  corner  of  the  streets  from  which  they 
took  their  name.  It  consisted  entirely  of  a  large  schematic 
eye.  The  retina  was  occupied  by  a  squatting  Vietnamese 
woman  holding  a  rifle  and  surrounded  by  the  caption 
"Self  Determination."  Splaying  out  into  the  iris  were 
small  scenes  of  figures:  one  labeled  "Shared  Economics" 
showed  farmworkers  with  a  Huelga  banner;  another 
captioned  "Collective  Work,"  depicting  kids  with  play 
blocks  called  for  "Childcare  Now" ;  a  scene  marked 
"Creativity,"  showed  children  building  sand  castles  and 
grown-ups  playing  music.  "Faith"  was  represented  by 
Native  Americans  sharing  a  peace  pipe;  "Purpose"  by 
bars  being  bent  open  around  a  rising  fist  and  rainbow; 
and  "Unity"  was  depicted  at  the  top  by  a  multiracial 


International  Hotel  Mural. 


154  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


demonstration  seeking  to  drive  Nixon  from  tiie  White 
House.  Although  the  mural  was  criticized  for  expressing 
a  unity  that  did  not  exist,  the  painters  responded  that  it 
like  the  other  captions  were  aspirations  felt  by  many  in 
the  Haight. 

The  district  had  been  since  the  fifties  one  of  the  first 
successful  interracial  communities  in  the  country.  Its 
mixed  population  became  even  more  varied  with  the 
coming  of  the  communitarian  and  psychedelic  era.  Al- 
though this  turned  sour  when  criminal  elements  took 
over  the  drug  scene,  some  young  people  stayed  and 
more,  though  in  lesser  numbers,  continued  to  move  in 
Sometimes  divided,  it  remained  a  highly  varied  commu- 
nity of  people  of  different  life-styles — young  people  on 
low  incomes,  blue-collar  families,  university  teachers, 
and  often  socially  conscious  professionals.  But  there  were 
also  many  unemployed.  Neighborhood  people  fought  an 
at  least  temporarily  successful  battle  against  efforts  of 
downtown  to  impose  urban  renewal  in  the  early  and 
mid-seventies. 

In  1974  the  young  women  artists,  now  joined  by 
Selma  Brown,  Arch  Williams,  and  Thomas  Kunz,  re- 
turned to  the  Rainbow  People  that  some  of  them  had 
worked  on  in  1972  for  a  peace  demonstration  and  re- 
painted it  because  it  had  deteriorated  badly.  They  also 
modified  the  imagery.  They  preserved  the  march,  but 
now  had  it  led  by  the  San  Francisco  Mime  Troupe,  and 


Miranda  Bergman,  Jane  Norling,  and  Peggy  Tucker 
(Haight  Ashbury  Muralists):  Unity,  1973,  San  Fran- 
cisco. 

the  banners  carried  aloft  read  "Honor  the  Vietnamese 
Peace  Treaty,"  "Health  Care  Is  A  Right  Not  A 
Privilege,"  "Women  Hold  Up  Half  The  Sky,"  "Workers 
Unite  For  Our  Rights,"  "Equal  Justice,"  and  "Rent 
Control."  There  was  also  a  Puerto  Rican  flag  with 
Liberacion  inscribed  above  it.  In  the  distance  a  large  banner 
marked  "People's  Cultural  Center"  flew  over  a  theater 
that  residents  were  trying  to  secure  through  the 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program.  The  issues  may  have 
changed  but  the  front  rank  still  carried  "Unity  In  Our 
Community."  Personalities  also  changed:  Ford  and  Rocke- 
feller's faces  joined  Nixon's  on  the  octopus  that  local 
people  were  wrestling  with.  At  the  other  side,  residents 
were  now  shown  tending  a  common  garden  rather  than 
relaxing  in  the  park.  At  the  dedication  of  the  renewed 
work,  the  painters  said: 

This  mural  is  about  our  community.  It's  about  the 
strength  and  power  of  people  of  all  different  colors  and 
cultures  working  together  to  break  the  economic  and 
military  grip  that  the  ruling  class  has  over  the  world 
and  our  community.  We  want  to  celebrate  in  our 
mural  painting  the  real  life  forces  within  us  that  keep 
us  struggling  to  overcome  the  division  of  racism,  class 
and  sexism.''^ 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  155 


Miranda  Bergman,  Selma  Brown,  Thomas  Kunz,  Jane 
Norling,  and  Arch  Williams  (Haight  Ashbury  Mural- 
ists):  Rainbow  People,  1974,  San  Francisco. 


The  mural's  connecting  of  issues  and  its  analysis  of  them 
was  shared  by  many  muralists  elsewhere  around  the 
country.  While  this  point  of  views;nay  not  have  been  held 
by  a  majority  of  Haight  residents,  they  were  tolerant  and 
issue-wise  and  could  handle  the  mural  at  least  as  a 
stimulus  to  discussion. 

During  1975  a  new  source  of  funding  for  murals  was 
developed  through  the  pioneering  work  of  two  San  Fran- 
ciscans who  pressed  for  the  application  of  the  Com- 
prehensive Employment  and  Training  Act  to  artists. 
CETA  had  been  passed  by  Congress  two  years  before  as 
an  on-the-job  training  program  to  prepare  workers  for 
permanent  positions  in  the  private  sector,  but,  as  a  result 
of  the  recession  of  1974/75,  it  was  extended  to  provide 
public-service  employment  to  the  jobless.  It  was  mainly 
in  this  latter  capacity  that  it  was  adapted  to  the  needs  of 
artists.  As  a  group  they  had  not  been  foreseen  as 
beneficiaries  by  Congress,  and  it  was  the  research  of 
Rene  Yaiiez  of  the  Galeria  de  la  Raza  with  the  later 
assistance  of  John  Kreidler,  who  was  then  working  with 
San  Francisco's  Neighborhood  Arts  Program,  that  dem- 
onstrated that  federal  manpower  funds  could  be  used  for 
artists.  Yafiez  already  in  1971  had  secured  federal  money 
from  STEP  (Supplemental  Training  and  Employment 
Program)  for  the  doing  of  the  first  Raza  murals  in  the 
city. 

One  of  the  first  uses  of  CETA  funding  in  San  Francisco 
was  in  conjunction  with  the  local  housing  authority. 
CETA  artists  were  assigned  to  public  housing  in  differ- 
ent ethnic  areas  to  do  murals  like  those  that  had  been 


under  way  since  1973  in  the  projects  of  East  Los  Angeles. 
One  of  the  important  features  of  the  San  Francisco 
undertaking  was  that  it  resulted  in  professional  artists 
drawing  untrained  residents  on  a  large  scale  into  the 
creating  of  murals.  At  Bernal  Heights  housing  in  the 
Mission  District,  Susan  Cervantes,  Patricia  Rodriguez, 
and  Graciela  Carrillo  discussed  designs  for  the  outdoor 
walls  with  tenants  in  public  meetings.  A  woman  resident 
worked  out  the  composition  of  one  by  herself,  while 
children  drew  designs  for  another  that  the  artists  trans- 
ferred to  the  higher  sections  while  the  kids  painted 
directly  on  the  lower  area.  The  walls  included  motifs 
from  Raza  and  Black  ethnic  heritage  as  well  as  a  whole 
range  of  children's  imaginings.  At  Valencia  Gardens  at 
the  other  end  of  the  .Mission,  Jack  Frost  painted  a  pair  of 
hot-air  balloons  with  a  farm-worker  eagle  on  one  and  a 
.Mexican  flag  on  the  other  floating  over  a  Photo-Realist 
canyon.  And  on  a  nearby  wall  George  .Mead  did  a  Tower 
of  Power  depicting  a  cone  made  up  of  community  people 
projecting  toward  you  from  the  wall.  They  also  did  a 
series  of  Afro-American  portraits. 

Meanwhile  the  dearth  of  expression  by  the  Black 
community  in  the  Fillmore  was  finally  relieved  in  1975 
by  CETA  funding  when  a  belt  of  murals  were  done  by 
ten-to-twelve-year-olds  along  the  base  of  another  housing 
project.  Under  the  guidance  of  Caleb  Williams  and 
Horace  Washington,  the  children  painted  scenes  of  Afri- 
can villagers  and  a  dragon-headed  fishing  boat. 

At  the  same  time  CETA  also  made  possible  murals  at  a 
project  largely  occupied  by  Asian-  and  Black  Americans 
near  Fisherman's  Wharf.  There  Carol  Nast,  Perci  Ches- 
ter, and  Pamela  Remkowicz  did  a  three-story  wall  de- 
picting a  nude  dark-skinned  girl  playing  a  horn  that 
charms  a  serpent  and  a  whole  lush  jungle,  which  borrows 


156  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Perci  Chester,  Carol  \ast,  and  Pamela  Remkowicz: 
Untitled,  1975,  public  housing.  Fisherman's  Wharf,  San 
Francisco. 


from  The  Dream  of  Henri  Rousseau.  This  work  encour- 
aged young  and  adult  residents  to  embellish  other  walls 
with  similarly  romantic  fantasies,  as  well  as  a  scene  of  a 
basketball  game  that  ingeniously  uses  decorative  port- 
holes as  balls. 

With  this  start  in  San  Francisco,  CETA  funding  was 
rapidly  adopted  by  muralists  in  cities  throughout  the 
country. 


San  Jose 

With  more  than  half  a  million  people  San  Jose  in  the 
mid-seventies  was  the  fastest-growing  city  in  the  United 


States,  but  it  was  paving  over  some  of  the  deepest,  most 
fertile  topsoil  in  the  world.  Once  prosperous  orchard 
country,  it  had  become  with  the  boom  that  began  during 
World  War  II  a  center  of  aircraft,  electronics,  the  manu- 
facture of  business  and  food  machines,  then  microcircuit 
equipment.  The  Santa  Clara  Valley  was  by  now  better 
known  as  "Silicon  Valley."  Its  large  Chicano  population 
dated  from  the  time  when  agriculture  and  canneries 
absorbed  local  life,  but  more  people  of  Mexican  heritage 
continued  to  come,  some  displaced  by  agribusiness 
elsewhere.  And  increasingly  engineers,  mostly  Anglo, 
arrived.  Chicanos  had  relatively  little  share  in  the 
economic  growth,  although  some  were  hired  to  do  the 
unskilled,  low-paid  labor  in  the  new  plants.  .Most  re- 
mained confined  to  the  barrios  near  downtown  and  on 
the  East  Side.  At  the  same  time  as  they  were  pioneering 
the  state's  bilingual  program  in  public  schools,  they  were 
turning  to  murals  to  press  for  additional  change  and 
affirm  their  ethnic  identity. 

Perhaps  the  first  work  in  San  Jose  was  the  frieze 
painted  over  a  neighborhood  legal-aid  office  by 
Malaquias  Montoya  in  1972  in  which  a  brawny,  bare- 
chested  man  plunged  forward  like  the  female  New  De- 
mocracy of  Siqueiros.  In  one  hand  he  bore  a  book  with  the 
farm  workers'  black  eagle  on  its  cover,  while  the  other 
was  a  fist  of  faces.  With  these  symbols  of  Raza  organiz- 
ing, he  seemed  to  persuade  armed  guerrillas  at  the  edges 
to  await  these  peaceful  means  to  improve  the  condition  of 
local  people. 

During  the  following  years,  increasing  numbers  of 
murals  appeared  in  the  barrios,  and  in  1974  at  the 
Washington  Elementary  School  a  major  project  was  un- 
dertaken by  staff,  students  and  parents,  most  of  whom 
were  Chicano.  Already  three  years  earlier  an  innovative 
open  classroom  building  was  completed  which  had  in- 
volved teachers  and  parents  in  the  design  process.  One 
result  was  the  Aztec  motifs  molded  into  the  concrete 
walls.  These  made  the  building  which  was  the  site  of 
after-school  community  activities  that  much  more  a  part 
of  the  barrio.  Now  with  the  help  of  artist  Bill  Wagner 
and  the  donation  of  tiles  by  a  local  firm,  the  parents  laid 
in  a  large  Aztec  calendar  as  the  pavement  of  the  school 
patio  and  above  it  a  twenty-foot-high  mosaic  Quetzal- 
coatl  mural  with  flanking  serpent  heads.  On  weekends  as 
many  as  one  hundred  parents  would  turn  out  to  work 
with  regular  and  broken  tiles  that  had  the  robustness  and 
color  of  ancient  murals.  During  the  following  years  addi- 
tional mosaic  murals  and  pavements  were  constructed  with 
increasing  participation  of  the  children  using  the  school's 
new  kiln  to  make  their  own  tiles.  There  was  a  Bicenten- 
nial Plaza  with  portraits  and  scenes  of  local  history,  then 
two  more  plazas  with  imagery  of  the  carnival  and  solar 
system.  Wagner  added  a  tile  mural  with  the  faces  of  all 
the  presidents  and  spaces  for  more.  Although  the  whole 
student  body  had  been  designated  "educationally  disad- 
vantaged," teachers  became  convinced  the  children  were 
artistically  gifted.  But  funding  cutbacks  in  the  later 
seventies  brought  the  mural  work  to  an  end. 


Bill  Wagner,  director,  students,  parents,  and  staff:  Un- 
titled, 1974,  Washington  Elementary  School,  San  Jose. 


Regelio  Duarte:  Untitled,  1974,  Chaparral  Supermarket, 
San  Jose. 


158  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

In  1974  nineteen-year-old  Regelio  Duarte  from  Los 
Angeles  suddenly  appeared  in  San  Jose  and  offered  to 
paint  without  a  fee  murals  at  the  Chaparral  Supermarket 
and  the  Mexican-American  Graduate  Studies  building  at 
the  State  University.  On  a  big  wall  of  the  grocery  facing 
its  parking  lot,  he  created  an  exuberant  mix  of  images 
from  Mexican  history  and  culture  that  is  monumental. 
There  are  portraits  of  Father  Hidalgo  and  Zapata,  an- 
cient indios  and  a  dreamy  Chicana  with  a  rose,  and  they 
are  enveloped  by  a  sacred  pyramid,  a  guitar-playing 
calavera,  the  Virgin  of  Guadalupe,  bits  of  landscape,  and 
scenes  of  struggle.  Done  in  spray  paint,  the  wall  has  the 
feel  of  the  street,  while  the  details  are  rooted  in  the 
.Mexican  heritage.  The  composition  as  well,  while  owing 
something  to  modern  photomontage,  harks  back  to  the 
packed  figuration  of  many  Mexican  murals  and  yet 
further  to  the  dense  luxuriance  of  Spanish  Colonial  and 
indio  walls  and  ceilings.  Duarte  shares  his  images  and 
design  with  other  Chicano  muralists  who  borrowed  their 
details  from  the  past  and  were  therefore  also  likely  to 
have  been  affected  by  old  forms  of  composition. 

At  San  Jose  State  Duarte  airbrushed  a  two-story  wall 
of  a  formerly  sedate  Victorian  frame  house  with  a 
proudly  naked  indio  raising  a  torch  in  one  hand  and 
touching  off  a  sunlike  explosion  with  the  other  as  stars 
sparkle  about  his  head.  Standing  astride  the  Mexican 
eagle  and  a  large  opened  book  the  pages  of  which  are  like 
its  wings,  the  indio  seems  to  exult  in  the  prospect  of  Raza 
education.  His  corazdn  expressed  not  only  by  the  heart 
painted  on  his  chest  but  by  his  total  spiritedness,  is 
strong  enough  to  make  any  "incorrectness"  of  drawing 
negligible.  In  a  nearby  panel  Duarte  painted  in  varied 
colors  what  appear  to  be  barrio  graffiti,  but  they  read 
"Benito  Juarez,"  "Emiliano  Zapata,"  "Pancho  Villa," 
"Cuauhtemoc,"  "Los  Batos  Locos"  (street  dudes),  "San 


w 


'S., 


ES  S 


Regelio    Duarte:    Untitled,    1974,    Mexican-American 
Graduate  Studies  building,  San  Jose  State  University. 


Regelio  Duarte:  Detail  of  mural,  San  Jose  State. 


RK1-*K 


Jo,"  "Chicano  Power,"  "La  Raza,"  and  "This  is  Aztlan." 
Some  authorities  at  San  Jose  State  were  embarrassed  by 
the  brash,  unacademic  art,  but  it  became  a  reminder  of 
the  barrio  and  its  cultural  vitality  on  a  campus  that  was 
training  the  personnel  of  Silicon  Valley. 

In  1975  forty-six  students  and  two  professors  at  the 
campus  began  a  Bicentennial  mural,  which  will  be  de- 
scribed in  detail  later. 

San  Diego 

On  Chicano  Park  Day,  1973,  the  third  anniversary  of 
the  takeover,  three  hundred  local  people  and  Raza  artists 
from  around  the  county  began  painting  the  gray  cement 
of  the  Coronado  Bridge  that  still  hung  oppressively  over 
the  barrio,  an  undertaking  that  was  to  continue  for  the 
rest  of  the  decade.  Their  intention  was  to  make  the 
columns  and  abutments  expressions  of  their  new  energy. 
Funds  had  been  raised  by  the  Centro  Cultural,  which 
since  1972  was  directed  by  Victor  Ochoa.  Fifty  dollars 
was  donated  by  La  Hermandad  Mexicana,  a  Barrio 
Logan  storefront  concerned  with  strengthening  Chicano 
participation  in  labor  unions.  That  first  day  of  painting  is 
remembered  by  locals  as  "an  attack"  on  two  retaining 
walls  on  either  side  of  Logan  Avenue.  On  one,  Quetzal- 
coatl  rises  up  against  an  image  of  the  bridge.  (Later  his 
head  was  changed  to  the  three  faces  of  the  mestizo  race 
blazing  like  the  sun.)  Close  by  are  crowded  depictions  of 
a  Mexican   village  street  and  large  faces  of  a   Native 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  159 

American  and  campesino.  A  rush  of  symbols  envelops  a 
central  pyramid;  there  are  zcorazon,  anindio  swastika,  the 
jaguar  of  Chichen  Itza,  a  Catholic  rose,  a  Chinese  yin  and 
yang,  a  farm  workers'  thunderbird,  and  a  calavera.  The 
symbols  recall  graffiti,  but  they  are  on  their  way  to 
becoming  a  narrative  scene.  Among  the  artists  who 
worked  on  the  abutment  were  Ochoa,  Guillermo 
Aranda,  Salvador  "Queso"  Torres,  .Mario  "Torero" 
Acevedo,  Fomas  "Coyote"  Castcfieda,  Arturo  Roman, 
and  "Crazy  Lion"  Cervantes. 

On  the  retaining  wall  across  the  street  people  again 
began  doing  their  individual  images  with  no  overall  plan. 
But  in  the  days  that  followed  some  of  the  artists  tried  to 
pull  it  together.  These  included  Aranda,  Ochoa,  Roman, 
Ernesto  "Neto"  de  Paul,  Abran  Quevedo,  and  Sal 
BaFajas.  When  it  was  completed,  the  background  was 
painted  in  tones  of  blue  from  which  there  advances  a 
wedge  of  barrio  people  in  brilliant  reds  and  yellows. 
Their  faces  seem  real  because  they  derive  from  a  news- 
paper photo.  Carrying  their  children,  farm  workers' 
banners,  and  a  Virgin  of  Guadalupe,  they  come  down  at 
you  out  of  California  croplands  where  in  the  distance 
campesinos  are  at  work.  An  arc  of  faces  also  looms  over- 
head with  Cesar  Chavez  in  the  center  and  an  ancient 
Olmec  head  below.  Strung  out  across  the  sky  to  the  right 
are  the  paler  portraits  of  the  leaders  of  the  Mexican 
Independence  and  Revolutionary  movements.  To  the  left 
stretch  the  faces  of  Che  Guevara  and  modern  Latino 
artists — Orozco,  Siqueiros,  and  Picasso,  joined  by  rock 


160  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Chicano  residents  and  artists  of  San  Diego:   Untitled, 
1973,  Coronado  Bridge  abutment ,  Chicano  Park. 


star  Santana  and  an  unnamed  child — a  promise  of  future 
Chicano  artists.  Below  them  is  a  protest  of  the  discrimi- 
natory hiring  practices  of  Coors  Beer.  Then  as  the  re- 
taining wall  tapers  there  is  a  montage  of  pre-Columbian 
scenes  and  finally  a  hellish  conflagration  oicalaveras  in  the 
helmets  of  conquistadores,  local  police  and  astronauts. 

In  1974  artists  and  residents  began  painting  additional 
abutments  and  moved  on  to  the  pylons.  On  a  low  wall 
the  school  children  of  Lowell  Elementary  School  were 
assisted  by  Ochoa  in  doing  a  graffiti  mural  that  is  a  rich 
mix  of  thunderbirds,  swastikas,  and  frets,  a  Pachuco 
cross,  an  ancient  indio  and  the  names  of  the  young  artists. 
About  this  time  .Mario  "Torero"  Acevedo  painted  the 
Cosmic  Clowns,  which  seemed  to  be  a  celebration  of  drugs, 
delighting  some  viewers  and  troubling  others. 

.Meanwhile  during  the  summer  of  1974,  Los  Toltecas 
began  painting  the  exterior  of  the  Centro  Cultural  in 
Balboa  Park  with  a  bold  composition  in  varied  styles 
which  in  time  encompassed  the  walls.  There  were  a  great 
ear  of  maiz,  a  pyramid,  the  legendary  Aztec  eagle 
struggling  with  the  serpent,  an  indio  woman  soaring 
among  the  stars,  a  calavera  in  monk's  robes  clutching  a 
dagger  and  cross,  an  angel  garbed  in  a  rainbow  trying  to 
revive  a  despondent  skeleton,  a  family  welcoming  people 
at  the  entrance.  It  was  painted  by  .Mario  Aguilar,  Guil- 
lermo  Aranda,  Sal  Barajas,  Arturo  Roman,  Neto  del  Sol, 
David  Avalos,  Antonio  de  Hermosio,  Samuel  Llamas, 
and  Antonia  Perez.  However,  the  black-robed  calavera 
and  bare-breasted  woman  that  faced  the  Naval  Hospital 


Chicano  artists  and  residents:  Untitled  (detail),  1973, 
bridge  abutment,  Chicano  Park. 


across  the  street  produced  protests.  The  artists  saw  this 
as  another  instance  of  racism,  since  there  were  nudes 
aplenty  in  the  municipal  art  gallery  nearby  and  the 
calavera  was  a  cultural  symbol  that  Anglos  should  have 
understood.  The  skeleton  was  finally  painted  out. 

Torres  and  other  artists  were  now  talking  about  an 
enormous  project — painting  all  1 50  pylons,  some  of  them 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  161 
seventy  feet  high,  that  led  down  to  the  bay.  The  Chicano 
Park  Steering  Committee  decided  to  invite  Raza  painters 
from  around  the  state  to  help.  The  Grupo  de  Santa  Ana 
painted  sheaves  of  maiz  springing  from  a  pyramid,  while 
a  great  womblike  sun  above  carries  an  embryo.  At  the 
base  of  the  pylon  next  to  it  Los  Ninos  del  Mundo,  a 
group  ot  young  artists  directed  by  Charles  Felix,  who 


Left:  Grupo  de  Santa  Ana  and,  right:  Los  Ninos  del 
Mundo,  directed  by  C.  W.  Felix;  background:  left;  Jose 
Montoya  and  right:  Juanishi  Orosco  (both  Rebel  Chicano 
Art  Front):  All  untitled,  1975,  Chicano  Park. 


Mario  Aguilar,  Guillermo  Aranda,  Sal  Barajas,  Arturo 
Roman,  Neto  del  Sol,  David  Avolos,  Antonio  de  Her- 
mosio,  Samuel  Llamas,  and  Antonia  Perez  (Los  Toltecas 
en  Aztldn):  Untitled,  1974,  Centra  Cultural  de  la  Raza, 
Balboa  Park,  San  Diego. 


162  /  COMMUNITY  MUR  AI  S 


were  doing  murals  at  Los  Angeles's  Estrada  Courts, 
depicted  a  huge  mushroom  suggesting  either  drug  abuse 
or  the  ancient  indio  culture  that  depended  on  hallucino- 
gens. From  it  an  arrow  points  upward  to  books  and  the 
rediscovery  of  Raza  culture  as  its  patron  QuetzalcoatI 
divides  into  two  big  heads.  Another  pylon  painted  by  a 
Los  Angeles  artist  connects  the  overthrow  of  the  demo- 
cratic government  of  Chile  with  a  police  attack  on  pro- 
testing marchers  in  the  United  States  carrying  placards 
marked  "Allende"  and  "Justicia."  In  1975  members  of  the 
Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front  came  down  from  Sacramento  to 
paint  additional  columns,  which  will  be  described 
shortly. 

One  of  the  particularly  strong  works  done  by  a  local 
artist  was  Tomas  "Coyote"  Casteneda's  homage  to  farm 
workers.  On  a  squat  pylon  he  showed  two  couples  facing 
each  other.  Joining  them  is  an  indio  braid  of  blood  vessels 
that  passes  through  a  corazdn,  symbolizing  the  brother- 
hood and  sisterhood  of  La  Raza. 

As  Torres  says,  the  murals  of  Chicano  Park  are  means 
of  "transforming  the  bridge  into  a  work  of  art."  The 
bridge  in  fact  does  have  its  own  beauty.  Torres  himself 
describes  the  succession  of  supporting  arches  under  the 
main  span  as  portales  (porticos).  Walking  among  them 
you  have  the  illusion  of  being  inside  an  uncompleted 
cathedral.  The  intention  of  the  local  artists  to  do  murals 
on  them  all  would  create  a  new  kind  of  community 
gathering  place.  It  would  humanize  and  make  "appropri- 
ate" the  impersonal  technology.  The  murals  of  Chicano 
Park  are  an  expression  of  residents'  will  to  preserve  their 
attachment  to  their  barrio   by   reviving  their  culture. 


Thomas  ''Coyote"  Castaneda:  Untitled,  1975,  Chicano 
Park. 


Local  people  had  sold  their  blood  to  a  blood  bank  to  raise 
funds  for  paint  and  brushes.  The  murals  were  also  an 
assertion  of  the  solidarity  of  Raza  people  of  the  county 
and  state. 

In  1975  Victor  Ochoa  became  director  of  art  and 
recreation  in  the  park  and  shared  offices  with  the  Chicano 
Federation  in  the  neighborhood  center  alongside  the 
pylons.  The  park  is  a  place  where  kids  play,  local  work- 
ing people  eat  their  lunch  and  on  weekends  come  to 
picnic.  Annually  April  22,  the  anniversary  of  the  day 
people  stood  off  the  police  and  bulldozers,  is  celebrated 
with  speeches,  music,  and  feasting.  At  the  1977  fiesta 
three  couples  thought  it  was  the  right  occasion  and  place 
to  be  married.*  To  carry  out  the  objectives  that  the  artists 
and  activists  had  been  working  on,  residents  throughout 
the  seventies  were  trying  to  make  their  Barrio  Logan 
Planning  Association  the  official  planning  agency  for  the 
area.  It  had  received  official  recognition,  but  to  sustain  its 
authority  was  an  ongoing  struggle.  It  had  drawn  up  a 
local  master  plan  (rendered  by  Ochoa)  and  was  working 
with  the  City  Council  for  enforcement. 

More  than  anything  else  the  murals  had  contributed  to 
the  survival  of  Barrio  Logan.  They  brought  people  to- 
gether in  shared  work  when  the  community  seemed 
doomed  to  dispersion.  They  became  the  visible  symbols 
of  their  collective  identity  and  proof  of  their  ability  to 
prevail  against  the  establishment.  The  murals  by  them- 
selves of  course  could  not  save  the  barrio.  At  mid-decade 
drugs  continued  to  be  pushed  in  Chicano  Park,  and  there 
were  killings.  The  barrio  continued  to  be  inundated  by 
junkyards;  local  shops  were  not  flourishing;  and  un- 
employment ran  high.  But  the  murals  provided  a  daily 
reminder  to  residents  and  Chicanos  elsewhere  in  the 
county  of  their  life  in  common  and  the  need  to  struggle 
for  it  if  it  was  to  continue.  As  long  asthere  were  the  will 


and  means  to  keep  adding  new  murals,  the  community 
was  intact. 

Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front  (Royal  Chicqno  Air  Force) 

The  RCAF  had  done  its  first  wall  art  in  Sacramento  in 
1968,  and  this  work  was  almost  the  only  one  that  re- 
mained of  its  early  murals  a  decade  later,  although  it  was 
responsible  for  more  than  twenty-five  during  these  ten 
years.  Most  had  been  painted  out  when  the  ownership  of 
buildings  changed.  Esteban  Villa's  bringing  of  his  stu- 
dents from  Sacramento  State  College  to  paint  in  the 
barrio  set  the  pattern  for  the  subsequent  activities  of  the 
teachers  and  students  who  continually  expanded  the 
RCAF's  community  involvement.  In  1970  one  of  them. 
Villa's  friend  from  college  days,  Jose  Montoya,  organized 
an  "Art  in  the  Barrios"  program  at  Sac  State  with  the 
intention  of  allowing  students  to  do  accredited  course 
work  in  the  community.  They  began  by  doing  silk- 
screen  posters  for  demonstrations  against  racism  in  the 
schools,  and  serigraphy  was  to  remain  one  of  their  basic 
media  when  they  turned  to  announcements  for  fiestas, 
weddings,  and  public  meetings.  Montoya  himself  had 
been  raised  in  the  mountains  above  Albuquerque  where 


\.!mndo   Cid:    Untitled,    1973,   La  Raza  Bookstore, 
'fl  amento. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  163 

Reies  Tijerina  later  sought  to  revive  the  traditional  com- 
munal village  life.  .Montoya  says  his  mother  was  a 
"primitive  artist"  and  his  father  ran  contraband,  for 
which  he  served  two  years  in  Leavenworth.  .Montoya 
himself  worked  in  the  fields,  served  on  a  minesweeper  off 
Korea  and  afterward  studied  art.  He  went  on  to  teach  in 
elementary  schools  in  California's  Central  Valley  and 
participated  in  the  farm  workers'  1966  pilgrimage  to 
Sacramento  where  he  acted  as  one  of  their  spokespersons. 
He  did  his  master's  work  at  Sac  State  and  was  teaching 
there  when  he  joined  with  Villa  and  others  to  organize 
the  RCAF  in  1968. 

In  1972  about  twenty  of  them  decided  to  broaden  their 
activities  and  established  a  public-service  corporation, 
the  Centro  de  Artistas  Chicanos,  which  became  the  focus 
of  Chicano  cultural  activities  in  the  city.  They  saw 
culture  as  a  crucial  means  to  the  survival  of  the  Raza 
community  if  it  was  not  to  be  ground  under  by  racism 
and  economic  exploitation.  Besides  murals  and  silk- 
screening,  there  were  classes  for  children,  teenagers,  and 
seniors  in  weaving,  ceramics,  beadwork,  and  the  prepara- 
tion of  costumes  and  dances  for  the  .Mexican  national 
holidays  and  indio  ceremonies  that  they  revived.  There 
were  Independence  Day,  the  Cinco  de  Mayo,  the  Dia  de  Los 
Muertos,  Dia  de  Las  Madres,  Fiesta  de  Maiz,  and  Fiesta  de 
Colores.  The  last  was  a  spring  rite  for  Tlaloc,  the  Aztec 
god  of  rain.  They  operated  a  La  Raza  Book  Store  and  a 
free  Breakfast  for  Ninos  program  for  low-income  chil- 
dren of  the  area.  On  a  trip  to  Seattle  in  1974  they  burned 
out  the  engine  of  their  van  and  were  helped  by  an 
American  Indian  .Movement  group  that  ran  an  automo- 
tive co-op.  When  they  returned,  they  borrowed  the  idea 
and  created  the  Aeronaves  de  Aztldn  in  Sacramento.  This 
"Airships"  was  a  car-repair  co-op  to  which  members  paid 
a  small  monthly  fee  and  received  regular  auto  care.  Later 
it  would  be  embellished. 

One  of  the  muralists  associated  with  the  RCAF  and 
the  Centro  was  Armando  Cid,  a  former  student  of  Villa 
and  Montoya,  who  in  1973  painted  the  facade  of  the 
bookstore  and  did  a  handsome  mosaic  based  on  indio 
patterns  for  the  Zapata  Park  public  housing.  But  the 
largest  body  of  the  RCAF's  work  of  this  period  that 
survives  are  the  pylons  they  painted  in  nine  days  at 
Chicano  Park  in  San  Diego  in  1975.  The  artists  had  just 
come  from  a  United  Farm  Workers'  convention  where 
they  had  served  as  security,  and  they  say  that  the  experi- 
ence affected  what  they  painted  in  San  Diego.  On  one 
of  the  columns  Montoya  created  a  very  impressive  image 
of  a  farm  worker  family  with  the  father  spreading  his 
arms  cruciform  across  the  pylon  capital,  suggesting 
both  sacrifice  and  an  embrace  of  the  whole  park  and 
viewers.  Beneath  him  are  his  wife  in  overalls  and  a  child 
holding  a  book  of  laws,  and  below  him  is  the  thick  stump 
of  a  grapevine.  The  composition  recalls  images  of  the 
Holy  Family  and  Mary's  mother,  each  encompassing  the 
other,  but  equally  important  is  the  connection  of  the 
family  to  the  land  through  the  vine.  This  veneration  of 


164  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


the  earth  and  the  human  relation  to  it  was  the  central 
tenet  of  the  Sacramento  muraiists,  v\  hose  religious  feel- 
ings were  closer  to  those  of  the  indios  than  to  Christianity. 

This  is  made  explicit  in  the  pylon  next  to  Montoya's, 
which  was  painted  by  his  son-in-law,  Juanishi  Orosco. 
(The  "-ishi"  part  of  his  name,  which  refers  to  the  "last 
California  Indian,"  was  once  jokingly  added  by  Ricardo 
Favela,  the  director  of  the  Centro,  because  of  Orosco's 
absorption  with  Native  American  lore,  and  the  name 
stuck.)  The  mural  shows  a  naked  couple  rising  from  a 
stalk  oimaiz  and  a  cultivated  field  that  correspond  to  the 
vine  in  the  other  column.  The  bodies  twist  like  an  ollin, 
an  indio  knot  that  symbolizes  movement  and  unity.  (The 
painters  also  see  a  connection  of  this  with  the  Chinese  yin 
and  yang.)  Between  the  two  figures  is  a  "god's  eye"  of  the 
Huichol  indios.  Orosco  says  that  the  cross  overhead  is  not 
Christian  but  formed  by  the  intersection  of  farm  workers' 
thunderbirds  and  also  suggests  the  vortex  of  a  pyramid 
seen  from  above. 

This  mural  in  particular  exhibits  the  indio  spiritualism 
that  occupies  the  RCAF.  Montoya  says  that  they  began 
turning  to  it  in  1970  especially  after  the  shootout  of 
Blacks  and  Chicanos  in  Sacramento  in  a  dispute  over 
poverty  funds  and  the  attack  of  police  on  peaceful  civil- 
ians at  the  Chicano  Moratorium  in  Los  Angeles.  While 
many  of  them  had  previously  supported  the  militant 
tactics  of  Brown  Power,  the  sight  of  children  being 
separated  from  their  parents  as  police  lobbed  tear-gas 
grenades  among  them  compelled  them  to  reassess  their 
strategy.  They  sought  inner  strength  by  searching 
through  their  indio  heritage,  and  art  came  to  be  their 
"medicine,"  their  "healing  power"  and  "weapon"  rather 
than  direct  confrontation.  They  read  Frank  Waters's 
Mexico  Mystique  and  Carlos  Castaneda's  Teachings  of  Don 
Juan.  They  studied  indio  ceremonies  and  attempted  to 
re-create  them,  including  peyote  rites.  They  placed  great 
confidence  in  the  .Mayan  ritual  of  purification  in  sweat 
lodges,  where  they  submitted  themselves  to  extremely 
hot  steam  which  only  special  methods  of  breathing  made 
it  possible  to  endure.  People  of  all  ages  joined  together  in 
these  rites  and  dances,  which  deepened  their  bonds  to  each 
other  and  the  land.  Their  Indianism  taught  them  collec- 
tive work  that  reinforced  the  ecological  and  .Marxist 
inclinations  of  some  members.  .Montoya  says  that  while 
others  talked  about  socialism,  they  had  found  a  way  to  it 
through  their  heritage.  On  another  occasion  Ricardo 
Favela  said  they  sought  to  treat  their  ordinary  work  as 
art.  In  general,  they  attempted  to  link  up  their  sense  of 
the  sacredness  of  human  life  and  the  land  with  their 
politics,  economics,  and  art. 

This  provided  the  collective  stamina  to  continue  to 
fight  their  everyday  battles,  such  as  the  city  police  chief's 
effort  to  build  a  Crime  Suppression  Unit  and  investigate 
street  gangs.  They  campaigned  against  gentrification  and 
sought  to  persuade  people  not  to  sell  their  homes  to 
speculators  or  the  redevelopment  agency,  which  would 
erode  barrio  life.  They  lobbied  successfully  to  get  Sac- 


Jose  Montoya  (RCAF): 
San  Diego. 


Untitled,  1975,  Chicano  Pa 


ramento  to  adopt  an  ordinance  that  would  require  the 
construction  budgets  of  all  public  buildings  to  set  aside 
two  percent  for  art.  And  they  supported  the  efforts  of 
farm  and  cannery  workers  to  organize. 

On  the  other  side  of  the  pylon  where  Orosco  painted  the 
couple  rising  from  a  field,  Esteban  Villa  depicted  a  giant 
Mujer  Cosmica,  inspired,  he  says,  by  the  idea  that 
"women  hold  up  half  the  sky."  Her  body  is  tattooed,  he 
explains,  with  the  names  and  images  important  to 
him — Che,  Allende,  Tio  Ho  (Uncle  Ho  Chi  Minh),  and 
his  own  father,  Antonio.  There  is  also  a  sickle  with  the 
hammer  missing  that  suggests  a  question  mark,  which 
reflects  Villa's  mixed  feelings  about  Communism.  The 
C/S,  an  abbreviation  of  Con  Safos,  is  a  kind  of  protective 
charm  that  graffitists  use  to  warn  viewers  that  any  harm 
to  the  inscription  will  return  to  the  offender. 

During  the  RCAF's  brief  stay  in  San  Diego,  one  of 
their  number,  Rosalinda  Balaciosos,  returned  from  the 
International  Women's  Conference  in  Mexico  City  and 
inspired  her  fellow  artists  Antonia  Mendoza  and  Celia 
Rodriguez  to  join  her  in  doing  a  mural  about  women 


Juanishi  Orosco  (RCAF):  Untitled,  1975,  Chicano  Park. 


around  the  world.  The  pylon  shows  representative 
figures  from  different  countries  and  at  the  bottom  two 
naked  women  playing  flutes.  The  genitals  of  one  are 
exposed,  and  the  whole  composition  is  a  lyrical  celebra- 
tion of  womanhood.  The  Chicana  artists  clearly  intended 
to  break  through  inhibitions  of  their  own  people  and  raise 
consciousness,  but  they  also  provoked  protest  from  the 
barrio.  There  was  some  resentment  that  the  mural  was 
done  by  a  group  of  nonresident  painters  who  imposed 
their  imagery  and  could  pick  up  and  go.  What  is  unique 
about  this  mural  is  that  women  treated  the  female  body 
with  the  pride  and  forthrightness  with  which  previously 
only  male  artists  had  depicted  the  human  body.  One  of 
the  recurring  characteristics  in  the  murals  of  Chicanos 
had  been  their  affirmation  of  their  flesh,  their  strength 
and  sexuality,  but  almost  exclusively  in  the  works  of 
men.  The  nearly  naked  indio  was  a  frequent  motif. 
Esteban  Villa  in  his  first  mural  of  1968  had  used  naked 
female  and  male  figures  in  order  to  dramatize  the  struggle 
against  racism,  and  Ray  Patlan  in  Chicago  used  primarily 
male  figures  for  the  same  purpose.  Gilberto  Ramirez 
sought  to  convey  hope  by  rather  academic  nudes,  and 
Guillermo  Aranda  showed  an  alluring  nude  woman  es- 
caping the  monsters  of  the  military-industrial  machine. 
Here  at  Chicano  Park  Juanishi  Orosco  celebrated  male 
and  female  bodies  equally,  but  it  was  the  women  artists 
who  affirmed  themselves  with  a  confidence  for  the  first 
time  equal  to  men. 

On  the  adjoining  surface  they  added  a  commemoration 
of  Joan  Little,  the  Black  inmate  of  a  North  Carolina  jail 
who  had  killed  a  White  guard  who  had  sexually  abused 

Left:  Esteban  Villa:  La  Mujer  Cosmica;  right: 
Rosalinda  Balaciosos,  Antonia  Mendoza,  and  Celia  Rodri- 
guez: Women's  Mural,  both  RCAF,  1975,  Chicano 
Park. 


166  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

her.  This  mural  also  generated  some  local  irritation, 
because  as  one  local  Chicano  painter  put  it,  Joan  Little 
had  been  adopted  by  the  liberal  press,  while  Olga 
Talamante,  a  politically  active  Raza  woman  from 
California  who  was  being  tortured  at  the  same  time  in  an 
Argentine  prison,  was  neglected.  This  kind  of  comment 
reflects  the  raw  sensibilities  of  people  who  have  long  been 
victims  of  racism,  and  both  murals  illustrate  the  con- 
troversy that  muralists  are  willing  to  provoke  and  regard 
as  educative. 


After  the  completion  of  the  first  murals,  tenants 
formed  their  own  organization,  Residentes  Unidos,  and  re- 
quired that  the  murals  be  "positive."'^  While  it 
monitored  copyrights,  F"elix  oversaw  the  design  and 
placement  of  the  murals.  Between  1973  and  1978  over 
two  hundred  young  people  and  professional  artists  did 
nearly  sixty  murals,  and  Felix  planned  to  complete  the 
remaining  seventeen  end  walls.  These  were  linked  by 
low  brick  walls  around  the  lawns  that  were  also  vibrant 
with  indio  stepped  frets,  meanders,  and  plumed  serpents. 


Los  Angeles 

There  are  by  far  more  murals  in  Los  Angeles  than  any 
other  city  in  the  United  States.  In  1978  there  were  more 
than  one  thousand  throughout  the  city.**  Two  reasons  for 
their  number  are  the  Mexican  mural  tradition  and  the 
two  million  people  of  Mexican  descent  w  ho  live  there, 
which  makes  it  the  largest  population  of  that  heritage 
outside  Mexico  City.  Half  live  in  East  Los.  Probably  the 
largest  single  concentration  of  murals  in  the  country  is  at 
Estrada  Courts,  a  public  housing  project  for  two 
thousand  people  in  East  Los  facing  Olympic  Boulevard 
along  which  trucks  and  buses  roar.  Across  it  are  old 
factories  and  warehouses.  In  1973  unemployment, 
drugs,  vandalism,  and  teenage  gang  killings  were  com- 
mon. Charles  "Gato"  Felix,  who  was  building  a  national 
reputation  with  high-relief  sculpture  made  of  nails,  now 
decided  to  turn  his  attention  to  his  own  turf.'"  With 
Goez  Gallery  he  had  already  done  a  few  murals,  and 
there  was  the  example  of  wall  paintings  nearby  at  the 
Costello  Recreation  Center  that  Las  Vistas  Nuevas  had 
produced  a  few  years  before.  Felix  gathered  around  him 
local  young  people  and  Vietnam  veterans,  and  with  the 
permission  of  the  housing  authority  started  out  with  the 
intention  of  doing  no  more  than  three  murals  on  the  end 
walls  of  the  two-story  barrackslike  apartment  houses. 
But  the  undertaking  developed  momentum.  Although 
the  first  year  the  only  funding  was  eight  hundred  dollars 
for  paint  and  brushes,  they  did  seven  murals.  The  fire 
department  lent  ladders  and  scaffolds.  The  teenagers 
were  unpaid  at  first,  but  when  they  decided  to  go  on  to 
more  walls,  wages  from  the  Neighborhood  Youth  Corps 
were  secured,  and  Felix  was  paid  by  it  after  two  years  of 
volunteer  work.  Felix  was  joined  by  other  professional 
artists.  Some  painted  walls  by  themselves,  some  directed 
crews  of  young  people.  Adult  residents  were  suspicious 
at  first,  for  the  teenagers  who  were  now  painting  were 
often  the  same  gang  members  who  had  formerly  van- 
dalized Estrada.  It  was  not  until  after  the  first  six  months 
that  the  painters  were  offered  their  first  cup  of  coffee, 
says  Ismael  Pcreira,  an  Estrada  veteran  who  helped  get 
the  murals  going."  Each  summer  between  1975  and 
1979  PY-lix  worked  with  about  125  kids;  Los  Nifios  del 
.Vlundo  they  called  themselves.  Additional  funding  came 
from  his  lectures,  car  washes  run  by  Los  Nifios  and 
donations  of  individuals  and  companies,  like  Olympia 
Beer. 

Rosalinda  Balaciosos,  Antonia  Mendoza,  and  Celia  Rodri- 
guez: Untitled,  1975,  Chicano  Park. 


Manuel  Gonzalez:  Tlalbc,  1973,  Estrada  Courts,  East 
Los  Angeles. 


Alex  Maya:  Tribute  to  the  Farm  Workers,  1974, 
Estrada  Courts. 


He  hoped  to  see  all  this  art  presented  to  the  city  for  its 
bicentennial  in  1981  and  that  Los  Angeles  would  then 
maintain  it. 

Manuel  Gonzalez  did  one  of  the  first  murals  trans- 
forming a  sculpture  of  the  Aztec  rain  god  Tlaloc  into  an 
equally  large  painting.  Another  early  two-story  mural, 
Tribute  to  the  Farm  Workers  by  Alex  Maya,  shows  a 
variation  of  the  Marines  planting  the  stars  and  stripes  on 
Iwo  Jima.  Here  the  thunderbird  banner  is  being  raised 
over  cultivated  fields  by  campesinos,  a  soldier  of  Cortez 


and  an  indio  who  is  stepping  down  from  an  ancient 
pyramid  as  a  sunlike  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  radiates  light 
above  snow-capped  mountains. 

A  cartoonlike  mural  by  Robert  Chavez  on  two  adjoin- 
ing end  walls  depicts  the  festivities  of  the  Day  of  the 
Dead.  There  are  calaveras  playing  tricks,  fireworks,  bal- 
loons, a  flying  plumed  serpent,  masks,  a  pinata,  farm 
workers,  and  their  flag,  all  done  in  a  rollicking  way. 

In  the  style  of  popular  illustration  David  Botello's 
Dreams  of  Flight  pictures  a  boy  swinging  toward  you  on  a 


168  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Robert  Chavez,  director,  and  students  of  East  Los  Angeles 
College:  Fiesta,  1974,  Estrada  Courts. 


David  Botello:    Dreams   of  Flight,    1974,    Estrada 
Courts. 


hanging  tire,  another  with  a  model  plane,  Pegasus,  a 
winged  indio,  an  astronaut,  and  a  paper  airplane. 

Bathers  lounge  in  a  wall  by  Gil  Hernandez  and  their 
feet  project  from  the  surface  in  the  manner  of  Siqueiros, 
whose  face  is  there  as  well — a  copy  of  a  self-portrait  that 
shows  his  fingers  ripping  through  the  surface  of  his  own 
canvas.  Hernandez  like  other  artists  added  his  telephone 


number  to  his  signature.  Other  walls  offer  views  of  the 
wilderness  and  wild  animals.  One  is  an  abstract  super- 
graphic  in  the  earth  tones  of  the  Southwest,  and  yet 
others  offer  decorative  patterns  of  serpents,  flowers  and 
indio  masks.  There  is  also  an  ingenious  set  of  comparisons 
of  Lincoln  and  John  Kennedy  spelled  out  between  their 
portraits.  One  wall  shows  addicts  with  an  American  flag 


for  a  backdrop.  Another  is  a  memorial  for  a  "homeboy" 
who  was  killed  in  gang  warfare. 

Felix,  who  directed  a  number  of  the  murals,  did  one 
that  enlarged  to  two  stories  in  bright  red  and  green  an 
ancient  stone  relief  from  El  Taj  in  that  is  actually  no  more 
than  three  feet  high.  The  scene  depicts  the  ritual  sacrifice 
of  a  ball  player  by  priests  in  elaborate  regalia.  While 
drawing  attention  to  heritage,  the  mural  seems  to  cele- 
brate the  sacrifices  of  the  heroes  of  La  Raza,  for  one 
theory  of  the  ripping  out  of  the  heart  of  the pelote  player  is 
that  it  was  the  winner  who  offered  himself  for  the  welfare 
of  the  community. 

Frank  Ferro  began  a  wall  in  1974  that  was  impressive 
from  the  start,  but  was  only  completed  in  1979.  As  if 
repeating  its  caption  of  Orale  Raza  (Raza — All  right!),  it 
multiplies  its  image  of  a  man  raising  his  arm  in  exultation 
while  a  child  smiles  and  a  rose  drops  a  petal. 

For  the  people  who  lived  at  Estrada  Courts,  the  murals 
were  to  be  seen  just  outside  their  windows,  as  soon  as 
they  went  to  the  door  or  came  back  from  work.  The 
variety,  quality  of  rendering,  and  sheer  outpouring  of 
ideas  and  feelings  and  imagination  were  remarkable.  In 
1973  when  the  murals  were  begun  there,  only  a  few  had 
been  done  at  other  public  housing  projects,  notably  at 
"the  Smith"  in  Lower  Manhattan  and  at  Cabrini  Green 
in  Chicago.  But  never  before  had  there  been  undertaken 
the  transforming  of  every  large  outdoor  wall  of  a 
neighborhood  by  paintings  specifically  for  the  residents 

C.  W.  Felix,  director,  and  Los  Ninos  del  Mundo:  Un- 
titled, 1973,  Estrada  Courts. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  169 

and  often  by  them.  Here  was  an  effort  of  local  people  to 
shape  not  only  their  visual  world  but  also  their 
psychological  space  and  social  relations.  There  was  a  new 
neighborliness  at  Estrada,  and  the  police  reported  that 
vandalism  declined.'^  Local  talent  was  drawn  out  and  the 
tenants  organized.  The  project  was  frequently  visited  by 
Anglos,  and  residents  saw  their  murals  on  TV  behind 
the  credits  of  "Chico  and  the  Man,"  all  of  which  must 
have  contributed  to  their  self-respect.  But  it  would  be  a 
mistake  to  overestimate  what  the  murals  could  achieve 
and  the  extent  they  could  affect  the  basic  problems  of  the 
barrio — gang  warfare,  drugs,  and  unemployment. 

While  the  early  Estrada  murals  were  being  done, 
others  were  under  way  at  Ramona  Gardens,  another 
public  housing  project  in  East  Los.  These  were  done  by 
residents  with  the  help  of  Mechicano  Art  Center  pain- 
ters. Between  1973  and  1977  fifteen  paintings  were  com- 
pleted. The  impact  of  cultural  heritage  is  demonstrated 
by  most  of  them.  One  shows  twice-life-size  full-length 
portraits  of  four  young  toughs,  two  in  undershirts, 
glancing  in  a  sidelong  uncertain  way  as  they  lounge  on 
simulated  steps,  while  alongside  are  ghostly  images  of  an 
indio  warrior,  a  conquistador,  and  a  Zapatista — each  with 
the  features  of  the  young  men.  The  self-consciousness  of 
their  glances,  which  may  have  been  taken  from  a  photo, 
is  oddly  shared  by  their  shadowy  forebears  as  if  all  of 
them  were  only  just  getting  used  to  the  resemblances. 
Titled  Ghosts  of  the  Barrio,  this  is  the  work  of  Wayne 
Alaniz  Healy,  who  was  not  a  resident  but  was  a  member 
of  the  Mechicano  Art  Center. 


170  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Wayne  Alaniz  Healy,  Ghosts  of  the  Barrio,  1974, 
Ramona  Gardens,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Manuel  Cruz:  Untitled,  1974,  Ramona  Gardens,  East 
Los  Angeles. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  171 


Traditional  imagery  is  employed  in  other  ways  also  at 
Ramona  Gardens.  One  wall,  painted  by  Manuel  Cruz  in 
1974,  shows  an  indio  priest  holding  out  to  us  the  corpse  of 
a  youth  killed  in  gang  warfare.  Alongside  a  girl  is  weep- 
ing, and  a  car  speeds  off  to  the  towering  city.  The 
caption  reads:  "To  ace  out  a  home  boy  from  another 
barrio  is  to  kill  La  Raza  .  .  ."  The  priest  in  his  regalia 
implies  what  they  all  share,  their  tradition,  their  common 
flesh  and  blood,  their  camalismo.  The  design  of  this  mural 
is  particularly  interesting,  for  it  is  the  very  inexperience 
of  the  artist  that  has  freed  him  from  the  three- 
dimensional  modeling  of  the  early  academic  murals  that 
often  neglected  the  surface  of  the  wall  and  lost  its  power 
to  order  material  in  a  forceful  way.  Here  the  artist  has 
responded  to  the  surface  and  arranged  the  content  fron- 
tally  or  in  profile  and  laid  in  the  colors  flatly.  Even  the  car 
speeding  in  the  distance  is  seen  squarely  from  behind. 
Everything  is  managed  for  maximum  legibility,  and 
there  is  a  heraldic,  even  a  hieratic  symmetry.  In  spite  of 
the  awkwardness  of  the  drawing  and  execution,  the  artist 
made  absolutely  clear  what  he  wanted  to  say  and  pre- 
sented it  in  a  spare,  moving  manner. 

Next  to  this  wall  is  another  that  shows  a  desert  and 
barricaded  road  receding  in  deep  perspective.  .Much  of  it 
is  desiccated  like  the  mountains  in  the  background,  but  a 
flash  flood  suddenly  brings  water  and  bright  indio  sym- 
bols. The  style  of  the  work  by  Ismael  Cazarez  recalls  the 
Surrealism  of  Dali.  A  wall  nearby  depicts  local  people 
and  ancient  indios  contemplating  a  rainbow  vision  of  a 
pyramid  and  cross  together.  The  exploding  and  flaring 
forms  of  other  murals  at  Ramona  Gardens,  some  bor- 
rowed from  low-rider  and  van  decoration,  take  on  a 
visionary  quality  as  they  tend  to  become  almost  total 


Left:  Manuel  Cruz,  right:  Ismael  Cazarez:  Both  untitled, 
1974,  Ramona  Gardens. 


Frank  Martinez:  Homage  to  Ruben  Salazar,  early 
1970s,  East  Los  Angeles  Doctors'  Hospital. 


abstractions  except  for  cultural  nationalist  symbols. 
Another  end  wall  is  painted  with  a  large  image  of  the 
Virgin  of  Guadalupe  in  her  golden  veil.  Thinking  back 
over  many  of  the  murals  here  and  of  Chicano  art  in 
general,  you  realize  that  the  visionary  is  a  central  element 
in  it,  with  roots  in  Catholic  miracles  and  the  induced 
hallucinations  of  the  indios.  The  magic  mushroom  is  an 
occasional   symbol.    The  deprivation  of  contemporary 


172  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Chicane  life  also  explains  why  artists  and  their  com- 
munities understand  as  a  kind  of  visionary  experience  an 
art  that  formulates  and  projects  their  hopes  and  dreams. 
Serious  change  \\  ould  be  a  transfiguration. 

The  Mechicano  Art  Center,  w  hich  coordinated  many 
of  the  murals  at  Ramona  Gardens,  also  contributed  to  the 
art  that  in  1974  filled  the  walls  of  the  East  Los  Angeles 
Doctors'  Hospital  a  few  doors  from  the  studio.  The  halls 
and  offices  were  crow  ded  with  local  easel  art,  some  of  it 
sponsored  by  other  groups  like  Goez.  In  the  cafeteria 
there  was  a  sweeping  mural  on  the  significance  of  medical 
research  to  the  Raza  family  by  Bill  Bejerano  of  San 
Fernando  Valley,  and  at  the  emergency  entrance  was  the 
mosaic  mural  memorial  to  Ruben  Salazar  by  Frank  Mar- 
tinez. .Mechicano  organized  a  competition  for  the  im- 
aginative painting  of  benches  inside  and  outside  the 
hospital  which  resulted  in  an  abundance  of  Mexican 
designs. 

Willie  Herron  did  important  work  at  both  Ramona 
Gardens  and   Estrada   Courts   during   1973   and    1974. 


William  F.   Herron  III:   My  Life  in  the  Projects 
(detail),  1973,  Ramona  Gardens. 


Inside  the  recreation  center  at  Ramona  he  created  a  room 
of  intense  pain  and  horror  with  a  crucifixion  sharing 
walls  with  monstrous  faces  and  bodies  and  a  calavera 
w  rithing  in  flames.  Sneering  figures  beat  and  knife  each 
other,  and  crouching  inflated  naked  women  that  fill  a 
wall  from  floor  to  ceiling  clutch  their  children  in  a 
moonlit  graveyard.  Herron  called  this  My  Life  in  the 
Projects. '  * 

At  Estrada  on  an  outdoor  wall  he  and  "Gronk"  painted 
a  black-and-white  Photo-Realist  montage  of  the  1970 
Chicano  Moratorium  organized  to  protest  the  Indochina 
War  and  all  forms  of  racism  against  Chicanos.  It  was 
there  that  Ruben  Salazar  had  been  killed  by  a  police 
tear-gas  grenade  fired  into  a  cafe.  The  mural  is  like  a 
sequence  of  images  that  come  at  you  from  the  TV  and  in 
just  as  incongruous  an  order:  the  face  of  a  chimpanzee, 
but  with  the  long  light  tresses  of  a  Hollywood  doll;  a 
Chicana;  a  helmeted  soldier  with  fixed  bayonet;  boys 
behind  bars;  an  L.A.  freeway  at  night;  a  room  in  the 
projects  crowded  with  mothers  and  kids;  a  boy  carrying  a 
picket  sign  calling  for  an  end  to  police  brutality;  a  long 
strip  of  a   "street   disturbance"   with   more  cops   than 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  173 


William    F.    Herron    III    and    ''Gronk": 
Moratorium,  1974-79,  Estrada  Courts. 


Chicano 


civilians;  a  screaming  Chicana;  a  painted  hand  holding  a 
sacred  heart  beneath  the  unseen  face  of  Jesus;  a  body 
splattered  with  blood,  like  an  upside-down  crucifix;  a 
man  shouting;  a  pair  of  masqueraders;  two  pairs  of  eyes 
staring  from  behind  barbed  wire;  a  tear-gassed  street 
encounter;  a  pair  of  bewildered  children.  This  much  was 
completed  in  1974,  and  in  1979  Herron  returned  to  it, 
adding  images  of  his  wife  and  the  two  of  them  embracing 
— as  if  against  the  violence  around  them. 

In  1973  the  first  large  organized  Los  Angeles  mural 
project  involving  many  panels  and  using  racially  mixed 
artists  was  undertaken  at  the  Venice  Pavilion.  Venice  is  a 
Los  Angeles  community  that  was  created  along  a  short 
stretch  of  Pacific  beach  in  1904  as  an  independent  town, 
which  its  founder.  Abbot  Kinney,  hoped  to  make  a 
cuftural  center  by  building  canals  and  collonaded 
porticos,  importing  gondolas  and  gondoliers  as  well  as 
artists  and  scholars.'*  Even  when  it  deteriorated  into  an 
amusement  park  and  was  incorporated  into  Los  Angeles 
in  the  twenties,  it  retained  its  unique  character.  In  the 
sixties  its  modest  rentals  made  it  a  haven  for  the  counter- 
culture, impecunious  artists,  independent  professional 
people,  and  Blacks  and  Chicanos.  There  developed  a 
tolerance  of  different  life-styles  and  a  sense  of  collective 
self-help  that  had  produced  community  operated  free 


legal  and  medical  services,  a  senior  citizens'  center,  pub- 
lic concerts,  festivals,  and  street  theater.  This  spirit  also 
created  the  murals  that  grace  garage  doors  and  outdoor 
walls  and  finally  the  decoration  of  the  Venice  Pavilion  on 
the  beach,  which  had  been  intended  by  the  city  fathers  as 
an  open-air  shelter  with  picnic  tables  and  a  small  stage. 
However,  before  the  murals  were  added  to  the  bare 
concrete  walls,  the  pavilion  was  a  three-million-dollar 
white  elephant  that  was  hardly  used.  Community  people 
decided  to  do  something  about  this,  and  Judy  Baca,  who 
was  employed  by  the  Recreation  and  Parks  Department, 
agreed  to  coordinate  the  local  artists  and  amateurs  who 
volunteered.  The  core  group  decided  to  do  a  history  of 
Venice  with  a  large  panel  devoted  to  each  decade  on  the 
inner  walls. 

Each  panel  runs  from  seven  to  fifteen  feet  high,  and 
some  are  three  times  as  long.  There  are  stylized  views  of 
Venice  in  its  early  days  as  a  cultural  center  in  the 
Renaissance  style.  These  are  followed  by  a  Pop  art  scene 
of  local  residents  working  in  an  aircraft  plant  during  the 
forties.  For  the  next  decade  Arthur  Mortimer  used  snap- 
shots of  a  beach  party  from  a  high  school  yearbook  of 
1954,  rendering  them  in  a  brown  and  orange  high- 
contrast  Photo- Realist  style  that  he  was  working  in  at  the 
time.  His  intention  was  not  to  make  them  look  like  faded 
photos  although  that  is  the  effect.  The  more  recent  era  is 
represented  by  a  scene  of  young  people  enjoying  them- 
selves along  the  Venice  canals  with  congas  and  guitars, 
picnicking  and  practicing  karate.   Other  murals  show 


174  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Arthur  Mortimer:  Venice  High  School,  Class  of  '54, 
Venice  Pavilion,  Venice. 


elderly  couples  in  suits  and  dresses  strolling  in  the  sun 
and  among  the  arcades.  There  are  also  picketing  strikers 
and  a  group  carrying  Israeli  flags.  One  wall  is  devoted  to 
children's  work.  Other  panels  offer  perspectives  of  the 
Pacific  coast  viewed  from  succeeding  altitudes,  cul- 
minating in  a  perspective  from  outer  space.  There  are 
also  visual  jokes  like  painted  trunks  of  palm  trees  on  the 
walls  that  merge  with  real  trees  beyond.  The  murals 
create  an  ambiance  of  nostalgia,  leisure,  and  good 
vibes — a  mood  that  local  people  clearly  cultivate.  The 
project  involved  two  hundred  community  people  from 


five  years  old  to  over  sixty  and  could  only  have  been  done 
with  warmth  and  neighborliness.  Once  the  pavilion  was 
adorned  with  murals,  it  came  to  be  widely  used,  and  in 
1975  paintings  were  added  along  the  outside. 

The  pavilion  murals  are  comparable  to  those  in  ethnic 
neighborhoods  that  celebrate  the  identity  and  heritage  of 
residents,  although  those  at  Venice  emphasize  the  plea- 
sure of  collective  leisure  rather  than  the  heroes  and 
struggles  of  their  past.  The  people  who  worked  on  the 
Venice  murals  did  not  have  to  lay  claim  to  dignity 
because   most   were  not  victims  of  racism.    But  their 


Judy  Baca,  Christina  Schlesinger,  and  local  people:  Un- 
titled, 1974,  Venice  Pavilion. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  175 


murals  are  important  because  they  demonstrate  that 
community  painting  is  not  limited  to  the  special  experi- 
ence of  any  ethnic  group  or  class. 

The  pleasure  and  gentleness  depicted  in  the  Venice 
Pavilion  murals  were  not  to  last.  The  developers  had 
already  turned  their  eyes  on  the  community  and  had 
built  luxury  highrises  around  a  yacht  harbor  at  nearby 
Marina  del  Rey.  Venice  had  been  designated  an  urban- 
renewal  area,  and  its  cottages  were  due  to  be  replaced  by 
upper-income  housing.  All  this  had  raised  property  val- 
ues, taxes  and  rents,  driving  out  long-time  residents.  One 
of  these  was  Emily  Winters  who  in  the  summer  of  1975 
coordinated  a  mural  project  of  a  women  artists'  coopera- 
tive, Jaya  (Sanskrit  for  nonviolent  victory),  on  the  side  of 
a  neighborhood  food  market.'*  Standing  alongside  the 

Jaya  Collective  and  City  wide  Mural  Project:  The  People 
of  Venice  vs.  the  Developers,  197S,  Venice. 


Judy  Baca,  Christina  Schlesinger,  and  local  people:  Un- 
titled, 1974,  Venice  Pavilion. 


mural,  you  look  up  the  street  and  over  a  series  of  canal 
bridges  and  cottages  to  the  ranks  of  highrises  closing  in 
on  Venice.  At  one  side  of  the  painting  there  are  people  of 
all  races  and  ages  working  vegetable  gardens,  playing  a 
guitar  and  flute,  chatting,  passing  a  joint,  and  dancing.  In 
the  windows  of  a  house  others  are  painting  at  an  easel, 
embracing,  or  just  gazing  out  on  the  street.  But  at  the 
other  side  wrecking  equipment  is  demolishing  a  cottage 
which  community  residents  are  lined  up  to  resist,  and 
one  of  them  sprays  on  the  wall  "Stop  the  pig." 

With  her  success  of  organizing  paint  crews  in  the 
barrios  and  large  numbers  of  community  people  at  Ven- 
ice behind  her,  Judy  Baca  turned  back  to  her  native  East 
Los  in  1974.  There  she,  a  five-member  staff,  and  thirty- 


176  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Barrio  Artistas  de  Aztldn,  directed  by  Judy  Baca,  Chris- 
tina Schlesinger,  Manuel  Cruz,  Sylvia  Morales,  Bernardo 
Saucedo,  and  Joe  Hernandez:  Untitled,  1974,  Little 
Sisters  of  the  Poor  Convalescent  Home,  East  Los  Angeles. 


five  street  youths,  some  of  them  gang  members  and  ex- 
junkies,  calHng  themselves  Varrio  (Barrio)  Artistas  de 
Aztlan,  painted  450  feet  of  murals  along  two  sides  of  the 
wall  surrounding  the  grounds  of  a  convalescent  home  for 
the  elderly  operated  by  the  Little  Sisters  of  the  Poor. 
Some  of  the  sisters  also  came  out  to  paint.  Some  scenes 
affirm  the  Raza  heritage  of  the  young  people  with  crisp, 
bright  pre-Columbian  imagery,  but  there  are  also 
Japanese  panels,  including  one  black  and  white  Photo- 
Realist  piece  showing  a  child  waiting  next  to  family 
luggage  and  a  poster  ordering  the  evacuation  of  persons 


of  her  ancestry  from  their  neighborhoods  during  World 
War  IL  Although  so  long  a  series  of  panels  does  not  have 
the  concentrated  force  of  a  single  design,  the  themes  of 
oppression,  liberation  and  ethnic  pride  run  through  them 
all,  imparting  a  kind  of  unity.  There  is  also  a  remarkable 
consistency  of  handsomely  executed  work. 

This  was  to  be  a  pilot  project  for  City  wide  Murals, 
which  Judy  Baca  after  a  year  of  proposal  writing  and 
lobbying  finally  saw  funded  by  Los  Angeles  in  1974  as  an 
office  that  was  to  arrange  for  community-based  mural 
painting  throughout  the  city.  It  was  different  from  other 


Nuns  of  Little  Sisters  of  the  Poor  Convalescent  Homt 
Untitled,  1974.  (Photo  SPARC) 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  177 


Pa«e/  of  Little  Sisters  mural. 


mural  organizations  because  it  was  a  muralist-managed 
public  program  that  invited  the  participation  of  compe- 
tent neighborhood  artists  and  directed  to  them  funds 
with  which  they  could  paint  either  by  themselves  or  with 
untrained  local  residents.  The  artists  had  to  get  two 
hundred  signatures  from  their  neighborhoods  approving 
their  proposed  designs.  This  provided  the  means  for  both 
local  autonomy  and  the  necessary  resources.  And  it  was 
under  this  arrangement  that  the  largest  number  of 
paintings  produced  by  any  mural  organization  in  this 
country  was  made  possible.  Citywide  was  operated  by  a 
small  staff  of  muralists  directed  by  Judy  Baca,  none  of 
whom  presided  over  the  mural  designs  of  others  but  left 
this  to  each  artist  and  his  neighborhood.  These  details 
will  be  examined  latter,  but  what  is  important  here  is  to 
observe  that  this  framework  facilitated  the  spreading  of 
murals  throughout  Los  Angeles.  There  were  other  pub- 
licly funded  projects  there  and  volunteer  groups  that 
survived  out  of  the  pockets  of  artists  and  what  they  could 
collect  locally.  But  Citywide  provided  a  beneficial  com- 
bination of  resources,  consultation,  freedom  for  the  art- 
ist, and  supervision  of  his  responsibility  to  his  neighbor- 
hood. 

In  its  first  year  Citywide  Murals  sponsored  more  than 
forty  walls  throughout  the  city  done  by  artists  of  diverse 
associations,  and  about  thirty-five  were  painted  each 
succeeding  year  until  1978  when  funding  came  to  an  end. 


The  variety  of  its  work  in  1974  and  1975  is  suggested  by 
a  few  examples.  There  was  the  Great  Arm  of  Friendship, 
imaginatively  conceived  by  Kamol  Tassananchalee,  a 
Thai,  for  a  San  Fernando  Valley  Mexican  restaurant.  It 
shows  a  fifty-foot-long  arm  made  up  of  a  crowd  of  faces 
of  different  nationalities,  some  with  TV  sets  and  tele- 
phones for  eyes  and  ears,  suggesting  how  technology  can 
serve  human  needs.  All  of  this  is  spliced  together  in  a 
richly  painted  Cubist  manner  and  reaches  out  with 
flowers  to  other  faces  across  the  wall.  Meanwhile,  the 
misuse  of  technology  is  represented  by  a  small  missile  in 
the  center  with  a  trajectory  much  shorter  than  the  ges- 
ture of  the  arm.  Another  handsome  work  depicted  the 
mythical  origin  of  the  Philippine  Islands  with  a  great 
albatross  skimming  over  the  waves  toward  native  people 
in  their  varied  costumes.  This  was  done  by  the 
Eighteenth  Street  Gang,  Faustino  Caigoy,  and  Pat 
Morales  at  an  outdoor  Filipino  cafe.  There  was  also  the 
work  of  Joe  Funk,  a  former  WPA  painter,  who  with  the 
help  of  fellow  regulars  at  the  Westminster  Senior  Citi- 
zens Center  in  Venice,  filled  a  wall  in  their  social  room 
with  jjortraits  of  themselves  and  scenes  of  the  beach 
community.  When  the  hall  is  filled  with  people,  they 
seem  to  continue  into  the  painting.  And  in'  another 
Citywide  project  that  year,  the  Classic  Dolls,  a  Chicana 
women's  gang,  painted  their  self-portraits  in  subtly 
muted  tones  beneath  a  brightly  colored  Mayan  priestess 
who  was  truly  monumental. 

There  were  other  large-scale  mural  projects  in  Los 


Kamol    Tassananchalee    (City wide):    Great    Arm    of 
Friendship,  1975,  Los  Angeles.  (Photo  SPARC) 


Faust ino  Caigoy,  Pat  Morales,  and  Eighteenth  Street 
Gang  (Citywide):  New  Emergence,  1975,  Los  Angeles. 


Joe  Funk  and  members  (Citywide):   Untitled,   1975, 
Westminister  Senior  Citizens  Center,  Venice. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  179 


Angeles  during  this  time.  The  county  sponsored  nine- 
teen works  in  an  Inner-City  Mural  Program  between 
1973  and  1974,  which  ranged  from  Frank  Romero's 
graffiti  mural  Un  Corazon  por  la  Gente  to  Kent  Twitchell's 
Old  Woman  of  the  Freeway  and  other  artists'  supergraphics. 
Fwitchell's  benignly  smiling  grandmother  wrapped  in  a 
crocheted  afghan,  presumably  of  her  own  artistry,  seems 
to  be  edging  out  of  the  picture  while  a  gray  moon  hovers 
behind  her — a  recurring  image  in  his  work  that  suggests 
the  isolation  and  mystery  of  personality.  The  old  woman 
is  in  fact  Lillian  Bronson,  a  TV  actress  of  the  Perry 
Mason  program.  The  view  of  her  is  limited  mainly  to 
drivers  in  the  further  lanes  of  the  Hollywood  Freeway, 
which  makes  it  impossible  to  catch  the  carefully  worked 
New  Realist  technique — almost  a  crocheting  of  color 
patches.  Repeated  passes  may  confirm  a  rather  senti- 
mental image  of  the  aged  rather  than  an  impression  of  the 
energy  that  they  more  commonly  want  to  maintain. 

Besides  supporting  work  at  Estrada  Courts,  Goez 
Gallery  made  further  contributions  to  large  scale  mural 
projects  in  East  Los.  In  1974  four  of  its  artists,  David 
Botello,  Robert  Arenivar  and  John  and  Joe  Gonzalez, 
saw  mounted  on  the  facade  of  the  First  Street  Store 
eighteen  panels  that  they  had  designed  and  that  Joel  Suro 
Olivares  executed  as  tiles  in  Mexico.  They  called  the 
sequence  A  Story  of  Our  Struggle.  It  depicted  issues  such 
as  the  betrayal  of  the  Treaty  of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo,  the 
farm  workers'  strike,  and  the  entangling  of  workers  in 
machinery,  but  the  vignettes  in  the  style  of  old  fashioned 
magazine  illustration  and  commercial  art  were  not  strong 
enough  for  the  subject.  This,  the  Goez  artists'  charac- 
teristic manner  was  most  elaborately  worked  out  in  a  set 
of  murals,  La  Vida  Breva  de  Alfonso  Fulano  (John  Doe)  for  a 
county  neighborhood  center  in  1975.  These  are  three 
well-painted  scenes  from  the  locality's  early  rural  life  to 
the  present.  Packed  with  representative  details,  the 
scenes  are  picturesque  summaries  of  the  past  that  recall 
only  pleasant  memories. 

Also  that  year  Goez  announced  a  plan  by  which  it 
hoped  to  involve  fifty  thousand  people  doing  1,530  mu- 
rals throughout  Los  Angeles  over  the  next  years  to  cele- 
brate the  city's  bicentennial  in  1981.'^  Although  the 
project  finally  did  not  receive  funding,  it  indicates  the 
kind  of  ambitious  plans  that  were  contemplated  at  the 
time. 

It  was  a  destructive  technology  and  culture  that  David 
Botello  attacked  in  1975  in  a  relatively  small  but  tren- 
chant work  on  the  side  of  a  cleaners  where  traffic  pounds 
along  boulevards  and  freeways  in  East  Los.  It  shows  a 
Chicano  worker  who  has  been  uprooted  from  the  cam- 
pesino's  way  of  life  and  is  chained  to  machinery  and 
tangled  in  cables  like  Laocoon  while  his  heart  is  being 
monitored.  He  is  also  cautioned  about  signing  contracts. 
Alongside  him  his  family,  eating  non-union  grapes  and 
turning  away  from  a  picture  of  the  Virgin  of  Guadalupe, 
is  absorbed  by  a  huge  TV  screen  with  Anglo  lovers 
against  a  background  of  the  flag  and  blazing  rifles.  En- 


Kent  Twitchell:    The  Old  Woman  of  the  Freeway, 
1974,  Los  Angeles. 

gulfed  by  wires  and  appliances,  the  Chicanos  are  also 
subjected  to  surveillance  by  cameras  and  the  "bugging" 
of  an  actual  public  phone  which  stands  against  the  wall, 
triggered  the  imagery,  and  became  part  of  it.  In  the 
center  Quetzalcoatl  flies  down  to  encourage  a  boy  w  ho  is 
reading  the  history  of  his  people.  The  title  of  the  mural. 
Read  between  the  Lines,  urges  viewers  to  break  through  the 
deceptions  and  entanglement.  Carefully  drafted  and  im- 
aginatively summing  up  much  of  what  Chicano  murals 
had  been  saying  up  until  this  time,  this  was  the  most 
compelling  work  Botello  was  to  do  during  the  decade, 
although  he  was  to  undertake  more  elaborate  composi- 
tions. 

In  1974  Carlos  Almaraz  and  members  of  the  Third 


Robert  Arenivar,  designer,  and  Joel  Suro  Olivares, 
ceramicist;Jose  Gonzalez,  project  director,  assisted  by  John 
Gonzalez  and  David  Botello:  A  Story  of  Our  Struggle 
(partial  view)  1974,  First  Street  Store,  East  Los  Angeles. 


A  Story  of  Our  Struggle  (partial  view) 


Robert  Arenivar  assisted  by  David  Botello,  Jose  and  John 
Gonzalez:  La  Vida  Breva  de  Alfonso  Fulano  (John 
Doe),  1975,  Brooklyn  Avenue  Neighborhood  Facility, 
East  Los  Angeles. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  181 


David  Botello:  Read  between  the  Lines,  1975,  East 
Los  Angeles.  (Photo  David  Botello) 

Street  gang  did  an  ensemble  of  works  in  support  of  the 
farm    workers    and    undocumented    immigrants    from 
Mexico.  (Almaraz  had  created  a  banner-mural  that  hung 
behind  the  first  national  United  Farm  Workers  Associa- 
tion convention  two  years  earlier.)  The  combination  of 
professional  painter  and  street  youth  now  created  a  se- 
quence of  murals  on  the  buildings  of  the  All  Nations 
Neighborhood  Center.  Beneath  a  caption  No  Compre  Vino 
Gallo  ("Don't  Buy  Gallo  Wine"),  they  showed  in  a  rau- 
cous cartoonlike  style  picketers  breaking  the  chains  of  two 
farm  workers.  On  another  two-story  wall  they  painted  an 
even  wilder  cartoon  of  undocumented  workers  bound  by 
barbed  wire  and  chains  who  cry  out.  No  somas  esclavos  de  la 
Migra.  .  .  .  Huelga.  .  .  .  Con  el  trabajador  venceremos  ("We 
are  not  slaves  of  the  immigration  authorities  and  border 
patrol.  .  .  .  Strike.  .  .  .  With  work  we  will  overcome"). 
A  wolf  marked  Explotacion  de  la  Raza  indicts  the  low 
wages  paid  "illegals"  by  bosses  who  could  threaten  to 
turn  them  over  to  la  Migra  if  they  protested.  The  vehe- 
mence of  the  caricature  is  something  that  only  Chicanos 
have  dared  in  murals.  Almaraz  and  a  few  others,  follow- 
ing Orozco,   have  used  the  distortions  of  cartoons  to 
create   a    monumental    rhetoric   of  denunciation.    The 
spiritedness  of  the  gang  painters  also  was  expressed  by 
the  big  bright  graffiti  signatures  by  which  they  signed 
themselves  on  the  entrance  staircase:  Flaco  .  .  .  Conejo 
.  .  .  Cholo  ...  El  Shorty  .  .  .  Santos  ...  El  Dopey  .  .  . 
Huerito  ...  El  Nicho  .  .  .  Beaver  .  .  .  Chuey  ...  and 
others. 


The  cartoon  murals  of  Robert  Chavez  are  different 
from  the  big,  boisterous  caricatures  of  Almaraz.  Chavez 
uses  much  smaller,  wiry  figures  that  look  like  jottings  in  a 
notebook,  but  he  extends  them  over  enormous  surfaces 
which  become  dense  with  witty  detail.  With  Bill  Graves 
he  covered  a  three-story  wall  of  Alice's  Restaurant  in  Los 
Angeles's  Westwood  Village  near  UCLA  about  1972. 
Facing  a  parking  lot,  it  shows  Humpty  Dumpty,  who 
wears  a  cook's  hat,  welcoming  to  his  "lib"  restaurant  a 
truckful  of  striking  farm  workers  while  Jesus,  dressed  in 
a  red  robe  marked  with  a  big  "1",  is  about  to  make  a  toast. 
Meanwhile  the  whole  affair  is  being  shot  by  Hollywood 
cameramen.  Don  Quixote  trots  across  the  foreground  on 
Rocinante,  and  the  rest  is  packed  with  the  extravaganza 
of  the  L.A.  scene — starlets  and  bathers,  pet  birds  and 
animals,  while  sausages  trail  down  from  above.  The 
crowded  details  remind  you  of  a  cityscape  of  Brueghel  or 
Bosch,  but  its  ironies  are  gentler. 

Chavez,  working  with  others,  did  another  work  on  a 
long  roofing  company  wall  in  1972  in  an  East  Los 
Angeles  barrio.  It  is  made  up  of  line  drawings  again 
like  notes  from  an  artist's  sketchbook.  There  is  no  domi- 
nant center,  but  a  sequence  of  images,  among  them  a 
crucified  Jesus  with  a  hip  mustache  and  blue  swim 
trunks.  Around  him  are  a  grim  Norse  warrior  with  a 
swastika  between  horns  on  his  helmet,  a  tiny  helicopter, 
dogs,  and  flowers  with  human  faces.  A  dollar-eared 
plutocrat  in  top  hat  cranking  an  engine  appears  to  drive 
two  hulks  of  rickety  war  machinery  battling  each  other. 
All  stand  knee-deep  in  skulls,  and  picket  signs  and 
banners  carry  the  messages  "Men  love  war  because  it 


182  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


^"™'="*M«.:'  .         %  ^mH.^ZVr 


Carlos  Almaraz  and  Third  Street  Gang:  No  Somos 
Esclavos  de  la  Migra  .  .  .  (We  Are  Not  Slaves  of  the 
Immigration  Service),  1974,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Carlos  Almaraz  and  Third  Street  Gang:  No  Compre 
Vino  Gallo  (Don't  Buy  Gallo  Wine),  1974,  All  Nations 
Neighborhood  Center,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  183 


^' 


^■1 


A- 


'i^r  ^• 


"^wi^m^ 


Robert  Chavez:  Alice's  Restaurant  Mural,  1970,  West- 
wood,  Los  Angeles. 


Robert  Chavez:  iPorque  Se  Pelean?  Que  No  Son 
Carnales.  (Why  Fight  Each  Other?  So  There  Will  Be  No 
Brothers.)  1972,  East  Los  Angeles. 


184  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

allows  them  to  look  serious"  and  Porque  se pekan?  Que  no  son 
carnaks  ("Why  fight  each  other?  So  there  will  be  no 
brothers"). 

During  1974  and  1975  Chavez,  who  was  teaching  at 
East  I>os  Angeles  City  College,  directed  a  very  large 
mural  with  the  help  of  his  son-in-law  and  a  few  student 
assistants  across  the  convex  facade  of  the  school  au- 
ditorium. It  is  an  incredible  fantasy,  a  vision  of  the 
heaven  and  hell  that  mankind  has  made  of  this  world.  In 
the  center  dominating  the  entire  phantasmagoria  is  the 
face  of  a  bountiful  Mother  Earth,  w  reathed  in  leaves  and 
ripe  and  rotting  fruit.  Chavez  says  he  used  his  daughter 
as  model.  She  wears  a  skeptical  expression  as  she  con- 
templates what  she  has  brought  forth.  To  the  right  in  an 
act  of  supreme  overkill,  a  huge  tracked  gun  carrier- 
bulldozer  scoops  up  a  child  in  its  metal  claws  while  a 
bomber  circles  above  and  a  little  gnome  propels  an 
improbable  mechanized  scooter  nearby.  There  is  also  a 
paper  dragon  that  raises  itself  to  snarl  above  bound 
human  figures  of  different  races.  A  pyramid  and  eye 
from  the  Great  Seal  on  the  dollar  bill  turn  out  on  second 
glance  to  be  two  flats  in  front  and  behind  a  barren  tree. 
Below  an  indio  mother  cuddles  her  mustachioed  infant 
between  a  dozing  tiger  and  garden  statuary.  At  the  far 
right  a  calavera  contemplates  a  rosy  inferno  crowded  with 
naked  sinners.  Chavez  says  they  represent  those  who 
have  given  up  the  struggle  for  knowledge.  This  is  bal- 


Robert  Chavez  and  assistants:  The  Land  of  Laputa 
(partial  view),  1975,  East  Los  Angeles  College. 


anced  at  the  far  left  by  an  ironic  pastel  blue  vision  of 
heaven:  other  naked  figures  striving  to  soar  upward 
around  the  college  president  standing  in  a  shriveled  chili 
and  bearing  a  Mexican  flag  with  a  dollar  sign  where  the 
eagle  and  serpent  should  be.  Originally  he  was  being 
peed  on  from  above,  but  Chavez  agreed  to  modify  that. 
However,  the  figures  around  him  are  being  fired  on  from 
a  masked  gun  emplacement.  Nearby  a  giant  ant  carries  a 
false  face,  while  a  sun  shatters  behind  another  eye  and 
pyramid  from  the  Great  Seal  (which  is  painted  with  a 
magnified  hand  print).  Coming  back  toward  Mother 
Earth,  there  is  a  crowded  freeway  ramp  that  breaks  off  in 
midair  while  beneath  a  guitarist  performs  with  a  dancing 
girl  who  is  also  a  bearded  penis,  and  old  folks  seem  none 
the  worse  for  wear  as  they  pose  on  a  giant  tortilla.  There 
is  much  more  ironic  detail,  and  beneath  this  main  area 
there  is  a  smaller  frieze  peopled  with  figures  that  suggest 
a  comic  spectrum  of  academic  studies.  Below  it  is  a  band 
of  leaves  and  roots.  Again  the  imagery  suggests  an  up- 
dated Brueghel  and  Bosch  with  several  assists  from  Dali 
and  Ernst.  But  the  whole  Surrealist  vision  is  distinctly 
the  wry  humor  of  Chavez.  The  title  he  gave  it  was  the 
Land  of  Laputa,  an  allusion  to  the  misguided  intellectuals 
who  live  on  the  island  in  the  sky  that  Gulliver  visits.  Seen 
from  the  broad  lawn,  where  hundreds  could  lounge,  the 
mural  offered  endless  commentary  on  the  civilization 
they  were  studying.  But  by  the  end  of  the  decade  a 
Hbrary  occupied  this  site  and  made  it  impossible  to  take 
in  the  mural  as  a  whole.  Only  sections  of  it  could  be  seen 
at  a  time  and  then  by  craning  your  head  upward.  The 
mural  became  an  additional  example  of  its  irony. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  185 


John  Alvarez  and  friends: 
Angeles. 


Untitled,   1973,  East 


Another  cartoon  work  was  done  a  few  years  earlier  in 
1973  by  Johnny  Alvarez  and  friends  on  two  sides  of 
The  Dip,  a  corner  tavern  that  marked  the  division  of  two 
E^st  Los  gang  turfs.  They  filled  one  wall  with  an  indict- 
ment of  the  Anglo  system  by  painting  a  pair  of  white 
hands  manipulating  the  strings  of  marionettes  attacking 
each  other  in  a  gang  rumble,  while  another  figure,  with  a 
hypo  smiles  in  his  stupor.  A  plumed  serpent  rises  in 
defiance.  In  contrast  the  other  side  of  the  establishment 
invites  you  to  the  wholesome  atmosphere  of  the  bar.  Its 
images  propose  that  the  right  thing  for  the  heirs  of  indios 
and  conquistadores  is  to  hop  into  their  low-rider  and  speed 
down  to  take  in  The  Dip's  marimba,  congas,  and  guitars. 

By  the  mid-seventies  it  was  difficult  to  walk  any 
distance  in  East  Los  and  not  see  a  mural.  Judy  Baca 
observed  at  this  time  that  every  barrio,  every  block, 
wanted  a  wall  painting.  Many  of  these  were  not  funded 
by  any  official  program;  it  was  the  shopowner,  church 
group,  local  residents  or  the  artist's  own  pocket  that 
financed  these  walls.  Among  these  works  was  Jesse 
Navarro's  draftsmanlike  view  of  Tenochtitlan,  the  Aztec 
capital,  and  well-drawn  portraits  of  Mexican  leaders 
against  a  raying  sun  on  the  side  of  a  grocery  to  be  seen  in 
1974.  And  the  following  year  on  a  dry  cleaner's  Ismael 


Cazarez  painted  a  Quetzalcoatl  returning  to  Mexicans, 
and  the  forces  of  earth  and  sky  burning  away  the  shackles 
that  bind  them.  The  caption  reads: 

Of  breaking  chains 

And  sacrificial  fires 

Of  Spirit  and  color 

And  men  of  culture 

Of  respect  for  life 

And  the  true  form  of  knowledge. 

Across  the  street  from  Lincoln  High  School  in  East 
Los  Carlos  Callejo,  John  Orona  and  Art  Zarate  had 
nearly  completed  a  large,  well-drawn  mural  in  1974  that 
showed  the  battling  of  street  gangs  against  each  other  and 
gas-masked  police  moving  in.  Above  them  at  one  side 
was  a  figure  of  a  Hollywood  beauty  blindfolded  by  an 
American  flag  and  holding  the  scales  of  justice.  (She  was 
reminiscent  of  a  similar  figure  in  the  Chicano  History 
mural  at  UCLA.)  Another  figure  was  shooting  himself 
up  with  heroin.  In  the  center  a  pair  of  enormous  hands 
were  sharing  a  handshake  of  carnalismo,  and  beneath  two 
members  of  previously  hostile  gangs  were  greeting  each 
other.  Meanwhile  at  the  right  a  Chicana  amid  striking 
farm  workers  raised  her  fist  in  contrast  to  blind,  blond 
Justice  at  the  other  side. 


Jesse  Navarro:  Untitled,  1974,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Ismael  Cazarez:  Of  Breaking  Chains,  1975,  East  Los 
Angeles. 


Of  GRCAKmCi 
ANOSMkRlfiCIM.f 

Of  snorroKBC 

AHO  MCn    Of  CutTl 
»..i.  Of  MncTfft 

^MOTMCTRUC  r»>Mo(KlKW 
CttN  MM*  V  Sol 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  187 


Carlos   Callcj'j,  Juta   Uruim,   and 
Justice,  1973,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Art   'Aarate:   Blind 


Although  the  Black  population  in  the  Los  Angeles 
basin  is  large,  and  it  was  among  it  that  the  first  major 
urban  riot  of  the  sixties  occurred  when  Watts  exploded  in 
1965,  murals  came  relatively  late.  One  of  the  early  ones 
was  an  extensive  undertaking  begun  in  1973  on  a  long 
retaining  wall  on  Crenshaw  Boulevard.  There  local 
adults  and  teenagers  painted  more  than  thirty  panels 
extending  250  feet  and  celebrating  the  heritage  and 
modern  culture  of  Black  people.  Coordinated  by  Alonso 
Davis  of  the  nearby  Brockman  Gallery,  they  chose  this 
additive  form  because  of  the  difficulty  of  organizing  a 
single  composition  when  they  had  irregular  free  hours. 
They  called  their  work  The  Wall  of  Visions.  One  panel 
shows  an  ebullient  young  woman  with  blow  ing  hair  and 
a  multicolored  scarf  flying  behind  her  with  a  caption  on 
it,  "To  know  you  care  makes  one  try."  It  is  done  in  a 
high-contrast  Photo- Realist  style  like  many  of  the  others, 
which  show  portraits  of  Black  leaders,  musicians,  and 
local  people.  Next  to  one  of  these  the  painter  wrote  in 
large  letters  that  fill  the  panel:  "Dedicated  to  my  daugh- 
ter Shauna,  and  her  loving  mother,  Wynona,  'Our  love 
however  strong  may  it  grow  stronger  and  last  til  death 
for  death  is  but  a  rebirth  of  life.'  My  love  to  you  both. 
Howie  74."  Nearby  figures  by  Alonso  Davis  glance  dream- 
ily in  their  imaginatively  textured  garb.  There  is  a  care- 
fully rendered  Black  easy  rider  astride  his  chopper,  Big 
Fred,  with  a  caption  encouraging  viewers  to  excel 
beyond  their  wildest  dreams.  And  also:  a  portrait  of  guru 
Mahararish;  an  imaginative  sequence  of  faces  emerging 
out  of  blobs  of  color  with  positive  and  negative  space 
growing  out  of  each  other;  a  bare-chested  Black  man 
suspended  by  chains  from  the  trees  above  the  wall;  a 
scene  of  African  warriors  and  the  seven  headed  cobra  of 
the  Symbionese  Liberation  Front.  A  portrait  of  an 
elderly  Black  woman  is  accompanied  by  the  words  of 
Susan  B.  Anthony:  "Although  woman  has  jierformed 


much  of  the  labor  of  the  world  her  industry  and  economy 
have  been  the  very  means  of  increasing  her  degradation." 
These  are  all  statements  of  individual  painters,  but  they 
were  made  in  public,  next  to  one  another  and  done  with 
care  and  respect  for  the  whole  project,  which  is  the  mark 
of  community.  By  1979  all  of  these  had  been  replaced 
by  a  new  set  of  images  that  were  perhaps  more  "artistic" 
but  less  socially  relevant. 

While  murals  in  Black  neighborhoods  were  slow  in 
getting  started  in  Los  Angeles,  a  major  exception  was 
Saint  Elmo's  Village.  In  1974  the  "village"  consisted  of 
five  families  that  occupied  ten  cottages  and  workshops. 
Rozzell  Sykes,  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  undertaking, 
shows  you  around.  The  sides  of  the  houses  are  red, 
black,  and  brown,  the  roofs  green.  The  grounds  are 
lushiy  planted;  there's  a  pond  in  back  shaded  by  slats 
overhead.  Around  it  hanging  plants  and  walls  painted 
with  faces  contribute  to  the  impression  of  a  tropical 
compound.  Rozzell's  nephew,  Roderick,  has  been  espe- 
cially successful  in  drawing  out  the  talent  of  young 
people,  who  come  from  all  over  to  do  art  at  Saint  Elmo's. 
The  sidewalks  along  the  street  and  those  that  run  be- 
tween the  houses  and  open  into  a  large  common  concrete 
yard  in  back  are  painted  in  brilliant  colors  with  figurative 
and  abstract  patterns.  The  backyard  is  crowded  with 
painted  cable  drums  which  children  use  as  work  tables 
for  their  art.  Hanging  on  all  the  walls  inside  and  out  are 
works  of  children  and  adults — portraits,  landscapes, 
abstractions,  and  small  murals.  There  is  an  abundance  of 
junk  sculpture.  Children  come  from  the  local  elementary 
school  and  neighborhood  to  work  here,  and  it  is  not 
surprising  to  find  that  they  have  transformed  a  long 
retaining  wall  that  runs  the  length  of  the  school  grounds 
into  a  mural.  Buses  from  more  distant  schools  bring 
additional  classes.  Especially  on  weekends  the  village  is 
flooded  by  visitors  from  all  over  the  city.  At  first  it 
survived  by  contributions  and  the  sale  of  its  art,  but  in 
the   mid-seventies  received   substantial   NEA   funding. 


Alonzo  Davis,  director,  Rudolph  Porter,  Joe  Sims, 
Jonathan  Clark,  Audobon  Lucas  and  others:  Wall  of 
Visions,  1974-79,  Los  Angeles. 


''To  Know  You  Care  Makes  One  Try,''  Wall  of  Visions, 
1974. 


All    i I J 


•  '  ajR  lcve  HnwEve«  strops'  - 

^^A>  rr  GROW    smnNoEfl, 
AND   UiT  Til    DEATT*     FOa 

CEATH  rs  ear  A  rebirth  Qf 
iTi>  LcvE  TTJ  you  B( 


Howie:   ''Our  love  however  strong  .   . 
Visions,  1974. 


,"  Wall  of 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  189 


Alonzo  Davis:  Untitled,  Wall  of  Visions,  1974. 


One  of  the  inscriptions  on  the  pavement  seems  to  de- 
scribe its  aim: 

If  we  put  forth  our  efforts,  use  our  abiUties  along  these 
lines,  It  will  make  a  chain  that's  boundless.  For  it  is  we 
people  that  make  things,  and  if  we  people  use  our 
natural  abilities,  we  make  many  things. 

Another  nearby  reads:  "If  you  live  in  a  shoe  box, 
brighten  it  up.  This  will  destroy  slums,  ghettos  and  inse- 
curityl"  Saint  Elmo's  Village  offers  an  attractive  example 
of  self-help  and  a  challenge  to  a  society  that  compels 
people  to  live  in  shoe  boxes. 

In  Watts  itself  a  few  murals  had  begun  to  appear  by 
1974.  One  by  Robert  Curry  and  students  from  Lake 
Junior  High   School  offered  portraits  of  Mayor  Tom 


Bradley  and  other  Black  leaders  beneath  the  tower  of 
City  Hall.  Next  to  it  are  a  large  red  silhouette  of  the 
African  continent  with  a  native  family  in  the  foreground, 
and  further  along  local  kids  posing  proudly  against  the 
fragile  loops  of  the  Watts  towers,  Simon  Rodia's 
homemade  sculpture  of  crockery  and  concrete,  which 
over  the  years  had  become  a  community  monument.  It  is 
impressive  that  although  Rodia  was  Italian,  Black  people 
here  identified  with  his  art,  not  only  because  it  was  done 
in  the  midst  of  the  ghetto,  but  also  because  it  was  a 
vernacular  art,  the  work  of  an  untrained  but  imaginative 
man  who  shaped  something  beautiful  from  the  debris  of 
everyday  life. 

Compton 

Another  example  of  how  people  came  together  to  do  an 
ensemble  of  murals  was  offered  by  the  Communicative 
Arts  Academy  in  Compton,  a  newly  incorporated  city 


B.  Anthony  Panel,  Wall  of  Visions,  1974. 


ALTHOUGTPit^ 

WOMAN  WAS   To 

PERFORMED    ..  , 

MUCK  OF  the:      l. 

L/VBOR  OF  THE  ''    ' 


BUSTRY  AMD   ^1 

HAVE  BECK 
THE  VERY 

MEA^fS  OF , 
imcreasikgI 

HER    T^C-^ 

s  a  sXi 


Sidewalk  and  wall  painting  (photographed  in  1974),  St. 
Elmo's  Village,  Los  Angeles. 


Robert  Curry:  Untitled  (photographed  in  1974),  Watts, 
Los  Angeles. 


between  Los  Angeles  and  Long  Beach.  It  was  a  large 
community  arts  workshop  financially  supported  in  part 
by  its  Black  membership.  Its  main  building  was  a  refur- 
bished warehouse,  and  on, the  facade  were  a  series  of 
assemblage  murals  of  human  figures  and  a  cityscape 
made  from  found  objects  by  John  Outterbridge,  the 
academy's  director  in  1974.  With  wit  and  tenderness 
they  united  the  forms  of  African  sculpture  and  modern 
Western  art.  Passersby  called  the  panels  Something  from 


Nothing.  Inside  the  walls  were  enveloped  by  murals  by 
different  painters.  One  by  Elliot  Pinkney  bore  the  cap- 
tion: "Lend  a  hand  to  your  brother,  help  him  off  the 
floor.  .  .  ."  and  the  work  depicted  just  that.  Others  dis- 
played athletes  and  dancers  and  symbols  of  Black  libera- 
tion. In  1975  the  building  had  to  make  way  for  urban 
renewal,  but  Pinkney  continued  to  do  murals  in  Comp- 
ton,  and  in  1975  Outterbridge  became  director  of  the 
Watts  Art  Center  that  was  to  spawn  more  public  walls. 

Santa  Ana 

The  largest  population  of  Chicanos  between  Los 
Angeles  and  San  Diego  is  in  Santa  Ana.  At  the  commu- 
nity college  there  in  1974  a  mural  stretching  along  two 


John  Outterbridge:  Something  from  Nothing,  1974, 
Communicative  Arts  Academy,  Compton. 


Sergio  0' Cadiz,  director,  assisted  by  students  and  coor- 
dinated by  Shifra  Goldman:  Untitled,  1974,  Santa  Ana 
College,  Santa  Ana. 


sides  of  the  library  reading  room  was  undertaken  by  the 
students,  outside  artist  Sergio  O'Cadiz  and  Shifra 
Goldman,  a  professor  and  writer  on  Mexican  and 
Chicano  murals.  Originally  O'Cadiz  proposed  a  big 
Posada-like  calavera  leaning  on  the  ground  with  a  cup  in 
its  hand.  The  students  protested  because  this  seemed  to 
them  a  "lazy  Mex,"  the  stereotype  they  most  wanted  to 
free  themselves  from.  It  was  also  difficult  for  them  to 
grasp  the  complex  significance  of  the  figure  of  death, 
which  south  of  the  border  is  treated  with  both  irony  and 
affection.  Finally  they  agreed  to  turn  the  skeleton  into  a 
stalking  guerrilla  with  a  rifle,  a  bandolier  of  cartridges, 
and  a  pachuco  hat,  who  is  pointing  a  bony  finger  past  a 
dollar  bill  to  a  farm  worker's  banner  and  demonstration. 
The  design  takes  advantage  of  the  corner  of  the  library 
by  placing  the  calavera's  elbow  at  the  angle  and  turning 
his  gesture  dramatically.  Beneath  the  dollar  on  which  the 
scales  of  justice  are  awry  is  a  crucified  indio,  an  allusion  to 
the  similar  figure  which  Siqueiros  had  painted  in  Los 
Angeles  and  which  had  been  whitewashed.  On  the  far 
edge  of  the  mural,  above  their  signatures,  the  painters 
painted  themselves  working  on  the  panels  outdoors.  The 
mural  is  handsomely  drafted  and  executed  in  a  crisp 
graphic  arts  style. 

New  Mexico 

On  one  of  the  few  occasions  when  Los  Artes 
Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan  worked  outside  of  Santa  Fe, 
they  did  an  elaborate  project  in  1973  on  two  sides  of  a 
patio  in  the  high  school  of  Las  Vegas,  New  Mexico,  a 
small  agricultural  town  about  fifty  miles  away.  One  wall 
was  entirely  devoted  to  an  indictment,  as  a  caption 
painted  into  the  mural  says,  of  75,000  Cbicanos  muertos  en 
Vietnam  jYa  Basta!  A  line  of  calaveras  garbed  in  battle 
dress  rush  forward  at  you  clutching  weapons  that  fire 
from  the  ceiling  and  a  tank  blasts  away,  while  Jesus  and 


his  mother,  symbolic  of  the  mothers  of  all  the  dead,  flail 
their  arms  in  a  shared  crucifixion.  The  mural  is  a  ritual  of 
arms  and  fists.  A  teenager  carrying  a  flag  emblazoned 
"Chicanos  Against  Fascism"  and  a  column  of  others 
holding  out  symbols  of  learning — pencils  and  a  ruler — 
rush  forward,  reminiscent  of  The  University  to  the  People, 
the  People  to  the  University  of  Siqueiros.  A  second  wall  at 
the  high  school  connects  the  use  of  Chicanos  in  Vietnam 
to  the  history  of  U.S.  exploitation  of  Mexicans.  A  bald 
eagle  crushes  a  green,  white,  and  red  snake,  an  ironic 
allusion  to  the  national  emblem  of  Mexico.  But  the  bird 
of  prey  is  attacked  by  an  indio  in  Aztec  regalia,  while  an 
ancient  god  lifts  his  hands  to  show  fresh  green  plants 
growing  from  them  as  he  bends  over  a  modern  mestizo 
couple  tilling  a  field. 

Los  Artes  also  did  a  few  works  in  Denver  and  Phoenix, 
and  back  in  their  barrios  in  Santa  F6  they  painted  their 
bold  images  on  the  walls  of  a  clinic,  school,  legal  office 
and  their  own  headquarters  in  a  cottage  where  they  also 
made  music.  Together  with  other  local  Chicanos  they 
were  talking  about  reshaping  the  barrio's  way  of  life 
rather  than  trying  to  become  integrated  into  the  com- 
petitive White  society  which  had  oppressed  them  for 
years.  With  the  example  of  villagers  elsewhere  in  New 
Mexico  trying  to  revive  old  institutions,  Santa  Fe 
Chicanos  were  discussing  how  to  update  the  communi- 
tarian society  of  the  old  pueblos  based  on  agriculture.  To 
carry  forward  this  purpose  Los  Artes  helped  organize  in 
1973  an  alternative  school  and  called  it  Tonantzin  after 
the  mother  of  the  gods,  who  had  appeared  in  their 
murals.  Included  was  a  mural  workshop.  There  were 
seventy-five  regular  students  and  one  hundred  more  who 
came  when  they  could.  In  Septembei*  two  young  men 
fled  into  the  school  pursued  by  police  who  claimed  they 
had  stolen  a  car.  The  police  demanded  the  right  to  enter, 
but  the  teachers  said  that  classes  were  going  on  and 
refused.  Over  one  hundred  police  reinforcements  were 
called  up,  and  shots  fired.  One  student  was  killed  and 
others  were  wounded.   Barrio  residents  were  charged 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  193 


Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztldn:   Untitled  (detail), 
1973,  Las  Vegas  High  School,  Las  Vegas,  New  Mexico. 


Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztldn:  Las  Vegas  High  School 
mural  (detail). 


194  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Joseph  Gomez  (Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztldn):  Un- 
titled, 1974,  Dental  office,  New  Clinica  de  la  Gente, 
Santa  Fe. 


with  wounding  the  poHce  and  a  trial  followed  in  1974. 
The  defendants  were  so  confident  of  their  case  that  they 
chose  not  even  to  present  a  defense,  and  all  were 
acquitted.  The  police,  it  appeared,  had  shot  one  another. 
But  the  trial  took  its  toll.  It  became  harder  than  ever  for 
the  muralists  to  raise  either  public  or  private  funds  to 
carry  on.  The  following  year  Samuel  Leyba,  leader  of 
Lx)s  Artes,  was  optimistic  about  painting  again;  some 
members  were  less  confident,  and  other  barrio  friends 
talked  about  getting  started  on  their  experimental  farm. 
But  as  a  muralist  group,  nothing  more  was  heard  from 
them. 

Albuquerque 

The  first  mural  of  the  community  movement  to  be 
done  here  was  Walter  Boca's  work  in  1973  on  the  outside 
of  the  South  Broadway  Cultural  Center,  which  depicts 
the  creation  of  the  solar  system,  the  flourishing  of  Native 
People's  culture,  and  the  destruction  of  life  on  earth  by 
modern  science  and  cities.  It  was  a  related  theme  that 
Francisco  LaFebre  and  a  group  of  local  people  presented 


on  the  facade  of  the  North  Valley  Community  Center  in 
1975.  Posed  against  the  high  rises  of  booming  Albuquer- 
que and  an  astronaut  are  the  big,  bold  faces  of  ancient 
and  modern  dark-skinned  peoples,  a  fist  as  big  as  they,  a 
farm  workers'  thunderbird,  and  the  grim  stare  of  an 
Indian  threatened  with  crucifixion.  LaFebre  also  embel- 
lished the  inside  and  outside  of  the  Chicano  Studies 
Building  at  the  University  of  New  Mexico  with  indio  and 
Mexican  imagery. 

El  Paso 

Next  to  the  Rio  Grande  here  is  the  Segundo  Barrio, 
ranks  of  cheerless  two-story  red  brick  tenements  that  had 
been  allowed  to  deteriorate.  Urban  renewal  threatened, 
but  residents  organized.  They  also  painted  their  walls 
with  indio  motifs  and  identified  their  community.  On  a 
school  building  in  1976  Carlos  Rosas  and  Felipe  Gallegos 
did  big  faces  of  mestizo  children  with  an  assertive  brown 
eagle  gazing  out  with  the  tenements  behind  them.  They 
signed  their  work  with  a  cucaracha.  On  Tays  Street  a 
tenants'  association  painted  an  image  of  their  efforts  and 
over  it  in  block  lettering  their  "struggle  against  the 
disappearance  of  the  barrio."  In  the  end  they  succeeded 
when  the  juthorities  were  persuaded  that  the  area  should 


Francisco  LaFebre:  Untitled,  1975,  North  Valley  Com- 
munity Center,  Albuquerque. 


Local  residents:  Secundo  Barrio,  1975,  El  Paso. 


Carlos  Rosas  assisted  by  Felipe  Gallegos:  Entelequia, 
1976,  El  Paso. 


196  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


be  refurbished  as  an  act  of  historic  preservation  and  that 
the  tenants  should  be  allowed  to  stay.  Local  culture  was 
also  reaffirmed  by  Ernesto  Martinez  at  the  Bowie  High 
School,  where  he  did  a  mural  with  indio  motifs  in  intense 
streaming  colors  in  1975,  and  the  following  year  opposite 
it  students  did  an  accomplished  montage  of  past  and 
present  El  Paso. 


Cipriano  Cisneros,  Enrique  Garcia,  and  Carlos  Aguirre: 
300   Tays  [Street]   Residents    Pledge   to    Struggle  ■ 
Against  the  Disappearance  of  the  Barrio,  mid-1970s,  \ 
El  Paso. 


Ernesto  Martinez:  Untitled,  1975,  Bowie  High  School, 
El  Paso. 


San  Antonio 

Jesse  Trevino  lost  his  painting  hand  in  Vietnam  in 
1967  and  says  it  took  him  two  years  to  learn  to  paint  with 
his  left.  The  bitterness  with  which  he  returned  still 
shows  in  the  oversized  images  that  press  out  of  his 
bedroom  wall.  There  is  an  attractive  girl's  face  bigger 
than  the  shadowy  portrait  of  himself  in  combat  gear. 
Covering  one  of  her  eyes  is  a  Purple  Heart  held  by  his 
stainless  steel  claw;  and  there  are  glimpses  of  a  beer  can, 
coffee,  bread,  a  car,  and  pills  to  complete  the  Photo- 
Realist  M  Vida  of  1972.  He  became  a  student  at  the  local 
Our  Lady  of  the  Lake  University  and  during  the  Raza 
activism  of  1974  filled  three  sides  of  the  student  lounge 
with  La  Historia  Chicana,  monumental  airbrushed  vig- 
nettes of  indigenous  peoples  contending  with  conquista- 
dores,  a  Zapata-like  figure  lifting  his  rifle  to  the  ceiling, 
and  farm  workers  and  a  young  family  against  their 
thunderbird  banner.  Since  then  he  has  concentrated  on 
large  canvases  in  which  he  records  the  persons  and  places 
of  the  Westside  that  are  close  to  him:  a  snowcone  man  at 


Jesse  Trevino:  Mi  Vida,  1972,  San  Antonio.  (©Jesse 
Trevino) 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  197 

his  stand.  El  Progresso  drugstore,  a  shop  window  with 
religious  articles.  With  such  work  he  has  had  one-man 
shows  and  built  a  successful  career. 

San  Juan 

Here  in  the  lower  Rio  Grande  Valley  the  United  Farm 
Workers  began  organizing  in  1967,  providing  social  ser- 
vices and  undertaking  job  actions  in  the  fields  for  better 
working  conditions,  but  as  late  as  1980  there  were  still  no 
contracts  with  growers.  However,  the  union  spread  to 
colonias  on  both  sides  of  the  border,  and  members  built 
their  own  Centro  Campesino  Miguel  Hidalgo  on  the 
Texas  side,  inviting  Mexican  painter  Artemio  Guerra 
Garza  to  depict  their  struggle  in  its  large  meeting  hall. 
There  on  two  long  walls  in  1974  and  1975  he  showed 
men  and  women,  black,  brown,  and  red,  who  if  they 
could  stand  to  their  full  height  would  burst  through  the 
ceiling.  Instead  they  are  bent  over  by  enwrapping  vines 
and  stoop  labor  with  the  short  hoe.  But  finally  a  farm 
worker's  eagle  seems  to  give  strength  to  one  to  break  the 
crucifix  he  is  bound  to.  Here  for  conferences  in  1978  and 
1980  Adolfo  Martinez  and  Chip  Jeffries  painted  banner 
murals  depicting  the  signing  of  the  longed-for  contract; 
Martinez's  bears  the  caption.  En  Texas,  Si  Se  Puede  (It  can 
be  done). 


Jesse  Trevino:  La  Historia  Chicana,   1974,  Student 
Lounge,  Our  Lady  of  the  Lake  University,  San  Antonio. 

(©Jesse  Trevino) 


Artemio  Guerra  Garza:  Untitled,  1974,  Centro  Catn- 
pesino  Miguel  Hidalgo,  San  Juan,  Texas. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  199 


Artemio  Guerra  Garza:  Untitled,  1975,  Centra  Campes 
sino  Miguel  Hidalgo. 


Tucson 

In  1975  the  first  mural  to  be  painted  in  Tucson  was 
unveiled  on  the  front  of  the  El  Rio  Neighborhood  Center 
to  mark  its  third  anniversary. •»  Chicanos  in  El  Rio  had 
campaigned  since  1970  for  a  facility  because  there  was  a 
municipal  golf  course  but  nothing  that  served  most  of 
them.  Finally  the  city  built  the  center  on  a  two-acre  site, 
and  Antonio  Pazos,  a  twenty-two-year-old  art  student 
from  Hermosillo,  some  two  hundred  miles  to  the  south 
in  Mexico,  was  commissioned  for  one  thousand  dollars  to 
do  the  painting,  which  produced  some  complaints  that  a 
local  Chicano  should  have  been  given  the  job.  However, 
he  worked  with  the  help  of  local  barrio  youth  from  the 
center.  The  result  was  an  extensive  composition  on  two 
sections  of  the  facade,  one  showing  Chicano  and  indio 
families  above  a  pair  of  miners  working  the  earth,  while 
in  the  background  a  hand  reaching  for  a  book  set  among 
Raza  symbols,  indicates  the  desire  to  learn  about  their 
own  culture.  On  the  other  section  a  demonstration  of 
residents  approaches  carrying  a  banner  that  reads  "El  Rio 


Belongs  to  the  People,"  and  above  dark-skinned  hands 
clasp  while  an  Aztec  war  god  dances  and  an  indio  woman 
lifts  her  unchained  arms  to  the  sky.  All  of  this  is  rendered 
in  big,  bold  forms  that  combine  the  flat  images  of  silk- 
screen  posters  with  indigenous  art. 


Chicago 

Painters  in  the  Midwest  and  East  also  sought  by  large 
murals  and  clusters  of  works  to  transform  the  spaces 
where  people  spend  their  daily  lives  into  environments 
that  were  truly  their  o\&n.  Break  the  Grip  of  the  Absentee 
Landlord,  directed  by  Mark  Rogovin  in  1973  and  de- 
scribed in  the  Introduction,  filled  the  entire  side  of  a 
three-story  apartment  building  and  was  larger  than  most 
murals  in  Chicago  at  the  time. 

Already  in  1970  while  warning  against  violence  in  Rip 
Oj^  Mitchell  Caton  had  begun  to  change  the  dreariness  of 
the  ghetto  into  something  that  expressed  his  love  of  color. 
The  area  on  the  South  Side  had  been  the  scene  of 
murders  and  rapes,  but  the  alley  where  he  painted  had 
been  for  years  a  neighborhood  gathering  place.  Every 
Sunday  afternoon  "Pops"  Simpson,  the  local  impresario, 


Antonto  Pazos:   Untitled,   1975,  El  Rw   \eighborhood 
Center,  Tucson.  (Photo  Margot  Panofsky) 


opened  a  red  garage  door  for  a  "jazz  battle"  while  people 
congregated  to  listen  to  the  discs  or  hear  a  live  set. 
During  the  week  also  they  gathered  there  to  meet  friends 
and  do  a  little  gambling.  In  1974  Caton  enlivened  the 
scene  further  by  extending  his  mural  with  musical  imag- 
ery. Down  the  wall  from  roof  to  ground  cascades  a  piano 
keyboard  with  a  pair  of  lilting  hands.  A  friend  wanted  to 
do  a  pair  of  blue  wings  of  the  Egyptian  sun  god  over  the 
red  door,  and  then  Caton  continued  with  Satchmo 
blowing  swirling  colors  from  his  horn.  A  combo  envelops 
him,  and  sheet  music,  bubbles,  glasses,  and  African 
textile  patterns  stream  down  the  brick.  The  opposite  wall 


Mitchell  Caton  (CMC):  Universal  Alley  (partial  view), 
1974,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


is  embellished  with  lilting  abstract  shapes,  and  both  sides 
create  Universal  Alley,  a  refuge  of  beauty  where  people 
can  join  together  for  a  little  pleasure. 

During  these  years  members  of  the  Chicago  Mural 
Group  were  also  doing  extended  works  inside  the  long 
Illinois  Central  viaducts  on  the  South  Side  that  were 
bleak  tunnels  through  which  walkers  had  to  pass.  These 
had  to  be  composed  with  a  view  to  pedestrians  passing 
alongside  them  rather  than  taking  them  in  all  at  one  time 
because  of  the  narrowness  and  thick  pillars  that  inter- 
fered with  a  viewing  of  any  long  stretch.  Overcoming 
these  difficulties  Caryl  Yasko  with  local  young  people 
already  in  1972  at  Fifty-fifth  Street  did  a  procession  of 
nearby  residents  weighed  down  by  city  streets,  smoking 
factories  and  a  military  tank.  And  with  the  images  the 
bitter  words  of  James  Agee's  poem,  "Under  City  Stone," 
follow  the  viewer.  In  another  long  underpass  at  Fifty- 
seventh  Street  in  1973  Astrid  Fuller,  also  with  young 


Caryl  Yasko,  director,  and  local  youth  (CMC):  Under 
City  Stone  (partial  view),  1972,  Hyde  Park,  Chicago. 


Astrid  Fuller  (CMC): 
view),  1973,  Chicago. 


Spirit  of  Hyde  Park  (partial 


Astrid  Fuller  and  local  people  (CMG):  Rebirth  (partial 
view),  1974,  Hyde  Park,  Chicago. 


Rebirth  (partial  view). 


assistants,  did  the  Spirit  of  Hyde  Park,  in  which  they 
described  the  struggle  of  local  people  for  decent  housing 
and  against  the  usual  devastation  of  redevelopment. 

In  1974  in  an  underpass  at  Sixtieth  Street  Fuller 
unreined  her  imagination  to  deal  with  the  causes  and 
solutions  of  urban  decay.  Turning  to  animal  allegory,  she 
showed  a  hospital  operating  room  with  crocodiles  at- 
tending the  Black,  Brown,  and  White  patients  (one  of 
whom  is  another  crocodile)  while  hornets  nest  above. 
Goat  and  rabbit  relatives  watch  helplessly  and  a  toad 
politician  stands  by  with  seeming  concern.  Outside  in  an 
alley  a  hyena  arsonist  is  at  work  while  a  black  panther  is 
about  to  leap  on  him.  And  sitting  among  the  garbage  a 
young  Black  man  reads  in  the  paper  that  there  are  no  jobs 
to  be  had.  The  remaining  panels  illustrate  the  coopera- 
tion of  the  authorities  and  residents  that  is  necessary  and 
that  gives  the  mural  its  title — Rebirth.  This  wall  drew  out 
the  distinctive  qualities  of  Fuller's  style:  a  flat  legibility 
and  stiffness  associated  with  so-called  "primitive  art"  and 
a  biting  fantasy  in  the  service  of  social  analysis. 

In  1975  Fuller  returned  to  the  IC  underpasses  with 
Women^s  Struggle,  using  the  structure  itself  to  illustrate 


Astrid  Fuller  (CMG):    Women's   Struggle   (partial 
view),  1975,  Hyde  Park,  Chicago. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  203 

Harriet  Tubman's  helping  slaves  escape  the  South  by 
way  of  the  Underground  Railroad.  To  this  she  added 
a  scene  of  the  sweatshopping  and  tenement  life  of 
women  and  their  families  caught  inside  a  huge  cobweb. 
Then  followed  details  of  women's  professional  achieve- 
ments, their  struggle  for  the  vote,  and  finally  their  cut- 
ting down  a  totem  pole  of  masculine  fetishes. 

At  the  same  time  that  the  CMG  was  undertaking 
larger  projects,  they  were  also  anxious  to  attempt  collab- 
orations between  their  trained  muralists,  which  had  been 
prevented  by  funding  that  allowed  for  only  a  single  artist 
and  untrained  assistants.  Already  in  1973  Jim 
Yanagisawa  had  painted  with  Santi  Isrowuthakul  (a  Thai 
art  student)  Nikkeijin  No  Rekishi  (History  of  Japanese 
America),  in  which  figured  largely  the  U.S.  concentra- 
tion camps  where  American  citizens  of  Japanese  descent 
were  interned  during  World  War  II.  Isrowuthakul  had 
also  worked  with  George  Stahl  on  The  Wall  of  Generations 
at  the  Christian  Fellowship  Church  in  1972,  where  Oscar 
Martinez  and  Yanagisawa  in  1974  did  a  second  set  of 
murals.  Their  painting.  Latino  and  Asian  American  His- 
tory, is  significant  because  it  was  one  of  the  CMG's  first 
murals  that  concentrated  on  the  theme  of  labor.  It  also 
called  for  interracial  cooperation  in  a  neighborhood  with 


204  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


James  Yatiagisaiva  and  Santi  Isroivuthakul  (CMC):  Nik- 
keijin  no  Rekishi  (History  of  Japanese  America),  1973, 
North  Side,  Chicago. 


Oscar  Martinez  and  James  Yanagisawa,  directors,  with 
assistants  (CMG):  Latino  and  Asian-American  His- 
tory, 1974,  Christian  Fellowship  Church,  North  Side, 
Chicago. 


a  volatile  mix  of  Japanese,  Puerto  Rican,  and  Chicano 
working-class  people.  The  church  had  been  able  to  meld 
a  mixed  congregation,  and  it  wanted  to  reinforce  this 
with  murals.  The  artists  involved  young  people  and 
undertook  two  large  panels  that  covered  a  two-story  wall 
on  the  outside  of  the  church's  community  house.  On  one 
side  of  the  wall's  central  window,  they  depicted  the 
immigration  of  Japanese  to  this  country  and  their  strug- 


gle to  eke  out  a  living  from  the  fishing  industry,  field 
work,  and  sweatshopping.  The  other  side  traces  the  Raza 
experience:  agriculture  in  the  days  before  Cortez, 
present-day  farm  labor  organizing,  migration  to  the 
cities,  and  factory  work.  As  each  era  of  human  effort 
rises  above  the  other  on  each  side  of  the  mural,  the 
figures  move  together  toward  a  center  of  illumination 
that  radiates  from  the  peak  of  the  building's  roof — not 


necessarily  a  religious  aura  so  much  as  the  glow  of  a 
better  life  that  can  be  won  by  cooperative  effort.  This 
was  acted  out  by  the  artists  themselves,  who  in  the 
course  of  the  painting  worked  on  one  another's 
panels — Martinez  on  the  Japanese  side  and  Yanagisavv  a 
on  the  Latino.  Other  such  collaborations  by  CMG  artists 
were  to  follow  and  developed  a  number  of  new  themes 
during  this  period  which  will  be  discussed  shortly. 
William  Walker,  who  Weber  says,  had  been  a  mentor 
to  all  of  them  and  carried  great  moral  weight,  left 
the  group  in  late  1974.  However,  the  following  year  he 
painted  with  two  CMG  muralists,  Mitchell  Caton  and 
Santi  Isrowuthakul,  Daydreaming  and  Mans  Inhumanity  to 
Men,  which  w  ill  be  turned  to  in  a  later  chapter. 

.More  extensive  projects  were  also  being  undertaken  by 
Mario  Galan  and  the  Puerto  Rican  Art  Association  be- 
tween 1973  and  1974  with  their  painting  of  the  three 
sides  of  the  courtyard  of  the  Puerto  Rican  Congress. 
There,  scenes  of  the  homeland — cutting  cane,  Morro 
Castle,  a  thatched  hut  surrounding  the  main  entrance — 
alternate  with  portraits  of  leaders  and  silhouettes  of 
political  struggle,  as  well  as  semiabstractions  of  musi- 
cians, masks,  and  indio  sculpture. 


Mario  Galdn  and  assistants:  Courtyard  murals  of  the 
Puerto  Rican  Congress,  1972-74,  Northwest  Side, 
Chicago. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  205 

The  instinct  of  people  of  Mexican  heritage  to  use  art  to 
create  an  environment  that  is  their  own  was  demon- 
strated by  the  residents  of  Pilsen  from  the  time  that  Ray 
Patlan  began  covering  the  walls  of  the  auditorium  at  Casa 
Aztlan  in  1970.  The  following  year  .Mexican  imagery 
spread  out  the  main  entrance  to  the  exterior  and  then  to 
the  walls  of  the  community.  By  1974  the  murals  that  he 
guided  together  with  the  earlier  walls  of  Castillo  and 
work  by  additional  artists  like  .Marcos  Raya  were  giving  a 
new  character  to  an  area  of  smallish,  gabled  red  brick 
houses  that  dated  back  to  the  nineteenth  century  and  that 
were  hedged  in  by  hulking  factories  and  railroad  em- 
bankments. While  one  team  was  extending  Reforma  y 
Libertad  along  the  streetfront  of  a  woodwork  plant  in 
the  summer  of  1974,  another  was  painting  the  outside  of 
the  day-care  building  across  the  street  from  Casa  Aztlan 
and  yet  another  group  was  doing  a  wall  in  a  neighbor- 
hood playground.  And  along  the  retaining  walls  of  a 
railway  embankment  children  had  painted  their  own 
trains. 

As  early  as  1971  artists  on  the  West  Side  began 
painting  walls  along  the  railroad  on  Hubbard  Street,  and 
by  1975  they  had  completed  a  large  part  of  what  they 
hoped  would  be  a  mile-long  sequence.'"  Ricardo  Alonzo 
with  the  aid  of  students  began  it  with  a  series  of  panels 
titled  Stop  Now  Gallery  and  extended  them  as  Chicago 
Gallery  I  and  //in  1973.   Their  subject  was  wildlife  and 


206  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

the  endangering  of  the  environment.  In  1975  the  West 
Town  Community  Youth  Art  Center  with  funding  from 
Model  Cities  and  local  business  sponsored  a  Bicentennial 
sequence  of  thirty-two  additional  panels  that  came  to  be 
called  Ethnic  Culture:  U.S.A.  Eight  of  these  under  the 
direction  of  Jose  G.  Gonzalez,  chairperson  of  MARCH 
(Movimiento  Artistico  Chicano),  and  with  the  help  of 
additional  Raza  artists  were  devoted  to  Central  American 
indio  cultures.  Anibal  Rojas  led  the  team  that  painted 
eight  more  concerned  with  North  American  Indians. 
Another  eight,  "The  Museum  of  American  and  Euro- 
pean Folk  Art,"  were  done  by  a  team  directed  by  Rose 
Divita.  And  Terry  Irwin  of  Richmond,  Virginia,  coor- 
dinated the  remainder,  which  were  occupied  with  Afri- 
can cultures  and  were  titled  "Upendo  Ni  Pamoja"  (Love 
Is  Together).  Altogether  they  were  the  outgrowth  of  an 
impulse  not  merely  to  bigness  but  to  create  a  humanly 
expressive  habitat  in  the  inner  city. 

During  the  1974/75  school  year  the  Public  Art  Work- 
shop coordinated  murals  in  twenty  city  and  suburban 
schools.'^"  One  of  these  at  the  College  of  DuPage  in- 
volved nineteen  students  under  the  direction  of  Mark 
Rogovin  who  painted  a  history  of  the  area  and  the 
college's  contribution  to  it.  The  history  of  Rockford  and 
the  need  for  cooperation  of  all  who  live  there  was  the 
subject  of  boys  from  a  local  home  for  delinquents  who 
were  assisted  by  Rogovin.  And  in  Joliet,  Kathleen  Farrell 
of  the  PAW  and  Valerie  Krakar,  a  local  artist,  worked 
with  a  summer  youth  program,  women  from  construc- 
tion firms  and  other  residents  on  the  city's  first  mural. 
Downtown  Is  Our  Town,  a  call  to  rebuild  and  humanize 
the  decayed  urban  center. 

Baltimore 

Outdoor  community  murals  came  to  artistically  con- 
servative Baltimore  in  1974  as  a  result  of  Mayor 
Schaefer's  announcement  the  previous  year  of  an  open 
competition  to  select  ten  designs  that  were  judged  by  a 
professional  panel  and  funded  by  the  NEA.  Predictably 
the  designs  were  largely  abstract  and  decorative  with  the 
exception  of  a  Bicentennial  work  done  by  Bob 
Hieronimus,  which  fused  occult  art  and  social  commen- 
tary. In  1975  CETA  funding  for  the  arts  made  possible 
the  beginning  of  the  "Beautiful  Walls  for  Baltimore" 
program  that  commissioned  ten  murals  each  year  and 
was  still  continuing  in  1979.  Its  purpose,  says  Monique 
Goss,  who  directed  it  for  two  years,  is  "to  bring  art  back 
to  'the  people'  and  to  support  local  artists."  It  too  in- 
volved the  selection  of  artists  and  screening  of  their 
designs  by  a  municipal  panel,  but  the  approval  of  the 
neighborhood  where  the  work  was  done  was  also  neces- 
sary. 

Once  again  supergraphics  and  ornamental  works  were 
most  common,  but  there  were  important  exceptions. 
One  was  an  abstraction  that  was  done  by  Goss  herself  in 
1975.  It  was  designed  for  the  end  wall  of  a  line  of  row 


houses  in  a  Polish  and  Lithuanian  neighborhood,  and  she 
researched  the  folk  art  of  these  cultures  to  come  up  with  a 
composition  that  would  be  locally  meaningful.  When  she 
showed  residents  that  she  had  drawn  her  motifs  from 
their  heritage,  they  readily  approved  them,  she  says. 

During  that  year  also  a  pair  of  artists,  Pontella  Mason 
and  James  Voshell,  one  Black,  the  other  White,  collabo- 
rated on  three  projects.  The  largest  was  a  series  of  five 
panels  for  the  waiting  room  of  the  Department  of  Social 
Services  in  Johnston  Square,  where,  as  Voshell  describes 
it,  women  with  hungry  babies  and  the  elderly  whose  gas 
and  electricity  have  been  cut  off  come  for  help.  There  the 
artists  offered  a  series  of  draftsmanlike  genre  scenes  of 
the  inner  city — people  marketing,  street  repairmen  at 
their  work,  a  woman  and  child  waiting  at  a  bus  stop, 
children  scrambling  over  a  jungle  gym,  a  jazz  combo. 
One  panel  shows  with  great  attention  to  their  glances  and 
gestures,  Black  folks  chatting  and  sunning  themselves 
along   their   doorstoops.    Yet   another   titled   "Arabs — 


Monique  Goss  assisted  by  Robert  Maddox  (Beautiful 
for  Baltimore):  Untitled,  1975,  Baltimore. 


Walls 


James  Voshell  assisted  by  Pontella  Mason:  The  Gather- 
ing, 197S,  Department  of  Social  Services.  (Photo  James 
Voshell) 


James  Voshell  and  Pontella  Mason  (BWB):  Lobby  murals, 
1975,  Department  of  Social  Services,  Johnston  Square, 
Baltimore.  (Photo  James  Voshell) 


James  Voshell:  Arabs— Refuse  Market,  1975,  Depart- 
ment of  Social  Services. 


208  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Refuse  Market,"  done  by  Voshell  alone,  depicts  men 
picking  over  the  scavengings  of  peddlers  as  kids  peer  at 
the  goods  abandoned  by  those  who  could  afford  to  do 
without  them.  The  "A-rabs,"  as  Voshell  says  they  are 
pronounced,  are  not  Arabs  at  all  but  Blacks  who  sell  their 
wares  at  customary  curb  sites  in  the  poorer  neighbor- 
hoods. The  two  painters  worked  six  months  in  the  Social 
Services  lobby.  People  would  come  up  to  them  and  say 
that  they  knew  the  folks  in  the  picture,  knew  the  street. 
Voshell  observes  that  "They  were  joyous  with  recogni- 
tion and  many  barriers  were  transgressed  with  paint  and 
brushes." 

One  of  the  other  works  that  Voshell  and  .Mason  did  in 
1975  showed  Black  men  absorbed  in  a  sidewalk  checker 
game,  and  the  other,  a  racially  mixed  group  of  kids  with 
their  tricycles  and  wagons  on  a  wall  opposite  a  recently 
integrated  school.  Voshell  says  about  their  murals: 

On  the  walls  of  a  neighborhood  an  image  becomes  a 
constant  intrusion  into  the  lives  of  the  people  in  the 
immediate  environment.  I  tried  to  project  an  accurate 
reality;  one  that  touches  or  communicates  ethnic  and 
social  pride  or  recognition.  I  tried  in  these  murals  not 
to  slap  the  people  in  the  face  but  to  generate  acceptable 
feelings  and  thoughts  about  themselves. 

Although  these  projects  were  the  only  murals  Voshell 
has  done,  his  easel  scale  work  deals  with  the  same 
inner-city  material.  Painting  from  candid  photos  he  takes 
with  a  200-mm  lens,  he  describes  his  work  as  "social 
documentary  realism."  He  had  given  up  a  promising 
career  as  an  art  teacher,  moved  into  a  warehouse  in  the 
inner  city  that  was  his  subject  and  survived  by  small  sales 
of  his  art.  Characterizing  himself  as  a  "hard-core  roman- 


yNayne  Cambern  assisted  by  Susan  Earle  (BWB):  Un- 
titled, 1975,  Baltimore. 


tic,"  he  believes  that  his  painting  life  in  the  streets  will 
make  things  better  for  the  people  who  live  there.  He  says 
about  his  murals  that  "It  was  like  putting  something  back 
from  where  I  had  derived  so  much." 

A  community  celebration  is  treated  with  affection  and 
humor  in  a  very  long  mural  that  Wayne  Cambern  did  in 
an  Italian  neighborhood  in  1975  as  part  of  Beautiful 
Walls.  It  is  a  scene  of  a  church  festa  painted  on  the  gable 
end  of  a  three-story  building  and  continues  along  an 
adjoining  wall.  Cambern  transformed  the  higher  section 
into  the  facade  of  a  church  with  dignitaries,  including 
Mayor  Schaefer,  standing  on  its  steps  and  joining  in  a 
street  procession  led  by  choir  boys,  flag  bearers,  and 
priests  carrying  the  statue  of  a  saint.  Locals  watch  from 
the  sidewalk,  a  pizza  cook  gleefully  flings  his  pie  dough 
into  the  air,  and  w  ine  is  poured  at  an  outdoor  table.  All  of 
this  occurs  against  Baltimore's  brick  rowhouses,  some  of 
them  the  beneficiaries  of  efforts  to  dignify  them  with 
artificial  stone.  The  celebrants  are  rendered  in  a  gentle 
cartoon  style  that  approximates  the  light-hearted  mood 
with  which  many  of  them  seem  to  enjoy  the  event. 

Philadelphia 

The  Walls  of  Respect  that  made  their  first  appearance 
in  Philadelphia  in  1972  became  more  elaborate  in  suc- 
ceeding years.  Clarence  Wood  of  the  .Museum  of  Art's 
Department  of  Urban  Outreach  designed  them  in  a 
decorative  way  often  against  a  background  of  stripes  and 
rays  on  the  outside  walls  of  schools  and  recreation  cen- 
ters. The  youngsters  filled  in  the  color.  At  the  West 
Philadelphia  Girls  and  Boys  Club  there  were  larger  than 
life  portraits  of  King  Tut,  .Malcolm  X,  Ameer  Baraka 
(Le  Roi  Jones),  Jomo  Kenyatta,  Haile  Selassie,  Aretha 
Franklin,  and  Harriet  Tubman.  At'  the  James  Rhodes 
School  against  the  Black  liberation  colors  were  Marian 


Anderson,  the  Jackson  Five,  Shirley  Chisholm,  Adam 
(>layton  Pouell,  Muhammad  All,  and  more. 

On  a  visit  in  1974  with  Wood  to  the  Greenway  Rec- 
reation Center  decorated   with  the  faces  of  Malcolm, 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  209 

King,  and  Jesse  Jackson,  1  listened  while  he  was  asked 
by  the  youngsters  if  he  would  help  them  do  another  wall 
they  had  already  primed.  They  wanted  to  paint  a  portrait 
of  one  of  their  friends  who  had  been   killed  in  gang 


Clarence  Wood  and  Gary  Smalls,  directors,  with  Icoal 
youth  and  artists  (DUO):  Untitled,  1973,  West  Philadel- 
phia Boys  and  Girls  Club.  Wood  is  examining  the  surface. 


Wayne  Cambern  assisted  by  Susan  Earle:  detail. 


2 10 /COMMUNITY  MURALS 


S barton  Lowe  and  the  Chinese  Youth  Coalition,  coor- 
dinated by  Don  Kaiser  (DUO):  The  Dragon  Wall, 
1973,  Chinatown,  Philadelphia. 

warfare.  This  presented  a  serious  problem  to  Wood,  for 
he  wondered  whether  he  should  help  reinforce  the  teen- 
agers' idea  that  the  dead  young  man  was  also  a  hero  to  be 
admired  and  emulated.  Later  Wood  decided  to  go  ahead 
with  the  mural,  and  three  previously  feuding  gangs 
cooperated  in  creating  it. 

When  in  1973  the  proposal  for  a  ramp  to  the  Ben 
Franklin  Bridge  that  crosses  the  Delaware  River 
threatened  to  slice  another  corner  from  Philadelphia's 
already  ravaged  Chinatown  and  to  destroy  the  oldest 
Chinese  Catholic  church  in  the  country,  local  people 
contacted  DUO.  Don  Kaiser  came  out  and  provided 
technical  assistance  to  the  Chinese  Youth  Coalition  that 
designed  and  executed  an  imaginative  mural  showing  a 
dragon  rising  up  against  the  curve  of  the  ramp  and 
wrecking  equipment.  Sharton  Lowe  was  the  principal 
artist,  and  the  work  came  to  be  called  The  Dragon  Wall. 
Kaiser  also  secured  a  hot-air  balloon  and  helped  the 
neighborhood  send  it  aloft  to  draw  public  attention  to  the 
issue.  Together  with  political  pressure  the  mural  helped 
block  the  ramp  and  keep  the  community  intact. 

In  1974  the  well-to-do  residents  of  the  old  red  brick 
houses  along  Philadelphia's  narrow  Hicks  Street  became 
exasperated  with  the  graffiti  that  confronted  them  on  a 
hotel  wall,  and  they  got  permission  to  do  a  mural  on  it. 
One  of  them  did  the  abstract  design,  and  they  sought 
technical  advice  from  DUO.  The  neighbors  did  the 
painting  in  four  days  and  celebrated  its  completion  with  a 
party  beneath  it  at  which  they  glowingly  described  how 
the  painting  had  brought  them  together. 


James  Kirk  Merrick  and  residents,  coordinated  by  Clarence 
Wood  and  Don  Kaiser  (DUO):  Untitled,  1974,  Drake 
Hotel  Ballroom,  Philadelphia. 

The  Friendly  Talking  Wall  was  the  result  of  students  and 
teachers  taking  advantage  of  a  construction-site  fence 
around  an  extension  of  the  Friends  Select  School  in  1974. 
It  was  divided  into  a  series  of  panels  on  which  they  did  a 


free  copy  of  The  Peaceable  Kingdom  of  Edward  Hicks,  the 
nineteenth-century  Quaker  leader  who  painted  nearly 
one  hundred  versions  of  what  he  beHeved  was  WilUam 
Penn's  fulfilling  of  the  biblical  vision  of  wild  and  domes- 
tic animals  dwelling  amicably  together.  To  the  left  Penn 
is  making  what  is  sometimes  regarded  as  the  only  fair 
treaty  between  Whites  and  Indians.  The  design  of  this 
Hicks  had  borrowed  from  the  earlier  Quaker  painter 
Benjamin  West,  and  the  students  did  a  linear  rendering 
of  this  and  a  portrait  of  West  further  along  the  fence. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  in 

Another  panel  displayed  a  great  sailing  ship  with  the 
caption  "Those  who  would  mend  the  winds,  shouldst 
FIRST  MEND  THEMSELVES."  There  was  a  portrait  also 
of  an  Indian  with  the  incantation:  "Cover  my  earth 
Mother  4  times  with  many  flowers.  ..."  To  these  were 
added  some  psychedelic  designs  and  a  pair  of  enormous 
eyes  gazing  back  at  you.  Altogether  the  wall  evoked  a 
sense  of  heritage,  personal  uplift,  and  generous  feelings 
characteristic  of  many  young  people  from  comfortable 
homes. 


Students  and  faculty:  Friendly  Talking  Wall  (partial 
view),  1974,  Friends  Select  School,  Philadelphia. 


Friendly  Talking  Wall  (partial  view). 


212  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

New  Jersey 

One  of  the  feu  college-based  groups  to  remain  to- 
gether to  do  murals  over  a  number  of  years  were  the 
People's  Painters,  organized  by  Eva  Cockcroft  at 
Livingston  College,  a  branch  of  Rutgers  University,  in 
Piscatavvay,  New  Jersey.  Their  story  is  told  well  by 
Cockcroft  in  Towards  a  People's  Art,  but  a  few  points 
about  it  are  worth  emphasizing.  The  group  came  into 
being  as  a  result  of  Cockcroft  having  spent  a  summer  in 
Chile  in  1972  where  she  met  and  painted  with  the 
Brigada  Ramona  Parra,  politically  progressive  young 
people  averaging  seventeen  years  old,  who  had  organized 
themselves  into  painting  teams  to  support  the  election  of 
Salvador  Allende  three  years  earlier.  The  brigades  came 
into  existence  because  his  Popular  Unity  coalition  could 
not  match  the  public  relations  effort  mounted  by  the 
incumbent  Christian  Democrats,  the  party  of  the  corpo- 
rate establishment  which  dominated  the  media.  A 
brigade  of  no  more  than  a  dozen  members  would  go  out 
at  night  and  paint  their  slogans  and  increasingly  more 
elaborate  imagery  on  walls.  To  elude  the  police  and 
opposition,  they  had  to  work  quickly  and  developed  an 
effective  guerrilla  mural  technique  of  one  member 
painting  the  prearranged  design  in  bold  black  outlines 
with  other  members  following  to  fill  in  the  spaces,  each 
with  his  own  color.  They  borrowed  the  simple,  bold 
manner  of  Fernand  Leger,  the  French  painter,  who 
depicted  working  people  in  forms  that  combined  ancient 
classicism  and  the  modern  machine.  After  Allende  was 
elected,  the  brigades  continued  to  paint  subjects  of 
popular  struggles,  but  now  they  could  work  more  lei- 
surely, invite  community  people  and  workers  to  paint 
with  them  and  do  more  complex  designs.^' 


Brigada  Ramona  Parra:  Untitled,  early  1970s,  Santiago, 
Chile.  (Photo  Eva  Crockcroft) 


Cockcroft,  who  was  a  teaching  assistant  at  Rutgers 
where  she  was  working  on  a  master's  degree  in  art 
history,  brought  back  to  nearby  Livingston  College  her 
enthusiasm  for  these  murals,  showed  slides  and  formed  a 
group  of  women's  painters  who  wanted  to  work  collec- 
tively. Their  first  mural  was  for  the  Women's  Center  on 
campus. ^^  Calling  themselves  the  People's  Painters,  they 
later  welcomed  men  to  their  collective.  In  1973  they  did 
murals  for  the  Sociology  Department,  the  Student 
Union,  and  then  a  series  of  guerrilla  works  on  outside 
walls  to  speak  out  quickly  on  issues  like  a  local  incident  of 
police  brutality  or  the  overthrow  of  the  democratic  gov- 
ernment in  Chile. 

Hardly  more  than  a  month  after  the  Chilean  coup  in 
1973,  members  of  the  People's  Painters  and  New  York's 
Cityarts  Workshop  joined  with  other  artists,  some  Latin 
American,  to  protest  publicly  the  atrocities  committed 
by  the  junta,  including  the  whitewashing  of  the  Ramona 
Parra  Brigade  murals.  They  recreated  from  photos  one 
hundred  feet  of  a  mural  that  had  been  painted  in  Santiago 
along  the  Rio  Mapocho,  reproducing  it  on  eight-foot 
laminated  panels  that  were  painted  with  the  help  of 
passersby  on  a  street  in  Soho,  lower  Manhattan's  gallery 
district.  Later  they  carried  them  up  to  midtown  and 
displayed  them  in  front  of  a  Chilean  airline  office  on  Fifth 
Avenue. ^^ 

Cockcroft  remarks  on  the  continuing  enthusiasm  of  the 
People's  Painters  in  spite  of  the  harassment  from  univer- 
sity officials  and  the  difficulty  of  keeping  a  student  group 
together.  In  1974  members  began  doing  murals  in  the 
community,  and  by  the  following  year  most  of  them  had 
graduated. 

The  murals  of  the  People's  Painters  and  the  Ramona 
Parra  Brigades  are  important  because  they  illustrate 
again  that  the  making  of  effective  public  statements  need 
not  be  denied  lay  persons.  Here  is  one,  among  a  number 
of  techniques,  by  which  they  can  directly  voice  their 
concerns  with  the  help  of  one  or  two  persons  with  at  least 
some  experience.  And  they  can  learn  on  the  job.  These 
muralists  also  demonstrated  a  method  of  overcoming  the 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  lU 


obstacles  of  getting  permission,  which  has  seldom  been 
taken  advantage  of  by  community  muralists.  Thi 
People's  Painters  also  found  that  once  the  murals  were  up 
that  it  was  important  to  get  quick  news  coverage  so  that 
they  could  get  maximum  visibility  before  they  were 
removed  or,  if  possible,  mobilize  public  support  to  pre- 
vent this. 


People's  Painters:  The  Livingston  Experience,  1973, 
Multipurpose  room,  Student  Union,  Livingston  College, 
Piscataway,  New  Jersey.  (Photo  Eva  Cocker  oft) 


People's  Painters:   Unite  to   End   Police   Brutality, 

1973,  Livingston  College.  (Photo  Eva  Cockcroft) 


2 14  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

J 


New  York         i 

A  work  that  was  hailed  by  the  press  as  the  "largest 
mural  in  New  York  City"  may  not  be  that,  though  it  is 
very  big — 27  X  1 16  feet — but  it  is  more.  Painted  in  1973 
on  a  wall  of  the  Wright  Brothers  High  School  facing  a 
major  uptown  intersection,  it  shows  monumental 
portraits  of  neighborhood  adults  of  the  different  races 
looming  over  a  school  building  and  reaching  down  to 
encourage  young  people.  Among  them  is  a  teacher  read- 
ing with  a  child,  and  a  player  who  seems  to  be  not  only 
tossing  a  basket  but  also  waving  on  a  line  of  students 
moving  toward  careers.  The  design  is  very  simple  and 
the  scale  enormous,  but  what  is  moving  are  the  portraits 
of  all  the  figures  that  are  generalized  in  a  manner  that 
draws  out  their  dignity  but  treats  what  is  personal  in 
their  faces  with  unusual  tenderness.  Its  title  is  Let  a 
People,  Loving  Freedom,  Come  to  Growth.  The  painting  was 
directed  by  Lucy  .Mahler  who  was  assisted  by  her  fellow 
artists  from  the  Freedom  and  Peace  Mural  Project  that 
was  organized  to  do  murals  in  Washington  Heights,  a 
largely  working-class  district.  After  getting  the  approval 
of  what  they  thought  was  all  the  necessary  adminis- 
trators, they  manned  a  table  in  front  of  the  school 
displaying  a  draft  sketch.  They  sent  letters  home  to 
parents  asking  their  views  and  collected  over  one 
thousand  signatures  endorsing  the  project.  Hardly  had 
the  artists  begun  work  with  the  students  on  the  wall, 
when  an  unsympathetic  custodian  had  them  arrested  for 
cleaning  graffiti  off  it;  and  only  months  after  the  finishing 
of  the  work  was  community  pressure  strong  enough  to 


People's  Painters:  Allende  Mural,   1973,  Livingston 
College.  (Photo  Eva  Crockcroft) 


persuade  the  school  to  pay  at  least  for  the  materials  to 
embellish  its  building,  to  say  nothing  of  fees  for  the 
artists. 

On  Manhattan's  East  Side,  downtown  and  uptown, 
the  nationalist  flags  of  Puerto  Rico  appear  again  and  again 
on  the  brick  of  tenements  facing  empty  lots  where 
buildings  have  been  torn  down  and  people  linger.  Di- 
rectly opposite  the  Cathedral  of  Saint  John  the  Divine 
one  of  these  lots  with  Plaza  Caribe  painted  on  a  wall  was 
circled  in  1974  with  these  flags,  peeling  murals  -and 
inscriptions  such  as  Mr.  Barret  no  tiene  nada,  esso  es  nuestro 
sacraficio,  lucha.  .  .  .  Proletarios  del  mundo  unios,  la  lucha 
continua  (.Mr.  Barret  gives  nothing,  this  is  our  sacrifice, 
struggle.  .  .  .  Proletarians  of  the  world,  unite,  the  strug- 
gle goes  on).  The  struggle  seemed  to  refer  to  either  a  rent 
strike  or  squatters  occupying  a  condemned  building.  At 
the  base  of  one  wall  was  a  simply  painted  mural  of  about 
7X12  feet  showing  a  mother  and  child  pointing  to  the 
sun  while  friends  follow  their  gestures  with  their  gazes. 
It  was  captioned  jLiberacion!  In  another  vacant  site  a  few 
doors  away  where  a  small  garden  had  been  planted,  the 
brick  wall  was  whitened  and  the  faces  of  Albizu  Campos 
and  Guevara  were  carefully  painted  in.  The  caption  read 
Libertad  Pa'  Los  Presos  Politicos  (Free  Political  Prisoners) 
and  then  Todos  al  Garden  Oct.  27.  It  was  signed  PSP 
(Puerto  Rican  Socialist  Party).  The  prisoners  the  painter 
must  have  had  in  mind  were  Lolita  Lebron  and  her 
companions  who  still  were  in  prison  since  their  assault  on 
Congress  in    1954.   The  rally  at  the   Madison   Square 


Utcy  Mahler,  director,  artists  of  the  Peace  and  Freedom 
Mural  Project,  and  students:  Let  a  People,  Loving 
Freedom,  Come  to  Growth  (detail)  1973,  Wright 
Brothers  School,  Washington  Heights,  New  York  City. 


Scale  (1973-75)/ 215 

Garden  brought  together  twenty  thousand  people  to  call 
for  Puerto  Rican  independence. 

In  the  early  seventies  a  long  frieze  recalling  joyous 
fiestas  in  Puerto  Rico  spanned  the  entrance  to  the  Museo 
del  Barrio,  an  art  school  and  gallery  in  a  public  housing 
project  in  Spanish  Harlem. 

In  1973  Hank  Prussing,  who  was  not  Puerto  Rican 
himself,  began  painting  the  side  of  a  four-story  tenement 
in  Spanish  Harlem  with  portraits  of  local  people  whom 
he  had  photographed.  There  between  the  windows  they 
lounged,  held  a  kid  brother  or  played  a  ukulele.  Bigger 
than  life  there  were  a  middle-aged  woman  in  her  apron,  a 
crooner  pouring  his  heart  into  a  mike,  a  girl  in  shorts  and 
high  wedges,  a  cop  and  resident  chatting.  After  a  fire  in 
1974  the  building  was  to  be  torn  down,  but  the  mural's 
sf)onsor,  Hope  Community,  Inc.,  a  neighborhood  or- 
ganization that  does  housing  rehabilitation  and  maintains 
a  local  center  and  art  program,  succeeded  in  saving  the 
structure  and  its  painting.  Prussing  added  more  portraits 
including  a  group  of  old-timers  playing  dominoes.  One 
of  them  who  had  been  a  regular  spectator  of  Prussing's 
work  died  three  years  before  his  portrait  was  completed. 
Manuel  Vega  painted  the  ground  level  with  a  flag  and 
what  appeared  to  be  signs  and  advertisements  pasted 
over  each  other  which  were  intended  to  accommodate 
real  posters  and  graffiti.  In  the  doorway  the  artists  added 
silhouettes  of  the  fellows  who  helped  with  the  scaffold- 
ing. Finally,  in  November  1978,  The  Spirit  of  East  Harlem 
was  dedicated,  and  Hope  was  trying  to  purchase  the 
building  and  arrange  for  murals  across  the  street  at 
Public  School  72. 

In  1973  Jame^  Jannuzzi  of  Cityarts  worked  with 
Puerto  Rican  and  Black  teenagers  of  the  Lower  East  Side 
where  there  was  an  interracial  coalition  which  he  wanted 
the  mural  to  reflect.^'*  They  set  up  a  workshop  in  the 
basement  of  a  neighborhood  artist  where  other  artists, 
who  lived  nearby  because  of  modest  rentals,  dropped  in 
and  began  to  contribute  to  the  design.  The  resulting 
composition  represented  the  power  of  murals  to  draw 
together  people  of  varied  skills  and  interests.  It  was  on  a 
big  wall  of  a  market  and  showed  the  Black  heritage  of 
Egyptian  pyramids  and  a  jungle  drummer,  a  portrait  of 
the  Puerto  Rican  patriot  Ramon  Betances,  and  a  ukulele 


Local  tenants:  Plaza  Caribe  Murals  (photographed  in 
1974),  Momingside  Heights,  New  York  City. 


'^ff"£?WA[<itiS 


216  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  tenants:   jLiberacion!   (photographed  in  1974), 
Plaza  Caribe,  Morningside  Heights,  New  York  City. 


Unsigned:  'Tree  Political  Prisoners,"  1974,  PSP  (Puerto 
Rican  Socialist  Party),  Morningside  Heights,  New  York 
City. 


Scale  (1973-75)11X1 


Unsigned:  Museo  del  Barrio  Mural  (photographed  in 
1974),  Spanish  Harlem,  New  York. 


Local  youth  and  artists  directed  by  James  Jannuzzi  (City- 
arts):  Ghetto  Ecstasy,  1973,  Lower  East  Side,  New 
York. 


218  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


player.  Local  gangs  were  acknowledged  by  their  colors 
on  the  spears  around  a  door.  And  thrusting  forward 
through  prison  bars  was  an  image  that  embodied  its 
t'\t\c— -Ghetto  Ecstasy. 

Cityarts  murals  had  always  been  large.  From  1972  and 
Arise  from  Oppression  its  works  became  among  the  largest 
single  panels  in  the  community-based  movement.  They 
seemed  to  be  trying  to  make  a  statement  that  could  have 
some  impact  in  spite  of  the  scale  of  the  city,  and  the 
artists  v\  anted  to  involve  large  numbers  of  young  people 
on  their  teams.  On  a  1974  project  that  Alan  Okada 
directed,  seven  stories  of  scaffolding  were  necessary  and 
veterans  of  previous  murals  were  employed.  It  looked  out 
across  a  schoolyard  to  a  major  crosstown  street.  Okada 
described  the  w  all  as  an  effort  to  be  outspoken  about  the 
relation  of  American  imperialism  to  neighborhood 
people.  When  the  scaffolding  came  down,  what  was  to  be 
seen  was  a  life-size  tenement  in  cross  section.  On  each 
floor  succeeding  generations  of  Asian-Americans  are 
shown  struggling  to  break  out,  from  the  time  of  coolie 
labor  on  the  railroads  to  confinement  in  U.S.  concentra- 
tion camps  during  World  War  II.  White  hardhats  resist 
their  efforts  to  escape  from  the  ramshackle  structure, 
while  a  mother  inside  is  making  payments  to  a  gray- 
suited  arm  that  becomes  one  of  the  tentacles  of  an 
octopus  that  tangles  an  American  flag.  Finally  the  young 
generation  breaks  through  the  roof  with  gestures  of 
liberation  as  their  counterparts  from  the  other  races  join 
them.  The  title  is  Chi  Lai — Arriba — Rise  Up! 

In  1975  Okada  led  another  Cityarts  workshop  that 
produced  a  mural  that  was  large  even  by  their  standards. 
The  painters  were  mostly  Asian  and  had  tried  to  get 
other  walls  before  they  received  permission  to  work  on 
the  side  of  a  tenement  overlooking  a  parking  lot  and 
Delancey  Street.  This  was  a  Puerto  Rican  neighborhood 
where  people  were  divided,  Okada  recalls,  between  sup- 
porters of  statehood  and  independence.  The  artists  de- 
cided to  design  a  work  calling  for  Puerto  Rico  Libre,  as  one 
of  its  banners  proclaims.  Portraits  of  Lolita  Lebron  were 
joined  by  those  of  Ho  Chi  Minh,  Malcolm  X,  and  Angela 
Davis.  But  the  owners  of  the  parking  lot  were  Vietnam 
vets  and  objected  to  the  image  of  Ho;  finally  the  muralists 
removed  all  of  the  portraits.  The  completed  work  looks 
even  higher  than  its  six  stories  because  of  the  tilt-back 
perspective,  which  begins  with  residents  at  the  ground 
supporting  a  nationalist  flag  that  curls  upward  and  be- 
comes a  red  banner  born  by  triumphant  figures  at  the 
top.  This  was  intended  to  suggest  support  for  Puerto 
Rican  socialism  in  general  rather  than  for  any  particular 
party,  Okada  says.  Caught  in  a  lower  furl  are  local  people 
drawing  each  other  up  out  of  the  slums  and  joining  a 
march.  Above  are  workers  directing  their  own  mill 
where  the  windows  ray  out  from  a  dynamo.  A  similar 
sense  of  energy  is  conveyed  by  the  splaying  rows  of 
cultivated  fields  and  paddies  nearby.  At  the  top  a  bare- 

Local  youth  directed  by  Alan  Okada  (Cityarts):  Work, 
Education,  and  Struggle:  Seeds  for  Progressive 
Change,  1975,  Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  2\9 


chested  worker  swings  a  sledge  hammer  out  of  the  wall 
while  a  colleague  holds  out  a  Little  Red  Book  and  other 
demonstrators  carry  placards  with  the  mural's  message 
and  title:  Work,  Education  and  Struggle:  Seeds  for  Progressive 
Change.  Drawing  on  the  enthusiastic  imagery  of  Chinese 
Socialist  Realism,  the  mural  risked  credibility  because  it 
adopted  conventions  wholesale  that  were  either  unfamil- 
iar or  could  be  lightly  discounted  by  local  viewers  as 
rhetoric.  This  was  clearly  intended  as  a  visionary  mural, 
the  dream  of  a  future  worth  working  for,  but  the  problem 
was  to  make  it  plausible.  Technically,  the  mural  is 
interesting  for  its  melding  of  multiple  points  of  view  and 
its  dramatic  perspectives  borrowed  from  Chinese  illus- 
tration. 

That  summer  Alfredo  Hernandez  directed  another 
C>ityarts  project  that  was  almost  as  large,  the  Puerto  Rican 
Heritage  Mural  on  the  outside  of  the  Rutgers  Pool  build- 
ing in  "Loisaida,"  a  recent  coinage  referring  to  the  Lower 
East  Side  and  Loiza  Aldea  on  the  island.  The  mural  rises 
with  vignettes  of  the  Tainos,  the  native  people,  the 
Spanish  conquest,  and  nineteenth-  and  twentieth- 
century  leaders.  There  are  also  a  piraquero  (snowcone 
.seller)  and  his  cart  and  Roberto  Clemente,  the  Puer- 
toriquefio  Pittsburgh  Pirates  star  who  had  been  killed  in 
1973  during  a  flight  to  bring  aid  to  earthquake  victims  in 
Nicaragua.  All  are  capped  with  a  rainbow. 

To  celebrate  International  Women's  Year  another 
Cityarts  team  directed  by  Tomie  Arai  painted  Women 
Hold  Up  Half  the  Sky  on  the  seventy-foot-high  wall  of  P.  S. 
63  nearby.  The  claim  of  the  title  is  driven  home  by  a 
huge  image  of  the  Statue  of  Liberty  pushing  up  out  of  the 
school  yard.  Her  arm  is  alive  with  scenes  of  women's 
labor,  care  and  struggle.  From  her  eye  a  woman  peers  out 
between  bars,  and  the  statue's  crown  has  become  a  chain 
whose  links  are  marked  Poverty,  Prison,  Last  Hired  First 
Fired,  Prostitution,  and  Racism.  Liberty's  torch  lights  up 
the  sky  from  which  women  of  all  colors  appear,  breaking 
their  chains,  taking  one  another's  hands  and  waving  back 
at  us,  as  one  holds  out  a  book  inscribed  with  the  names  of 
Harriet  Tubman,  Rosa  Luxemburg,  Rosa  Parks,  Lolita 
Lebron,  Joan  Little,  and  Ramona  Para.  The  work  was 
designed  and  painted  by  twenty-one  local  young  people 
ranging  in  age  from  fourteen  to  twenty-six  who  worked 
three  months  at  it. 

Also  in  1975  Cityarts  took  on  one  of  the  busiest  corners 
in  the  world,  Forty-second  Street  and  Eighth  Avenue, 
with  one  of  its  largest  murals  at  a  cost  of  fifteen  thousand 
dollars,  but  its  message  does  not  come  through  clearly. 
The  artists  led  by  James  Jannuzzi  sought  to  project  what 
appears  to  be  an  image  of  humanity  struggling  against 
manipulation,  which  is  symbolized  by  hands  in  the  sky 
controlling  the  strings  that  yank  at  mankind  and  seem  to 
determine  its  self-images,  its  masks,  gods,  and  culture. 
Meanwhile  a  bird  of  rebirth  hovers  overhead,  which 
gives  the  mural  its  title.  Phoenix. 

A  unique  transformation  of  a  pompous  public  monu- 
ment into  people's  art  by  community  residents  is  the 


Local  youth  directed  by  Alfredo  Hernandez  (Cityarts): 
Puerto  Rican  Heritage  Mural,  1975,  Lower  East  Side, 
New  York. 

undulating  bench  covered  in  mosaic  figures  that  wraps 
for  three  hundred  feet  around  Grant's  Tomb  in  uptown 
Manhattan.  There  sculptor  Pedro  Silva  of  Cityarts 
Workshop  instructed  neighborhood  people  in  the 
techniques  of  Barcelona's  Antonio  Gaudi  and  Simon 
Rodia  of  Watts  Towers,  then  left  them  free  to  design  and 
set  the  mosaics.  The  concrete  core  itself  does  not  main- 
tain the  sedate  form  of  park  benches  but  loops  and  arches 
and  snakes  around  the  monument,  exhibiting  mosaic 
dragons,  lions,  palaces,  autos,  dancing  nudes,  flags,  and  a 
portrait  of  Grant.   The  project   was  intended   by   the 


220  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


National  Park  Service  to  discourage  graffiti.  However, 
because  the  mosaics  came  to  draw  more  people  to  Grant's 
Tomb,  there  were  more  graffiti  on  the  tomb  itself  than 
before — a  kind  of  success,  said  Alan  Okada,  codirector  of 
Cityarts  at  that  time.  The  project,  started  in  1972  and 
completed  three  years  later,  is  a  model  for  the  unstarch- 
ing  of  traditional  public  art  and  assimilating  it  into  the 
community. 

Massachusetts 

In  1973  Nelson  Stevens  and  Dana  Chandler  painted 
the  long  mural  on  the  street  front  of  the  Black  construc- 
tion workers'  union  hall  in  Roxbury,  described  in  the 
Introduction.  The  following  summer  Stevens,  who  was 
teaching  in  Afro-American  Studies  at  the  University  of 
Massachusetts  in  Amherst,  wanted  to  give  undergradu- 
ates experience  in  community  art  and  began  directing 
student  murals  in  Springfield.  During  the  summer  of 
1974  they  painted  /  Am  a  Black  Woman  and  Black  Music. 
The  following  year  they  were  responsible  for  twenty 
more  large  works  there,  and  by  the  end  of  1977  there 
were  thirty  in  all.^' 


Local  youth  directed  by  Tomie  Arai  (Cityarts):  Women 
Hold  Up  Half  the  Sky,  1975,  Lower  East  Side,  New 
York. 


Cityarts  team  directed  by  James  Jannuzzi:  Phoenix, 
1975,  Midtown,  New  York.  ^ 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  22\ 


Local  people  directed  by  Pedro  Silva  (Cityarts):  Grant's 
Tomb  Benches,  1972-75,  New  York. 


222  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Summary 


What  marked  this  third  period  of  the  new  mural 
movement  was  that  enough  experience  had  been  gained 
by  isolated  projects  to  stimulate  artists  and  community 
people  to  large-scale  undertakings  that  advanced  sub- 
stantially early  muralists'  intention  of  reshaping  their 
social  environment.  During  the  first  stages  of  the  move- 
ment, urgent  messages  had  to  be  gotten  out,  and  they 
were  soon  followed  by  amplifications  nearby.  These 
murals  were  a  collective  art  addressing  social  concerns, 
and  they  created  spaces  around  them  that  invited  serious 
exchanges  of  ideas,  some  of  which  materialized  as  addi- 
tional murals.  The  dialogue  in  the  street  that  the  ex- 
tended process  of  doing  a  mural  stimulated  and  it  was 
hoped  the  finished  image  would  continue,  made  for  a 
new  kind  of  social  space.  When  this  was  discovered, 
efforts  were  made  to  extend  it  in  the  same  and  other 
places.  The  initial  intention  of  Charles  Felix  at  Estrada 
Courts  was  to  do  only  three  murals,  but  they  grew  to 
sixty  as  people  realized  the  power  of  cooperative  expres- 
sion to  affect  their  lives.  Between  1973  and  1975  this 
experience  widened  around  the  country,  and  the  idea  of 
undertaking  from  the  beginning  a  project  of  many  con- 
nected murals  began  to  take  hold.  The  muralists  also 
sought  new  kinds  of  collaboration  and  more  integrated 
ways  of  working  on  the  same  painting,  reaching  beyond 
add-on  kinds  of  composition.  The  idea  of  reshaping  an 
environment  by  an  ensemble  of  murals  was  not  merely  an 
aesthetic  ambition,  it  reflected  a  further  development  of 
the  will  to  community  and  the  discovery  of  one  means 
towards  it.  While  murals  by  themselves  could  not  alter 
underlying  social  conditions,  they  gave  people  experi- 
ence in  social  action  and  cooperative  work  that  they  could 
control  and  express  themselves  through.  The  murals 
could  serve  as  a  beginning  of  more  fundamental  change. 


NEW  ISSUES 

Labor  Murals 

During  this  period  new  issues  began  to  occupy 
muralists.  The  most  widespread  opening  was  made  by 
the  theme  of  labor.  This  theme  had  been  implicit  from 
the  first  of  the  murals  that  protested  racism  and  affirmed 
Black  and  Brown  Power,  since  discrimination  in  educa- 
tion, hiring  and  advancement  was  a  large  part  of  their 
grievance.  Labor  organizing  was  the  explicit  subject  of 
the  farm  workers'  mural  at  Del  Rey  that  Antonio  Bernal 
did  in  1968.  And  Chavez  and  workers  had  figured  in  the 
indoor  murals  of  Ray  Patlan  at  Casa  Aztlan  in  1970  and 
1971.  But  the  concerns  of  farm  workers  and  other  labor- 
ers did  not  become  a  primary  subject  for  murals  until  a 
few  years  later.  This  can  be  partly  understood  because  of 
the  preoccupation  of  the  early  murals  with  mounting  a 


response  to  racism  in  general.  Labor  emerged  as  a  major 
theme  not  as  the  first  specialized  topics  of  racism,  like 
urban  renewal,  drugs,  and  gang  violence,  began  to  draw 
muralists'  attention,  but  only  after  these  themes  that  are 
associated  with  where  people  live  had  been  dealt  with. 
The  early  labor  murals  however  also  appeared  as  protests 
to  the  racism  to  which  both  farm  and  urban  workers  had 
been  subjected. 

Already  in  1972  Carlos  Almaraz  did  a  large  banner  on 
canvas  measuring  sixteen  by  twenty-four  feet  that  was 
hung  behind  the  rostrum  at  the  first  convention  of  the 
United  Farm  Workers  of  America  in  Fresno.  It  was  in 
fact  a  big,  boisterous  cartoon.  Cesar  Chavez,  who  com- 
missioned the  work  for  $150,  "sees  things  simply  and 
dramatically,"  Almaraz  says.  "He  wanted  to  show  the 
farm  workers  attacked  by  Teamster  goons,  growers  and 
the  Kern  County  Police."^®  And  that  is  what  the  artist 
did  with  giant  caricatures  of  the  antagonists  and  sym- 
pathetic renderings  of  a  farm-worker  family  with  a 
Huelga  picket  sign.  Two  years  later  Almaraz  working 
with  local  youth  painted  the  ensemble  of  caricature 
murals  on  behalf  of  the  farm  workers  on  the  East  Los 
recreation  center.  These  murals  and  others  supporting 


Carlos  Almaraz  and  M.  T.  Bryan:  Banner,  1972, 
United  Farmworkers  Convention,  Fresno.  (©  Carlos 
Almaraz) 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  22-i 


Jose  Guerrero  assisted  by  local  youth:  ''Yes,  it  can  be  done 
Pilsen,  Chicago. 


I 


UFW  were  the  result  of  its  strategy  to  carry  their  strug- 
gle to  the  big  urban  market  of  grapes  and  wine  by  way  of 
consumer  boycotts,  which  are  credited  with  having  been 
as  important  as  picketing  in  the  fields.  Another  was 
painted  in  1973  by  a  militant  city  worker,  Jose  Guerrero, 
in  Chicago's  Pilsen  Barrio  under  the  sponsorship  of  Casa 
Aztlan  and  the  Chicago  Mural  Group.  Done  at  the  end  of 
an  alley  just  as  it  let  out  into  a  main  street,  it  showed  a 
throng  of  marchers  with  fists  aloft  and  a  farm  workers' 
banner  next  to  the  Mexican  flag,  snapping  in  the  wind.  It 
is  inscribed:  Si  Se  Puede — Yes,  It  Can  Be  Done.  The 
communitarian  character  of  the  farm  workers'  organiza- 
tion is  referred  to  in  a  lower  corner:  Dedicado  a  esta  gran 
communidad  La  U.F.W. 

Murals  were  being  done  for  the  labor  organizing  of 
other  minority  groups  as  well,  like  Nelson  Stevens  and 
Dana  Chandler's  1973  Black  Worker  for  the  Construction 
Workers'  labor  temple  in  Roxbury,  described  at  the 
beginning. 

One  of  the  most  moving  of  labor  murals  was  done  on 
the  side  of  an  abandoned  and  boarded-up  tenement  in 


Unsigned:  "And  he  [the  boss]  gets  rich  with  our  labor!' 
(photographed  in  1974),  South  End,  Boston. 


224  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Boston's  South  End  and  was  probably  repeated  the  mural  movement.  Cry  for  Justice,  in  1972.  He  called 
elsewhere.  The  imagery  is  extraordinarily  condensed,  '^  The  History  of  the  Packinghouse  Worker  and  depicted 
the  draw  ing  elementary.  A  worker  is  shown  at  a  series  of  the  early  struggle  of  the  union  to  organize.  Management 
w  heels  that  spill  gold  coins  into  the  bulging  pockets  of  a  '^  ranged  against  employee  representatives  with  a  chess- 
golden  figure  marked  patron  (the  boss).  The  caption  board  between  them.  On  it  police,  a  judge  and  a  thug 
below  reads  ■  .  .  y  el  se  hace  rico  con  nuestro  trabajo!  serve  as  chess  pieces  for  the  owners,  and  already  some 
(.  .  .  and  he  gets  rich  on  our  work) — similar  to  (Chavez's  workers  are  knocked  over  on  the  board  or  are  lifted 
words  repeated  in  the  Bank  of  y\merica  mural.  The  into  the  air  by  the  bosses,  who  are  much  larger.  In  the 
image  came  from  "Movement"  literature  and  ultimately  background  police  are  trying  to  break  up  a  demonstration 
from  one  of  the  posters  produced  by  the  Parisian  stu-  outside  a  plant.  The  grim  eyed  participants  and  somber 


dents  during  their  strike  that  was  joined  by  ten  million 
industrial  workers  in  1968. 

Another  mural  already  discussed  that  contains  an  im- 
portant labor  component  is  the  1973  Jewish  Mural  at 
Bialystoker  House  in  the  Lower  East  Side  that  com- 
memorated the  pioneering  work  of  the  International 
Ladies  Garment  Workers'  struggle  for  the  eight-hour 


tones  are  familiar  from  Walker's  previous  scenes  of  con- 
frontation, and  this  painting  shares  with  Black  Love  a 
formal  ordering  of  profiles  and  overlapping  figures  that 
dramatizes  the  pointblack  conflict.  Monumental  but  not 
heroic  workmen  more  than  fill  the  three  smaller  panels  at 
the  right.  They  go  about  their  jobs  with  a  quiet  dignity 
which  is  reinforced  by  the  sober  black-and-white  tonality 


day.  The  Wall  of  Respect  for  Women,  which  Cityarts  did  and  relieved  by  their  lemon  yellow  aprons  and  the  pink 

the  following  year,  illustrated  the  kinds  of  work  that  of  the  beefs.  The  color  harmony  could  have  come  out  of 

women  had  done  for  the  past  century  and  the  profession  Velazquez,  Goya,  or  Manet.  Throughout,  the  episodes 

they  were  trying  to  break  into.  are  complex,   but  details  are  generalized.   The  stocky 

In  1974  the  artists  of  the  Chicago  Mural  Group  de-  figures  have  big  and  expressive  heads.  There  is  a  classical 

cided  to  focus  on  the  achievements  of  workers  in  building  simplification    of    form,    the    contours    rounded    and 

the  nation  and  their  own  unions.  One  result  was  the  smoothed  out  in  the  manner  of  Rivera,  and  the  whole 

mural  on  which  Oscar  Martinez  and  Jim  Yanagisawa  remains  legible  and  bold.  The  union  local  is  in  the  heart 

compared  the  struggles  of  Latino  and  Asian  workers.  At  of  a  Black  ghetto,  and  Walker  has  shown  that  workers  of 


the  same  time  William  Walker  was  engaged  on  a  mural 
for  the  South  Side  local  of  the  Amalgamated  .Meatcutters 
and  Butcher  Workmen,  who  published  the  first  book  on 


all  races  have  played  their  part  in  labor  struggles.  Mark 
Rogovin  has  said  that  the  union  hoped  for  a  mural  that 
would  generate  more  rank  and  file  participation;  if  any 
mural  could,  this  one  should, 
iirii-       iir  i»      /^ir^i    TT-  r  1     r>     1  •      1  Earlier  in  1974  John  Weber  and  Jose  Guerrero  com- 

Willtam  Walker  (CMG):  History  of  the  Packinghouse    j^.^j  ,  ^^^j^^  ^f  ^^^^^1^  ^^  ^he  entrance  hall  and  stair- 
Worker  (partial  vtew) .  1974.  Amalgamated  Meatcutters 
and  Butcher  Workmen  local,  South  Side,  Chicago.  (Photo 
Tim  Drescher) 


well  of  the  United  Electrical  workers  labor  temple  also  in 
Chicago.  The  two  painters  were  at  the  murals  for  a  year, 
researching  union  history,  interviewing  labor  officials 
and  visiting  a  plant.  The  panels  show  workers  at  the 
forge,  on  the  picket  line  and  in  negotiation,  with  some 
portraits  of  union  leaders.  UE  has  remained  one  of  the 
few  unions  to  be  active  on  broad  social  issues,  and  the 
murals  show  its  struggles  not  only  against  big  business 
but  also  the  military-industrial  complex  and  the  Ku  Klux 
Klan.  The  picket  signs  the  workers  carry  protest 
speed-up  and  urge  solidarity  in  Spanish  as  well  as  En- 
glish. 

During  the  same  year,  1974,  Barry  Bruner  painted 
Work  Force,  a  mural  honoring  construction  workers  on  a 
wall  of  the  firm  that  donated  the  use  of  its  scaffolding  to 
the  Chicago  Mural  Group.  It  was  a  frieze  of  laborers 
pouring  cement,  unwinding  cable  and  setting  brick.  One 
of  the  crew  was  a  woman.  Their  forms  were  echoed  by  a 
cement-mixing  truck  and  factory  chimneys,  vents  and 
cooling  towers  in  the  background,  once  more  a  borrow- 
ing from  Rivera.  When  the  mural  was  damaged  by  water 
seepage,  Weber  started  afresh  the  following  year  with 
workers  astride  steel  beams  in  the  manner  of  Leger. 


John  Weber  and  Jose  Guerrero  (CMG):  Solidarity  Mu- 
rals (partial  view),  1974,  United  Electrical  Workers 
hall,  Chicago. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  225 

In  1974  other  murals  celebrating  work  were  done  by 
members  of  the  CMG.  There  was  Ray  Patlan's  con- 
tribution to  a  mural  in  Blue  Island,  near  Chicago,  that 
depicts  Chicanos  operating  heavy  industrial  machinery. 
(This  will  be  described  in  the  discussion  of  censorship.) 
It  was  through  the  theme  of  labor  that  Caryl  Yasko 
introduced  murals  to  a  White  working-class  neighbor- 
hood in  Chicago.  She  describes  how,  when  she  first 
broached  the  idea  of  doing  a  mural  to  the  families  of 
Polish,  German,  and  Scandinavian  factory  workers, 
many  of  them  first  generation,  in  Chicago's  Logan 
Square,  they  were  reluctant  because  they  associated  wall 
paintings  with  Black  ghettos.  In  time  their  doubts  were 
overcome,  and  the  mural  was  completed  in  the  fall  of 
1974.  Its  imagery  is  bold  and  simple,  depicting  a  woman, 
man  and  child  turning  a  machine  belt  that  propels  the 
earth  and  a  large  wheel  that  contains  symbols  of  food, 
shelter,  and  clothing.  The  motion  is  then  passed  to 
smaller  wheels  with  images  of  work,  education,  religion, 
and  recreation.  It  is  to  maintain  control  of  these,  the 
artist  says,  that  local  residents,  whose  memory  of  "au- 
tonomous villages"  in  the  old  country  is  still  fresh,  must 
remain  vigilant  against  urban  mechanized  society. ^^ 
Megalopolis  is  suggested  by  a  huge,  dark  figure,  backed 
by  waves  of  tumbling  high-rise  buildings,  who  resists  the 


Barry  Bruner  (CMG),  Work  Force,  1974,  Chicago.  (© 
Rosenthal  Art  Slides) 


Solidarity  Murals  (partial  view). 


^               ^j.j^mfnTi"ri — i>irinrT<c-MM 

■ft^ 

t 

^^^M 

ef^      ^ 

Psi 

p^ 

iH 

^3lt^^M^     ^fT'        ^ 

vjip^    "wSf^A 

Caryl  Yasko  assisted  by  Celia  Radek  and  James 
Yanagisawa  (CMG):  I  Am  the  People,  1974,  North- 
west Side,  Chicago. 


symbolic  family's  efforts  to  turn  the  earth  to  meet  their 
needs.  The  mural  is  accompanied  by  a  plaque  and  poem 
that  reads: 

i  am  the  people 
who  learn 

who  worship 
labor  and  recreate 
it  is  from  me 
from  my  efforts 
the  obstacles 
within  my  life  are  overcome, 
i  am  the  people. 

The  painting  and  poem's  affirmation  of  the  power  and 
unity  of  working  people  was  not  irrelevant  to  the  cus- 
tomers who  stopped  at  the  McDonald's  beneath  it.  For 
many  were  members  of  local  labor  unions  and  others 
belonged  to  the  neighborhood  association  with  which  the 
muralists  worked.  There  was  a  strong  organized  effort, 
Yasko  notes,  to  preserve  the  neighborhood  by  buying  up 
aging  homes,  refurbishing  them,  and  reselling  them  to 
local  people  at  low  prices.  Residents  who  had  left  Logan 
Square  were  returning,  and  the  mural  became  part  of 
people's  efforts  to  redevelop  their  community.^* 

In  1975  Yasko  with  the  help  of  her  parents  and  local 
people  painted  a  Bicentennial  mural  for  Lemont,  a 
Chicago  suburb,  in  which  she  showed  workers  quarrying 
stone  years  before.  An  old  quarryman  modeled  for  the 
worker  with  the  hammer.  The  yellow  tonality  of  the 


Caryl  Yasko  assisted  by  Walter  and  Joe  Nelson  and  local 
youth  (CMC):  Lemont  Bicentennial  Mural,  1975, 
Lemont,  Illinois. 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  111 

mural  is  similar  to  the  color  of  the  local  limestone,  which 
was  used  in  Chicago's  famous  fire  tower  and  late- 
nineteenth-century  churches.  The  woman  lifting  the  cut 
stone,  Yasko  says,  does  not  represent  actual  labor  women 
performed,  but  the  support  they  gave  their  men  during 
the  1885  strike  when  wages  were  cut  and  quarrymen  and 
their  wives  were  killed.  Writing  about  the  mural,  Yasko 
said: 

...  we  also  have  to  remember  that  the  history  of 
America  is  the  history  of  the  American  people,  like 
those  depicted  in  the  mural.  .Men  who  worked  in  the 
mines,  women  and  men  who  struggled  for  justice  for 
the  working  people.  Men  who  drove  the  barges,  who 
worked  in  the  quarries,  who  hammered,  cut,  and 
hauled  the  stone  to  build  the  cities  of  .Midwestern 
America. 

In  public  art  we  try  to  portray  the  true  spirit  of  the 
American  people,  rather  than  the  slick  portraits  of  the 
political  and  economic  elite.  I  have  emphasized  the 
spirit  of  labor  of  men  and  women  at  work,  the  men  and 
women  who  built  the  town  of  Lemont. ^^ 

Similarly  the  muralists  elsewhere  around  the  country 
who  painted  scenes  of  farm  and  industrial  workers 
stressed  that  it  was  the  daily  work  of  ordinary  people  that 
had  created  civilization — its  physical  apparatus  for  living, 
its  cultivated  land,  a  meaningful  way  of  life — in  all,  its  real 
culture.  These  muralists  saw  this  as  a  vast  creative 
activity  that  they  wanted  their  art  to  be  a  part  of.  In 
particular  they  wanted  to  help  the  common  makers  of 


228  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

this  human  artifice  become  aware  of  their  own  achieve- 
ments and  conscious  of  their  abihty  to  shape  the  human 
world  according  to  their  values  and  purposes  rather  than 
the  priorities  of  others.  Hence  the  muralists  sought  to 
work  with  progressive  trade  unions.  They  also  came  to 
speak  of  the  identity  of  their  art  with  all  productive  labor. 
Consuelo  Mendez,  one  of  the  Mujeres  .Muralistas  in 
San  Francisco,  has  said: 

I  feel  it  is  really  important  to  work,  and  since  it  seems 
that  I  can  do  it  the  best  through  painting,  that  is  why  I 
paint.  I  feel  rriyself  not  really  an  artist,  but  an  artist- 
worker.  It  is  extremely  important  that  art  be  put  in  the 
streets,  in  the  communities,  to  the  sight  of  everyone. 
Mural  painting  helps  to  add  life  and  color  to  the  drab 
environment  that  surrounds  us.  Our  people,  the  work- 
ers, can  identify  readily  with  our  work  because  it  is 
there  for  them  to  see  and  enjoy.  Our  images  are  our 
people  and  our  cultures,  full  of  color,  life  and  strength 
to  keep  on  struggling.''** 

Mendez  felt  uncomfortable  with  the  separation  that  con- 
temporary society  makes  between  the  artist  and  worker, 
especially  the  prestige  and  privilege  that  attached  to  the 
former.  She  understood  her  skill  as  part  of  the  work  of 


Caryl  Yasko,  Celia  Radek,  Lucyna  Radycki,  Justine  De 
Van,  and  local  people:  Razem  (Together)  (partial  view), 
1975,  West  Side,  Chicago. 


the  ordinary  people  she  painted  for.  She  wanted  to  work 
where  they  were  and  see  the  products  of  her  labor  used 
by  them.  Other  muralists,  feeling  similarly,  began  to 
speak  of  themselves  as  "cultural  workers,"  adapting  the 
usage  of  Social  Realist  artists  that  was  common  during 
the  1920s  and  1930s.  Like  them  the  new  muralists  fre- 
quently spoke  of  moving  their  art  out  of  their  private 
studios  and  into  the  streets.'"  What  they  had  in  mind  was 
giving  up  the  detachment  of  an  art  of  individualist  self- 
expression  and  becoming  instead  spokesmen  and 
educators  of  their  communities,  and  hence  technicians 
and  working  people  like  their  viewers. 

The  significance  of  labor  was  also  an  important  com- 
ponent of  the  second  mural  that  Caryl  Yasko  did  in  a 
Polish  neighborhood  in  Chicago,  which  has  in  fact  the 
largest  Polish  population  of  any  city  in  the  world  after 
Warsaw.  The  success  of  the  CMG  at  Logan  Square  in 
doing  the  first  mural  in  a  largely  Eastern  European 
working-class  district  had  opened  the  way  to  this  second 
project  in  1975.  Urged  by  the  franchise  holder  of  the 
McDonald's  facing  /  Am  the  People,  Yasko  now  joined  by 
Celia  Radek  and  Justine  DeVan  pursued  a  wall  opposite 
another  McDonald's  on  the  West  Side.  With  the  assist- 
ance of  artists  from  the  community,  Lucyna  Radycki  and 
John  Kokot,  and  the  local  Polish  American  Congress,  which 
helped  the  muralists  with  their  research,  the  painters  did 


^Mi^  -1  -s/X  k 

Scale  (1973-75)  I  229 


Kent  Deming,  Tad  Hunter  and  others:  Untitled  (partial 
view),  Carlo's  Transmission  Service,  1975,  San  Rafael, 
California. 


a  zestful  work  celebrating  what  they  described  as  "the 
living  heritage  of  Poland  which  survives  in  America." 
The  composition  includes  a  much  enlarged  wycinaka,  an 
elaborate  paper-cutout  form  of  folk  art  that  the  muralists 
designed  to  depict  symbols  of  the  careers  that  Poles  had 
excelled  in — music,  writing,  and  art,  as  well  as  chemis- 
try, medicine,  and  the  construction  industry.  The  wy- 
cinaka treats  with  the  same  esteem  skilled  labor,  the 
professions,  and  the  popular  and  fine  arts.  Next  to  it  is 
the  figure  of  Janochik,  a  Polish  Robin  Hood,  who  rises 
from  the  ground  and  displays  a  sapling  in  his  palm 
suggesting  the  transplanting  of  Polish  culture  to 
America.  The  composition  is  concluded  by  four  dancers 
in  brightly  striped  traditional  costumes  w  ho  kick  up  their 
heels  and  stretch  their  arms  to  one  another's  shoulders. 
The  bright  flat  colors  of  the  mural  allude  to  the  recent 
popular  art  of  Poland — its  posters,  and  the  dedication 
ceremony  brought  out  dancers  costumed  like  those  in  the 
painting,  which  had  been  titled /?aze7« — together.  ^^ 

The  themes  of  heritage  and  labor,  art  and  work  were 
impressively  melded  here,  which  reflected  the  current 
rise  of  white  ethnic  consciousness  among  working-class 
people,  particularly  of  Polish,  Slavic  and  Italian  origin, 
often  of  second-  and  third-generation  immigrants,  al- 
though an  additional  wave  of  Poles  had  come  to  Chicago 
since  the  Second  World  War.  The  revival  of  this  con- 
sciousness, not  only  in  Chicago  but  in  other  northern 
industrial  cities,  has  been  partly  laid  to  the  fact  that  many 


working-class  "ethnics"  were  employed  in  work  of  de- 
creasing prestige,  low  worker  autonomy,  and  little  op- 
portunity for  advancement,  such  as  steel-  and  auto- 
making.*^  In  response,  it  has  been  suggested,  these 
workers  and  their  families  turned  to  their  ethnic  groups 
and  heritage  to  restore  their  self-respect.  This  kind  of 
analysis  invites  the  comparison  of  White  ethnic  con- 
sciousness to  Black  and  Brown  Pride. 

A  mechanic  and  his  friends  brought  art  to  the  worksite 
in  a  striking  way  at  Carlo's  Transmission  Shop  in  San 
Rafael,  twenty  miles  north  of  San  Francisco  in  1975. 
Kent  Deming,  one  of  the  ow  ners.  Tad  Hunter,  and  seven 
young  women  worked  for  eight  days  using  whatever 
paint  that  came  to  hand  to  create  a  six-foot-high  frieze  of 
brightly  painted  pistons,  drive  shafts,  and  gears  that 
swung  around  tw o  interior  walls  of  the  garage.  Inspired 
by  abstract  painting,  the  artists  adopted  the  schemati- 
cally flattened  diagrams  from  an  old  motor  manual, 
enlarging  the  engine  parts  and  making  them  dynamic  by 
emphasizing  diagonals  and  gear  teeth  and  using  brilliant 
hues.  Afterwards  the  employees  agreed  that  the  painting 
gave  the  workshop  a  charge.  It  is  as  if  a  mechanic  had 
found  something  artful  in  his  work  that  he  wanted  to 
bring  into  focus  and  share. 

Addressing  the  community  muralists  in  their  first 
National  Murals  Newsletter,  Anton  Refregier,  one  of  the 
still  active  Social  Realists  of  the  New  Deal  era,  described 
the  new  painters'  work  as  a  "continuation,  even  if  un- 
planned and  unconscious,  of  the  spirit  of  public  com- 
mitment of  the  artist"  of  that  earlier  time.*''  He  spoke  of 
the  older  and  newer  murals  as  "evidence  of  the  energy 
and  basic  humanism  so  typical  of  progressive  America." 


230  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Anton  Refregier:  If  There  Is  No  Struggle,  There  Can 
be  No  Progress,  1970,  Headquarters,  District  1199, 
National  Union  of  Hospital  and  Health  Care  Employees, 
Mid  town.  New  York. 


And  in  passing  he  referred  to  one  of  his  own  recent 
works,  a  large  mosaic  mural  completed  in  1970  over  the 
entrance  of  the  new  headquarters  of  District  1 199  of  the 
National  Union  of  Hospital  and  Health  Care  Employees 
just  off  Times  Square.  In  it  union  members  are  shown  on 
the  job,  picketing,  and  at  leisure.  In  the  center  are  the 
same  words  of  Frederick  Douglass  that  Weber  and  Guer- 
rero added  to  their  UE  mural:  "If  there  is  no  struggle 
there  can  be  no  progress."  As  you  enter  the  foyer  of  the 
union  hall,  the  first  thing  that  meets  your  eye  is  a 
commodious  art  gallery,  likely  the  only  permanent  one 
now  maintained  by  the  American  labor  movement.  It  is 
operated  by  retired  workers  and  has  frequent  exhibits  not 
only  of  members'  work  but  also  of  artists  from  across  the 
country  and  abroad  whose  art  relates  to  the  progressive 
social  concerns  of  1 199.  Displayed  outside  the  entrance 
of  the  gallery  was  what  is  believed  to  be  the  first  painting 
of  workers'  agitation  by  a  major  artist — The  Strike,  done 
by  Robert  Koehler  in  1 886.  And  one  of  the  gallery's  early 
exhibitions  was  a  showing  of  protest  posters  in  1973. 
Thus  the  new  murals  were  forging  connections  not  only 
with  the  labor  movement  but  also  with  traditions  of 
working  people's  culture. 

White  Middle-Class  Murals 

At  the  same  time  in  the  mid-seventies  that  muralists 
were  identifying  with  the  working  class  and  the  small 
business  people  of  the  neighborhoods,  they  began  doing 
works  with  a  few   middle-class  groups.   For  instance. 


when  in  1973  the  owner  of  a  filling  station  and  car  wash 
in  Chicago,  who  had  been  a  long-time  member  of  the 
American  Civil  Liberties  Union,  suggested  a  mural  on  its 
activities,  the  Chicago  Mural  Group  responded  by 
painting  a  billboard  on  his  premises  calling  for  the  sup- 
port of  the  liberal  organization,  which  has  mainly  a 
White  middle-class  membership.  The  racially  mixed 
muralists  were  John  Weber,  Oscar  Martinez,  Heidi 
Hoffer,  and  Jae-hi  Kim.  Beneath  the  caption  "Defend  the 
Bill  of  Rights.  .  .  ."  the  mural  was  a  bold  Pop  Art  design 
of  comic-strip-style  faces  that  crowded  the  space — brown 
faces  behind  bars,  the  head  of  a  hooded  Klansman,  and  a 
blue-visaged  wheeler  and  dealer.  A  green  general  held  a 
microphone  attached  at  one  end  to  his  earphones  and  at 
the  other  picking  up  the  sound  of  money  talking.  Mean- 
while a  dollar  marked  bag  and  oil  derrick  weighed  down 
one  side  of  the  scales  that  blindfolded  Justice  held. 

It  was  in  1974  that  the  students  of  the  Friends  Select 
School  in  Philadelphia  and  the  affluent  residents  of  Hicks 
Street  painted  their  murals.  But  in  that  and  the  following 
year  murals  by  and  for  middle-class  communities  were 
rare.  Judy  Baca  observed  that  the  only  middle-class 
groups  that  took  advantage  of  the  services  of  Citywide 
Murals  were  schools  and  organizations  like  the 
Westminster  Senior  Citizens  Center  in  Venice. 

Murals  on  Environmental  Themes 

What  is  often  identified  as  a  middle-class  concern,  the 
environment,  is  not  only  more  oppressive  in  the  inner 
city,  it  also  can  have  special  meaning  to  minority  people. 
In  1972  a  remarkable  work  that  connected  ecology  with 
racism  was  done  by  Albert  Zeno,  a  Black  Chicago  artist. 


Scale  (1973-75)  m\ 


John  Weber,  Oscar  Martinez,  Heidi  Hoffer,  and  Jae-hi 
Kim  (CMG):  Defend  the  Bill  of  Rights,  1973,  North 
Side,  Chicago. 


h  extends  for  over  a  hundred  feet  through  one  of  the 
city's  Illinois  Central  viaducts.  Alewives  and  Mercury  Fish 
is  an  indictment  of  the  pollution  of  the  Great  Lakes  by 
industrial  runoff  of  the  poisonous  metal  and  the  sucking 
of  alewives  (a  saltwater  fish)  into  the  fresh  water  lakes 
where  they  die  and  pile  up  on  Chicago  beaches,  as  a 
result  of  the  construction  of  the  Saint  Lawrence  Seaway. 
Zeno  treated  this  environmental  issue  as  one  affecting  the 
lives  of  ordinary  people  as  well  as  an  event  upsetting  the 
whole  natural  order.  In  the  mural  fish  erupt  out  of  the 
lake  like  a  volcano.  But  then  the  subject  suddenly 
changes  as  you  reach  the  darkest  part  of  the  viaduct.  In  a 
remarkable  leap  of  the  imagination,  Zeno  saw  a  connec- 
tion between  this  example  of  human  interference  in 
nature's  processes  and  the  imprisoning  and  exploitation 
of  Black  people.  He  took  advantage  of  the  barred  gates 
and  turnstiles  of  the  train  station  to  paint  his  people  in 
shackles  behind  them  and  then  breaking  their  chains  to 
liberate  themselves.  He  concluded  with  a  scene  of 
mothers  of  all  races  nestling  their  infants  while  fish  swim 
gracefully  again  in  the  background. 

In  1973  Tony  Rodriguez  of  Cityarts  Workshop 
painted  the  Destruction  of  Nature  on  a  building  directly 
beneath  one  of  the  bridges  that  link  Manhattan's  Lower 
East  Side  with  Long  Island,  an  area  dense  with  chim- 
neys and  cars.  The  mural  shows  one  large  flue  and  the 
buildings  around  it  overwhelming  and  polluting  human- 
ity and  the  countryside;  burning  coals  rain  down  like 
meteorites.  Mankind's  protest  and  identification  with  the 
natural  world  are  illustrated  by  a  green  human  figure 
who  inhabits  a  huge  cabbage  from  which  four  hands  of 
different  colors  reach  out  in  appeal. 

Pollution,  meaningless  production,  and  the  waste  of 


resources  came  under  attack  from  another  Cityarts  mural 
in  1974  in  a  neighborhood  of  the  Lower  East  Side  that 
knew  the  blight  and  poverty  associated  with  this  inti- 
mately. The  painters  led  by  James  Jannuzzi  posed 
against  uncontaminated  nature  and  native  people  and 
their  culture,  an  assembly  line  with  small  pyramids  of 
gold,  a  limousine  leaking  oil,  derricks  jetting  raw  pe- 
troleum, chimneys  spewing  smoke  and  a  pipeline  cutting 
through  a  landscape.  An  indignant  dragon  rears  up  in 
opposition,  and  in  the  center  naked  figures  of  the  differ- 
ent races  seem  to  be  awakening  and  washing  themselves 
in  a  waterfall.  The  artists  called  their  work  New  Birth.  In 
spite  of  the  awkwardness  of  the  drawing,  it  was  clear  and 
outspoken. 

In  1974  Eva  Cockcroft,  who  had  guided  student 
murals  at  the  Livingston  campus  of  Rutgers  University, 
carried  the  idea  beyond  the  suburbs  deep  into  the 
countryside — to  Warrensburg  in  the  Adirondack  Moun- 
tains. No  one  there  had  ever  heard  of  murals  before, 
but  persisting  she  involved  local  young  people  in 
a  large  work  on  the  pollution  of  the  river  that  runs 
through  town,  and  this  project  stimulated  others  in 
neighboring  communities.^' 

Environmental  Response  was  a  1975  work  of  On  the  Wall 
Productions  in  Saint  Louis  that  encouraged  urban  ag- 
riculture by  presenting  in  monochrome  people  cultivat- 
ing furrows  in  the  foreground  that  converge  toward  a 
mammoth  heap  of  colorful  vegetables  on  the  horizon. 

Murals  by  then  were  also  expressing  a  concern  about 
open  space,  which  was  an  interest  not  only  of  the  subur- 
ban people  who  wanted  to  keep  it  nearby  but  also  of  city 
people  who  wanted  it  within  range.  In  Lucas  Valley 
among  the  hills  north  of  San  Francisco,  where  the  sub- 
divisions and  highways  are  penetrating,  Hilaire  Dufresne 
painted  a  mural  on  the  pavement  of  a  barnyard.  It  can 


232  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Zeno:  Alewives  and  Mercury  Fish  {partial  view), 
1972,  Hyde  Park,  Chicago. 


only  be  seen  by  walking  up  the  slopes  above  it — precisely 
what  he  hoped  people  would  want  to  do  in  the  future 
also.  The  painting  shows  a  bold  semiabstraction  of  the 
landscape  he  hoped  would  be  preserved.  Dufresne  did  a 
similar  landscape  on  a  vertical  surface,  the  wall  of  a 
movie  house  in  nearby  Fairfax,  the  following  year. 


Alewives  and  Mercury  Fish  (partial  view). 


Alev\  ivcs  and  Mercury  Fish  {partial  view). 


Tony  Rodriguez  (Cityarts):  Destruction  of  Nature, 
1973,  Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


234  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  youth  directed  by  James  Jannuzzi  (Cityarts):  New 
Birth,  1975,  Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


Hilaire  Dufresne:  Lucas  Valley  View,  1975,  Lucas 
Valley,  Marin  County,  California.  (Photo  Hilaire  Duf- 
resne) 


Health  Murals 

The  third  stage  of  the  mural  movement's  development 
was  marked  by  additional  community-based  organiza- 
tions finding  in  wall  paintings  a  means  of  publicizing 
their  services.  Neighborhood  clinics  as  well  as  people- 
oriented  legal  offices,  model-cities  agencies,  and  settle- 
ment houses  commissioned  murals. 

In  the  city  of  Washington  the  streetside  walls  of  the 
Shaw  Community  Health  Center  were  covered  by  large 
panels  done  by  muralists  of  the  predominantly  Black 
area  in  1972.  Three  painted  by  James  Arthur  Padgett 
show  the  busy  activities  inside  in  bright  patchwork  pat- 
terns. He  was  able  to  transform  the  naive  stiffness  of  his 
drawing  into  style  and  to  order  the  incidents  of  the 
w  aiting  and  examination  rooms  by  keeping  his  figures  flat 
and  emphasizing  the  roundness  of  their  heads,  the  de- 
signs of  their  clothing,  and  the  rhythm  of  their  gestures. 
This  has  something  of  the  crisp,  bright  pattern-making  of 
Jacob  Lawrence  but  nevertheless  is  fresh.  On  additional 
panels  other  young  artists  likewise  did  imaginative  in- 
terpretations of  medical  care  for  people  in  Africa  and 
America.  The  project  was  sponsored  by  the  Wall  Mural 
Program  of  the  D.C.  Commission  on  the  Arts  and  the 
Department  of  Environmental  Services. 

In  1973  on  an  outside  wall  of  the  People's  Health 
Clinic  in  a  Black  neighborhood  on  Chicago's  South  Side, 
Caryl  Yasko  and  Douglas  Williams  with  the  assistance  of 
students  from  the  King  Urban  Progress  Center  painted  a 
ten-foot-high  mural  in  warm  reds,  browns,  and  oranges 
showing  parents  and   medical   aides   inside  caring  for 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  235 
children.  It  has  a  classic  simplicity  of  design,  reminiscent 
of  Walker's  Black  Love,  that  imparts  a  quiet  dignity  to  the 
scene.  On  a  wall  of  the  depicted  clinic  is  a  chart  describ- 
ing prenatal  care  that  offers  encouragement  to  passersby 
to  seek  out  medical  advice.  Next  to  the  mural  a  panel 
identifying  it  adds  a  political  dimension:  "The  Health  of 
the  People  is  the  Foundation  of  their  Happiness  and 
Power." 

Two  years  later  Yasko  joined  with  other  members  of 
the  Chicago  Mural  Group,  Mitchell  Caton,  Justine 
DeVan,  and  Celia  Radek,  to  deal  with  a  related  theme 
relevant  to  people  of  all  races  and  incomes — the  issue  of 
proper  health  care  that  all  can  afford.  The  mural  is  an 
indictment  of  the  American  health  establishment.  It  is 
painted  on  the  side  of  a  one-story  building  easily  seen 
from  a  main  thoroughfare,  and  takes  as  its  ironic  title 
Prescription  for  Good  Health  Care.  It  shows  the  profile  of  a 
huge  head  symbolizing  American  medical  practice,  for 
its  one  visible  eye  is  marked  with  a  star  and  stripes.  But 
the  head  is  drained  blue  and  is  being  gorged  with  pills, 
drugs,  and  tubes.  We  get  an  X-ray  view  of  its  brain 
cavity,  which  is  like  a  yellow-white  furnace  where  a 
supine  patient  is  caught  in  a  tangle  of  medical  parapher- 
nalia, beams  of  light,  and  radiation.  Outside  on  the  nose 
another  small  patient  is  desperately  trying  to  put  some 
heart  into  the  system  by  means  of  a  bottle  that  contains 
that  organ.  But  he  is  being  reined  back  by  vicious-looking 
characters,  who  one  of  the  muralists  says  were  suggested 
by  the  four  horsemen  of  the  apocalypse.  The  nearest  is  a 


Caryl  Yasko  and  Douglas  Williams  (CMC):  The  Health 
of  the  People,  1973,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


236 /COMMUNITY  MURALS 


doctor  in  whites  whose  vision  is  constricted  by  horse's 
Winders.  Another  suggesting  the  drug  industry  has  the 
head  of  a  capsule  and  transparent  Hmbs.  The  third 
Hterally  has  buildings  on  his  brain  and  symbolizes  real 
estate  investors.  And  the  last  is  all  red  in  flesh  and 
clothing  and  has  rolled  up  plans  projecting  from  his 
pocket,  suggesting  perhaps  the  system  or  its  planners 
who  have  drained  the  blood  from  the  blue  head.  Over  the 
four  loom  as  commentary  a  huge  skull  and  a  transparent 
hundred-dollar  bill  as  big  as  they.  The  transparency  and 
images  that  slowly  emerge  from  other  images  are  clearly 
the  style  of  Mitchell  Caton.  But  he  and  the  other  artists 
were  able  to  meld  their  individual  manners.  The  project 
was  also  important  because  its  team  included  both  Black 
and  White  artists,  and  the  site  was  in  a  White  working- 
class  neighborhood  where  Martin  Luther  King  had  been 
stoned  years  before.  It  was  now  becoming  integrated, 
and  the  painters  were  demonstrating  one  result  of  racial 
cooperation. 

Prison  Murals 

During  this  period  when  murals  were  being  utilized  by 
an  increasing  variety  of  groups  and  institutions  it  oc- 
curred to  a  number  of  painters  to  turn  to  prisoners. 
Muralists  had  worked  in  ghettos,  barrios,  and  slums 
where  jail  was  a  familiar  fact  of  life,  minority  people 
being  singled  out  by  the  criminal  justice  system  for 
prosecution  and  confinement.  In  the  early  seventies  pris- 
oners themselves  were  organizing  against  their  condi- 
tions, and  support  was  coming  from  outside.  In  1973 
Judy  Baca  and  Christine  Schlesinger  worked  with  pris- 
oners at  the  California  Institute  for  Women  in  Frontera. 
Baca  speaks  of  the  despair  and  apathy  that  had  to  be 
overcome  before  the  inmates  could  be  induced  to  paint. 
What  they  finally  arrived  at  in  a  dayroom  however  was 
extraordinary.  The  prisoners  had  been  accustomed  to 
measure  their  suffering  by  the  clock  on  the  wall.  Moved 
by  lines  from  a  poem  of  Ho  Chi  Minh,  "When  the  prison 
doors  open,  the  dragon  w  ill  fly  out,"  they  took  the  clock 
as  their  centerpiece  and  around  it  painted  a  female 
dragon  devouring  time  between  her  flaming  jaws.  The 
dragon  held  the  clock  with  a  woman's  delicate  arm,  while 
the  other  arm  was  bestial,  culminating  in  a  set  of  claws. 
A  woman's  bare  breast  was  exposed,  but  the  rest  of  her 
body  was  all  scales,  claws  and  a  reptile's  tail — a  half- 
human  crocodile,  but  with  golden  wings.  Shortly  after 
the  completion  of  the  mural  a  new  warden  took  over  and 
ordered  its  removal.  That  sums  up  the  problem  of  trying 
to  do  prison  murals.  It  seems  that  any  imagery  that  is 
faithful  to  the  prisoners'  feelings  will  not  be  allowed, 
whereas  the  kind  of  murals  that  are  permitted  are  ap- 
proved because  they  do  not  challenge  the  authorities  but 
keep  the  prisoners  busy. 

.Meanwhile  a  group  of  students  from  the  University  of 
Rhode  Island  who  had  organized  themselves  as  the  Col- 
lege Community  Art  Projects  were  working  with  pris- 


oners in  the  state's  Adult  Correctional  Institutions  be- 
tween 1972  and  1976.^*  They  did  murals  with  prisoners 
in  the  men's  maximum  and  minimum  security  divisions, 
in  the  women's  units,  and  later  in  the  Boys  Training 
School.  One  of  the  group's  muralists.  Shelly  Estrin 
Killen,  tells  of  the  warden  of  the  men's  maximum  divi- 
sion ordering  the  whitewashing  of  their  work.  Before  this 
could  be  carried  out,  she  contacted  concerned  people  on 
the  outside  including  the  press,  and  pressure  succeeded 
in  halting  the  destruction  of  the  murals.  However,  the 
student  group  was  refused  financial  assistance  from  the 
Rhode  Island  Council  on  the  Arts,  the  university  and 
other  state  foundations.  The  only  aid  came  from  New 
York  groups — the  Black  Emergency  Cultural  Coalition 
and  the  DJB  Foundation. 

Similar  problems  were  encountered  by  a  group  of  Bay 
Area  painters  when  they  visited  San  Quentin  early  in 
1976  to  consider  the  possibility  of  doing  a  mural  with  the 
prisoners.  Some  simply  withdrew  once  they  had  taken  in 
the  scene  and  talked  with  officials.  They  felt  that  any- 
thing they  would  be  allowed  to  do  would  mean  par- 
ticipating in  the  co-optation  of  the  prisoners.  However, 
Hilaire  Dufresne  and  a  few  others  decided  to  make  a  try 
and  got  the  authorities'  approval  of  their  design.  It  was 
carried  out  by  eight  prisoners  on  a  wall  facing  the 
Adjustment  Center,  where  the  problem  prisoners  are 
incarcerated,  and  beneath  which  George  Jackson  was 
killed  by  guards.  The  mural  shows  the  hills  and  sky  that 
would  be  seen  if  the  wall  came  down.  Dufresne  prepared 
a  proposal  for  more  painting  to  train  prisoners  in  skills  to 
help  humanize  their  present  environment,  skills  that 
could  also  be  used  later  on  the  outside.  But  this  was  cut 
short  when  funding  was  denied.  His  effort  was  a  sincere 
and  imaginative  one,  but  it  is  hard  to -see  how  public  art 
can  serve  prisoners  when  they  cannot  be  outspoken. 
Doing  murals  in  prisons  compounds  the  difficulties  of 
serious  muralists  working  in  any  establishment  institu- 
tion. 

On  the  other  hand,  Bruce  Coggeshall  had  a  mixed 
experience  as  prisoner-muralist.  As  a  convict  at  Soledad 
State  Prison  in  California  he  did  a  work  in  the  prison 
library  that  still  remains,  but  another  he  did  on  the  history 
of  penology  in  1970  was  painted  out  when  the  warden 
decided  it  was  too  political.  Later  when  Coggeshall  was 
moved  to  the  prison  system's  Medical  Facility  at  Vaca- 
ville  he  was  permitted  to  do  a  115-foot  wall  that  dealt 
with  "the  social  condition  of  man  from  1963  to  1974,"  as 
he  described  it.  In  his  own  words,  it 

starts  with  the  Kennedy  administration,  the  struggle 
for  civil  liberties,  Martin  Luther  King,  Castro,  assassi- 
nations, Oswald,  Ruby,  the  Peace  Corps  and  then  goes 
to  Johnson,  his  family,  Malcolm  X,  the  miniskirt, 
topless  and  bottomless,  the  dances,  Vietnam  war, 
Bobby  Baker,  Walter  Jenkens,  then  to  .My  Lai,  and 
Nixon,  the  pardon.  Rockefeller,  the  energy  crisis, 
woman's  lib,  gay  lib,  the  minorities,  their  struggle, 
Cesar  Chavez,  farm  labor    Bobby  Fisher  and  Boris 


Spassky,  sports  figures,  penology  with  Reagan,  Pro- 
cunier  [former  director  of  the  Cahfornia  Department 
of  Corrections]  and  a  gun  tower  with  a  chained  but 
walking  George  Jackson,  Hitler  and  just  about  every- 
thing including  the  string  bikini  and  a  streaker.*^ 

The  mural  is  a  great  montage  of  images  that  are  bor- 
rowed from  magazine  and  newspaper  photos  and  clearly 
captioned.  Coggeshall's  experience  demonstrates,  if  it 
needed  demonstrating,  that  prisoners  are  at  the  mercy  of 
their  keepers,  and  that  different  keepers  will  feel 
threatened  by  different  things.  He  pushed  on  the  system 
as  hard  as  he  dared  and  found  where  it  would  give  and 
where  it  offered  resistance. 

In  other  instances  prisoners  have  decorated  their  din- 
ing halls  with  pleasant  pastoral  landscapes,  which  it  is 
difficult  for  someone  on  the  outside  to  criticize  because 
they  are  not  political.  What  can  be  concluded  from  these 
examples  is  that  if  a  professional  muralist  does  want  to 
help  prisoners  do  murals,  he  must  do  it  on  their  terms, 
which  is  not  different  from  his  accountability  to 
neighborhoods  on  the  outside.  It  is  not  unlikely  that  he 
may  find  himself  caught  between  the  convicts  and  the 
authorities,  and  this  he  must  be  prepared  to  deal  with, 
for  by  then  he  has  acquired  responsibilities  to  the  pris- 


Visionary  Murals 

While  many  muralists  were  seeking  in  their  ethnic 
culture  resources  for  community  development,  others 
were  pursuing  a  transformation  of  personal  and  collective 
life  through  occult  wisdom  and  its  symbolism.  In  widely 
separated  places  around  the  country  and  with  hardly  any 
knowledge  of  one  another,  these  painters  of  different 
racial  backgrounds  employed  a  rich  vocabulary  of 
esoteric  imagery  to  communicate  their  understanding  of 
social  and  even  political  change.  Already  Gary  Rickson 
in  Boston  in  1968  utilized  a  great  cosmological  eye  that 
was  weeping  because  of  human  violence.  The  following 
year  he  employed  surrealistic  and  "metaphysical"  imag- 
ery in  his  Africa  Is  the  Beginning.  Rickson  was  able  to  keep 
his  symbols  within  the  understanding  of  a  popular  audi- 
ence at  the  same  time  as  he  conveyed  with  cryptic 
elegance  the  impression  of  great  spiritual  forces.  In  1974 
he  with  young  assistants  returned  to  the  symbol  of  the 
weeping  eye  in  a  mural  overlooking  an  outdoor 
neighborhood  theater  in  the  South  End.  We  have  also 
observed  that  much  Chicano  art  has  a  strong  visionary 
element  in  it.  The  idea  of  Aztlan  itself,  with  its  dream  of 
a  new  civilization  growing  out  of  the  past,  has  lent  itself 
to  visionary  presentation  like  Guillermo  Aranda's  mural 
of  1974  at  the  Centro  Cultural  in  San  Diego.  There  a 
beautiful  Chicana  flees  from  a  mechanized  monster 
across  a  rainbow  to  an  incarnation  of  a  new  Aztec  culture 
with  a  pyramid  crowned  by  eagles.  The  vision  is  seen 
through  a  transparent  globe  held  in  a  pair  of  enormous 


Scale  (1973-75)  I  111 

hands,  but  the  pyramid  projects  behind  the  globe, 
suggesting  that  it  is  more  than  an  apparition.  In  many 
other  Chicano  murals  the  evocation  of  indio  culture  in  a 
modern  setting  had  a  visionary  aspect. 

But  in  Baltimore  Bob  Hieronimus  developed  an  al- 
together different  approach  out  of  esoteric,  official 
American  and  modern  Pop  imagery.  A  White  artist,  he 
completed  in  a  Black  neighborhood  in  1974  a  mural 
dedicated  to  the  Bicentennial  in  which  he  utilized  the 
symbols  of  the  nation's  Great  Seal — the  monoptic  eye  in 
a  pyramid.  Lady  Columbia,  the  eagle,  stars,  and 
wreath — and  combined  them  with  figures  of  Aquarius,  a 
great  comet,  the  ship  of  state  bearing  the  heraldry  of 
Baltimore  and  Maryland,  a  UFO,  and  the  Yellow  Sub- 
marine moored  to  the  top  of  the  city's  Battle  Monument, 
which  is  a  memorial  to  its  defenders  against  the  British  in 
1814.  Hieronimus  says  his  mural  urges  a  "cultural  regen- 
eration" that  would  fulfill  the  city  and  country's  poten- 
tialities. He  succeeded  in  pulling  these  images  together  in 
a  work  whose  beauty  and  force  are  immediate.  Although 
the  symbols  are  familiar  and  the  uninitiated  can  make 
headway  with  them,  Hieronimus  wrote  an  attractively 
illustrated  guide  for  those  who  w  ant  to  pursue  their  more 
recondite  meaning.  The  acceptance  by  local  Black  people 
of  his  painting  was  demonstrated  when  I  was  photo- 
graphing it  five  years  after  it  was  done.  A  young  voice 
came  down  from  a  window  high  in  a  building  behind  my 
back:  "Don't  you  take  no  picture  of  our  picture." 

In  1975  Hieronimus  did  a  twelve-by-ninety-foot  mural 
for  Baltimore's  Lexington  Market,  which  dates  back  to 
the  founding  of  the  nation.  Therefore,  he  took  as  his 
main  image  a  long  banquet  table  set  wiiji  meats,  fruits, 
and  cheeses  to  which  America's  great  have  come  to 
celebrate  its  two-hundredth  birthday.  All  the  per- 
sonalities have  local  associations;  the  roster  extends  from 
Washington  to  Francis  Scott  Key,  Edgar  Allan  Poe  to 
Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.,  and  modern  jazz  and  big  band 
performers.  Over  them  the  Greal  Seal's  providential  eye 
and  pyramid,  along  with  Virgo,  the  astrological  sign  of 
service,  preside.  Soyuz  noses  up  to  Apollo  and  a  new 
Peaceable  Kingdom  of  colorful  beasts  (each  of  whom,  we 
are  told  in  a  brochure,  has  symbolic  meaning)  envelops  a 
portrait  of  modern  Baltimore.  At  very  least  the  mural  is 
entertainingly  designed  and  vibrant  in  color. 

It  is  in  Los  Angeles  that  the  greatest  number  of  esoteric 
murals  have  been  done,  undoubtedly  because  the  city  has 
been  the  home  of  cults  for  decades.  They  have  often  been 
associated  with  the  exotic  tastes  of  Hollywood  and  sun 
worshippers  but  also  with  the  fact  that  California  since 
the  nineteenth  century  has  been  the  home  of  a  wide 
variety  of  Utopian  experiments,  often  of  a  religious  na- 
ture. The  local  occult  murak  owe  their  origin  to  the 
revival  of  this  tradition,  particularly  by  the  countercul- 
ture. The  most  famous  and  controversial  was  the  Beverly 
Hills  Siddhartha  by  the  Los  Angeles  Fine  Art  Squad,  but 
it  will  be  discussed  later.  .Murals  of  the  Age  of  Aquarius 
adorned  Los  Angeles  cabarets  and  restaurants,  health 


238  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Robert  Hieronimus:  Lexington  Market  Mural  (partial 
view),  1975,  Baltimore.  (Photo  Robert  Hieronimus) 


Keith  Tucker:  Gro-Between,  1972,  Santa  Monica. 


••^  i 


food  establishments,  head  shops,  and  book  and  record 
stores.  The  familiar  imagery  of  occult  lore  to  be  seen 
around  the  country  flourished  there  and  in  San  Francisco 
at  least  since  1969  with  white-bearded  sages,  enlightened 
couples  surrounded  by  auras,  mandalas,  wild  but  benign 
landscapes,  exotic  flowers,  richly  plumaged  birds,  swell- 
ing mushrooms,  stars,  and  planets — the  Paradise  Found 
of  the  hip  subculture.  Some  of  these  murals  borrowed 
from  illustrations  for  science  fiction  or  medieval  ro- 
mances. If  this  "head  art"  is  to  be  taken  seriously,  it  is  not 
because  of  its  aesthetic  quality — it  seldom  rises  above  the 
routine  and  adheres  to  not  very  promising  models.  But  it 
is  significant  at  least  as  a  challenge  to  the  values  of  the 
one-dimensional  society  of  commerce  and  the  public 
media.  However,  it  is  important  to  distinguish  "head  art" 
from  the  work  of  Rickson  and  Chicano  artists  who  were 
able  to  make  the  occult  credible  by  coming  to  grips  with 
social  reality.  While  "head  art"  had  its  serious  devotees,  it 
had  a  transient  popularity  and  readily  succumbed  to 
commercialization.  It  never  had  the  kind  of  deeply  rooted 
base  in  a  neighborhood  that  was  common  with  commu- 
nity murals. 


NOTES 

1.  Jaime  Carrillo,  Candice  Ho,  Julio  Lxjpez,  Anthony 
Machado,  and  Jack  Nevarez. 

2.  The  mural  was  The  Marriage  of  the  Artistic  Expression  of  the 
North  and  South  of  this  Continent.  It  was  painted  in  public  at  the 
Golden  Gate  Exposition  on  Treasure  Island  and  later  installed 
at  the  City  College  of  San  Francisco. 

3.  Susan  Thistle,  Vicki  Smith  and  William  Ristow, 
"BART:  Forcing  the  Mission  Underground,"  San  Francisco  Bay 
Guardian,  November  IS,  1973,  pp.  19,  22.  Also,  Heins,  pp.  76 
ff. 

4.  Deborah  Rudo  and  Scott  Riklin,  "Galeria  Suffers  $ 
M^ots"  Arts  Biweekly  (San  Francisco),  July  15,  1977,  p.  6. 

5.  "Countdown  for  the  I-Hotel,"  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian, 
August  6,  1976,  p.  3. 

6.  "Who's  upholding  the  law  at  the  I-Hotel?"  San  Francisco 
Bay  Guardian,  January  13,  1977,  p.  3. 

7.  Quoted  by  Thomas  Kunz,  "The  Haight-Ashbury:  Cul- 
ture and  Community,"  Common  Sense  (San  Francisco),  May 
1975,  p.  9.  The  Haight  Ashbury  Muralists  who  did  the  mural 
include  Kunz,  Jane  Norling,  Miranda  Bergman,  Selma 
Brown,  Peggy  Tucker,  and  Arch  Williams. 

8.  Drescher  and  Garcia,  p.  27. 

9.  Citywide  Murals  press  release,  July,  1978. 
to.  McBride,  p.  17. 


Scale  (1973-75)  1219 

1 1 .  Gil  Blanco,  "Vehicle  for  Positive  Change,"  Latin  Quarter 
(Los  Angeles),  October  1974,  p.  29. 

12.  .McBride,  p.  17. 

13.  "The  .Viural  .Message,"  Time,  April  7,  1975,  p.  79,  and 
.McBride,  p.  17. 

14.  Herron's  work  at  Ramona  Gardens  was  facilitated  by 
David  Kahn,  staff  worker  for  EPIC  (Educational  Participation 
in  Communities),  a  consortium  supported  by  nearby  colleges. 

15.  Horst  Schmidt-Brummer,  Venice,  California,  An  Urban 
Fantasy  (New  York:  Grossman,  1973),  p.  17. 

16.  Gerald  Faris,  "Painting  Depicts  Obliteration  Fear,"Io^ 
Angeles  Times,  July  6,  1975,  p.  2. 

17.  "The  .Mural  Message,"  r/wf. 

18.  ".Mexican-American  .Mural  to  Be  Unveiled,"  Arizona 
Daily  Star,  September  13,  1975,  Sec.  B,  p.  1. 

19.  Victor  Sorell,  "Barrio  Murals  in  Chicago,"  Revista 
Chicano-Riqueiia,  Autumn,  1976. 

20.  Rogovin  and  Barbara  Russum,  Report  on  PAW  ac- 
tivities to  Expansion  Arts  Program,  NEA,  1974-75. 

21.  Eva  and  James  Cockcroft,  "Murals  for  the  People  of 
Chile,"  TRA  (Toward  Revolutionary  Art),  no.  4,  1973,  pp. 
2-11;  and  David  Kunzle,  "Art  in  Chile's  Revolutionary  Proc- 
ess: Guerrilla  .Muralist  Brigades,"  A^eu;  World  Review  41,  no.  3 
(1973):  42-53. 

22.  Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  pp.  188  ff. 

23.  Lucy  Lippard,  "Issues  and  Commentary,"  Art  in 
America,  January-February  1974,  p.  35. 

24.  Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  p.  182. 

25.  National  Murals  Newsletter  (N MM),  no.  1,  1977,  p.  5. 

26.  Carlos  Alvaraz,  "The  Artist  as  a  Revolutionary,"  Chis- 
mearte.  Fall  1976. 

27.  Caryl  Yasko,  "Logan  Square's  First  Community-based 
Mural  Project,"  report  to  Chicago  Mural  Group,  1974,  p.  3. 

28.  Ibid.,  p.  2. 

29.  Caryl  Yasko,  "Report  on  Lemont  .Mural,"  for  CMG, 
1975,  p.  4. 

30.  Newsletter  of  San  Francisco  Street  Artist  Guild,  late 
spring  1975. 

31.  David  Shapiro,  p.  24. 

32.  Justine  DeVan,  Celia  Radek,  and  Caryl  Yasko,  Razem, 
team  statement  to  CMG,  1975. 

33.  James  O.  O'Toole  et  al..  Work  in  America  (Cambridge: 
MIT,  1973?),  pp.  35  f. 

34.  "A  Letter  From  Refregier,"  A'A/A',  no.  1,  1977,  p.  2. 

35.  Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  pp.  119-23. 

36.  Shelly  Estrin  Killen,  "Prison  Walk,"  NMN,  no.  1,  1977, 
p.  3. 

37.  Reported  by  Greg  deGiere,  "Bruce  the  Brush  Paints 
Politics  in  Prison,"  The  Reporter  ( Vacaville,  Calif.),  February  9, 
1975,  p.  2. 


5 


PROBLEMS  AND  PROMISE 

(1976-80) 


As  the  mural  movement  was  reaching  the  period  of  its 
greatest  activity  and  expansion,  it  was  also  undergoing 
serious  stresses;  but  innovation  and  advances  were  to 
continue  along  with  growing  obstacles.  One  of  the  key 
and  persistent  threats  was  the  difficulty  of  funding.  The 
National  Endowment  for  the  Arts,  which  had  been  the 
major  source  of  public  funds  since  1970,  began  cutting 
back  its  support  after  1973.  The  principal  explanation 
must  be  the  decline  of  riots  and  militancy  in  the  inner 
city  together  with  the  recession  that  began  in  1974.  It 
was  the  violence  in  the  barrios  and  ghettos  that  had  first 
provoked  the  funneling  of  federal  money  to  the  urban 
poor,  and  muralists  understood  that,  although  some  of  its 
backers  in  government  were  serious  about  community 
arts,  the  main  motivation  for  the  NEA  money  they 
received  was  cooling  out  the  long  hot  summers  in  the 
inner  city.  While  violence  did  decline,  there  was  little 
improvement  in  employment,  low-income  housing,  and 
public  services.  In  fact  with  the  recession  of  1974  a  new 
wave  of  joblessness  set  in  that  was  to  remain  unabated 
during  the  next  six  years  for  inner-city  people.  On  the 
other  hand,  a  source  of  federal  funding  unforeseen  by  the 
government  was  discovered  by  muralists — CE TA  man- 
power funds  administered  by  the  Department  of  Labor. 
Money  under  this  program  began  moving  to  them  in 
1975.  By  1978  it  was  the  Department  of  Labor  rather 
than  the  NEA  that  was  providing  the  largest  part  of 
federal  support  for  community  murals.  But  community 
art  was  being  sustained  as  a  sop  to  unemployment  rather 
than  as  a  deliberate  effort  by  the  government  to  support 
culture.  The  funding  picture  was  also  temporarily  al- 
leviated during  the  middle  of  the  seventies  by  allocations 


at  all  levels  of  government  to  celebrate  the  nation's 
Bicentennial.  When  these  funds  were  used  up,  commu- 
nity arts  in  general  were  threatened  by  the  fiscal  crisis  of 
the  cities  that  the  near-bankruptcy  of  New  York 
dramatized.  The  attempt  of  municipalities  to  cut  back 
first  on  funding  for  what  was  regarded  as  frills  was 
experienced  by  City  wide  Murals  in  Los  Angeles  in  1976, 
and  two  years  later  support  was  totally  curtailed.  This 
challenge  was  compounded  in  1978  by  the  taxpayers' 
revolt  that  began  in  California  and'  threatened  to  spread 
across  the  country. 

At  the  same  time  that  mural  activity  was  spreading  and 
individual  groups  were  growing,  they  were  reaching  out 
and  forming  networks  with  a  view  to  learning  from  each 
other  and  dealing  with  the  new  problems  they  were 
encountering.  Visits  by  distant  artists  and  even  their 
teenage  teams  began  early.  In  1970  the  Cityarts  staff  took 
a  group  of  Lower  East  Side  youngsters  to  Boston's 
Roxbury  to  view  the  work  of  muralists,  and  this  became 
the  basis  of  the  first  outdoor  mural  Cityarts  did.  Two 
years  later  the  staff  traveled  to  Chicago,  where  the 
greatest  number  of  socially  conscious  wall  paintings  was 
then  to  be  seen.  In  1974  muralists  from  Chicago  to  New 
York  and  Philadelphia  gathered  in  Boston  for  a  sym-l 
posium  organized  by  the  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art. 

Also  in  that  year  Latino  artists  on  the  West  Coast,! 
many  of  them  muralists,  organized  as  the  California] 
Coalition  de  Artistas.  In  1975  their  representatives  met] 
with  Governor  Brown  and  discussed  the  concept  ofj 
community  arts,  state  support  of  jobs  for  artists,  andf 
recognition  that  they  were  professionals  deserving  steady] 
employment  and  basic  benefits  in  such  areas  as  health.'' 


240 


This  meeting  had  an  impact  in  shifting  state  support  to 
the  community  arts. 

Organizing  murahsts  on  the  national  level  was  dis- 
cussed at  the  First  West  Coast  Mural  Conference  in  Los 
Angeles  and  the  College  Art  Association  meeting  in 
Chicago  in  January  1976.  .Muralists  were  looking  to  such 
organizing  not  only  as  a  means  of  exchanging  information 
but  also  as  a  method  of  lobbying  the  NEA  and  other 
agencies  to  provide  funding.  Another  important  issue 
was  trying  to  establish  what  a  legitimate  fee  for  profes- 
sional muralists  is  and  to  get  agreement  among  them  to 
work  toward  a  common  pay  scale.  A  frequent  complaint 
heard  at  the  Los  Angeles  conference  was  that,  because 
untrained  community  people  were  often  employed  on  a 
mural,  it  was  expected  that  the  fee  for  the  professional 
artist  need  be  no  more  than  a  dollar  a  square  foot.  John 
Weber  doubted  that  muralists  had  either  the  energy  to 
devote  to  making  a  union  effective,  or  that  it  could  mount 
sufficient  power  to  produce  the  changes  they  sought.  He 
suggested  instead  broadening  the  concept  to  a  national 
coalition  of  community  arts  groups  that  would  include 
those  involved  in  the  other  visual  and  performance  arts. 

The  day  after  the  West  Coast  Conference,  the  mural 
movement  received  recognition  by  the  academic  estab- 
lishment by  appearing  on  the  program  of  the  College  Art 
Association  annual  meeting  in  Chicago  w  ith  a  slide  lec- 
ture, symposium,  and  bus  tour  of  mural  sites. 

The  First  National  Murals  Conference  was  held  dur- 
ing the  May  Day  weekend  of  1976.  Cityarts  Workshop 
took  responsibility  for  the  arrangements  and  hosted  more 
than  150  muralists  from  around  the  nation.  Fhere  were 
workshops  on  murals  in  the  schools,  political  murals, 
methods  of  documentation,  permanent  painting  tech- 
niques, and  collective  method,  as  well  as  the  legal 
protection  of  art  and  artists.  Although  participants  came 
with  a  variety  of  views  about  the  purpose  and  character 
of  murals,  they  could  agree  that  their  common  purpose 
was  to  "build  a  truly  community-based  monumental 
public  art  movement  in  the  U.S."^  They  spoke  of  mutual 
support  and  communication  among  the  artists  and  get- 
ting the  word  out  about  murals  to  the  public  at  large.  To 
meet  these  needs  they  organized  a  National  .Murals  Net- 
work, beginning  as  a  coalition  of  over  fifty  mural  groups 
and  independent  muralists.  They  designated  regional 
centers  of  contact  and  decided  to  publish  a  newsletter 
and  continue  to  meet  annually.  The  centers  would  share 
the  responsibility  of  publishing  and  hosting.  In  the  first 
newsletter  Cityarts  Workshop  called  for  representatives 
of  different  mural  groups  to  join  with  it  to  visit  the  new 
head  of  the  NEA's  Visual  Arts  program  to  explain  the 
goals  and  needs  of  the  movement  in  order  to  reverse  the 
dwindling  of  federal  funding.  However,  mounting 
difficulties,  particularly  cutbacks  in  funding,  the  strain  of 
continuous  work,  and  the  departure  of  some  muralists 
from  their  groups,  were  reflected  in  the  postponement  of 
a  second  annual  meeting  in  1977  to  the  following  year. 

The  National  Murals  Newsletter  itself  became  an  im- 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  241 

portant  means  of  keeping  artists  in  touch.  While  report- 
ing new  work  being  done  throughout  the  country  and 
funding  developments,  it  increasingly  offered  muralists 
the  opportunity  to  exchange  views  in  its  pages.  In  1979  it 
brought  out  an  edition  that  dealt  exclusively  with  com- 
munity murals  being  done  abroad.  After  being  produced 
in  New  York  and  Chicago,  it  was  edited  in  San  Francisco 
under  the  leadership  of  Tim  Drescher,  who  observes  that 
it  is  published  in  the  same  vein  as  the  murals  are 
painted — as  a  cooperative  venture  to  raise  the  qualitative 
level  of  communication. 

Money  was  not  the  only  problem  for  community 
murals.  Already  during  the  summers  of  1974  and  1975, 
the  politically  conscious  painters  around  the  country 
were  talking  about  a  new  level  of  seriousness,  a  greater 
outspokenness  they  wanted  in  their  art.  .Vlark  Rogovin  in 
Chicago  said  that  images  of  peace  doves  or  hands  joined 
in  unity  were  no  longer  enough.  To  him  it  was  important 
to  show  different  groups  of  people  coming  together  to 
resist  a  common  enemy  and  to  project  images  not  only  of 
protest  but  also  of  solutions.  Alan  Okada  in  New  York 
said  that  the  group  of  experienced  muralists  in  the  Lower 
East  Side  he  was  directing  had  taken  a  serious  step 
forward  by  being  explicit  in  Chi-lai — Arriba — Rise  Up! 
about  the  connection  of  U.S.  imperialism  abroad  and  the 
exploitation  of  minority  people  at  home.  William  Walker 
emphasized  that  murals  had  new  responsibilities  in  the 
face  of  the  heightening  crisis  that  he  believed  connected 
the  Watergate  impeachment  hearings,  going  on  at  the 
moment,  and  the  problems  of  the  slums. 

In  Los  Angeles,  Judy  Baca  said  in  the  fall  of  1974  that 
young  people  in  the  barrios  had  to  learn  to  talk  before 
they  could  sing.  Asked  if  issues  like  police  harassment, 
the  repression  of  women,  and  the  difficulty  of  getting 
decent  jobs  had  become  themes  of  many  murals,  she  said 
"No."  Most  young  Chicanos  did  not  understand  that 
they  had  been  singled  out  and  were  victims  of  racism,  she 
said.  They  thought  everyone  suffered  similarly  or  that  at 
least  they  as  Chicanos  could  reasonably  expect  it.  She 
added  that  their  horizon  of  understanding  was  limited  to 
their  barrios.  This  was  at  first  difficult  for  an  outsider  to 
accept,  because  the  massive  turnout  for  the  antiwar 
Chicano  .Moratorium  in  1970  seemed  to  reflect  an  under- 
standing of  the  connection  of  economic  imperialism 
abroad  and  colonialism  in  the  barrios.  But  the  moratorium 
was  the  peak  of  organizing  in  East  Los  Angeles.  The 
violent  attack  of  the  police  on  the  crowd  and  the  killing  of 
reporter  Ruben  Salazar  by  a  tear-gas  grenade  were  later 
viewed,  local  observer  Shifra  Goldman  said,  as  having 
severely  weakened  the  movement.  These  events 
fueled  hundreds  of  protest  murals  but  impaired  serious 
local  organizing.  In  1976,  Goldman  and  Baca  agreed, 
there  was  no  organization  in  the  barrios  that  was  fighting 
the  continuing  police  harassment  or  dealing  effectively 
with  the  urgent  need  of  residents  for  jobs.  Judy  Baca 
spoke  with  great  sadness  of  the  violence  Chicanos  were 
victims  of.  Her  brother  had  been  jailed  for  five  days  for 


242  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


not  being  able  to  raise  seventy  dollars  bail  for  traffic 
tickets  and  had  his  head  severely  beaten  by  two  other 
prisoners. 

Baca  was  concerned  by  the  insufficiency  of  follow-up 
after  a  mural  was  completed.  The  most  concrete  result 
was  the  continuing  demand  by  barrio  people  for  more 
murals,  which  she  viewed  as  a  means  of  affirming  the 
neighborhood  as  their  own.  She  also  said  that  the  murals 
gave  young  people  the  experience  of  working  together. 
Sometimes  two,  even  three  gangs  collaborated  on  a  single 
work.  But  she  acknowledged,  as  Saiil  Solache,  who 
worked  back  in  1970  on  the  first  important  Chicano 
mural  of  the  new  movement  in  Los  Angeles  also  said  five 
years  later,  that  the  murals  were  not  yet  helping  Latinos 
organize.  They  were  helping  to  bring  people  together 
and  understand  each  other,  he  agreed,  and  that  was  an 
important  first  step,  but  that  was  all.  The  gang  wars  and 
vandalism  continued,  Baca  said.  She  recognized  the  need 
for  adults  and  young  people  to  get  together  and  build  on 
the  enthusiasm  that  the  murals  generated.  But  many 
adults  in  the  barrios  felt  threatened  by  the  teenage  gangs 
and  supported  the  police  coming  in  to  keep  them  under 
control.  In  1976,  three  years  after  the  first  paintings  were 
done  at  Estrada  Courts,  there  were  fourteen  gang  killings 
in  the  barrio,  which  extended  beyond  the  public  hous- 
ing, and  unemployment  among  Estrada  residents  re- 
mained around  55  percent.*  All  that  could  be  reasonably 
expected  of  the  murals  would  be  to  encourage  political 
action  to  create  conditions  that  would  change  this. 

In  San  Francisco  Consuelo  Mendez,  one  of  the  mem- 
bers of  Las  Mujeres  Muralistas,  said  in  1975  she  was  no 
longer  satisfied  with  painting  decorative  scenes  of  happy 
Latin  American  indios.  She  believed  that  murals  had  to  be 
political  and  wanted  to  discuss  with  other  artists  how 
they  could  respond  more  effectively  to  the  need  for  an  art 
of  struggle.  Shortly  afterward  she  made  an  extended  visit 
to  Cuba  where  she  directed  a  mural  done  by  fellow 
members  of  the  Venceremos  Brigade.  On  her  return  she 
turned  increasingly  to  silk-screen  prints  on  social  themes 
and  then  in  1976  left  permanently  for  Venezuela  where 
she  was  born. 

Rene  Yariez,  codirector  of  the  Galer'ia  de  La  Raza  in 
San  Francisco  who  coordinated  many  of  the  Mission 
District  murals,  said  in  1975  that  it  was  no  longer 
sufficient  to  make  mufals  on  such  vague  themes  as 
"Power  to  the  People."  He  was  persuaded  of  the  im- 
portance of  murals  in  raising  people's  social  and  political 
understanding,  but  to  do  this  paintings  had  to  be  specific. 
It  was  important  to  do  serious  research  on  Uxral  issues,  he 
said.  One,  for  instance,  that  had  not  been  dealt  with  and 
was  of  deep  local  concern  was  how  to  prevent  the  de- 
portation of  Mexican  "illegals" — that  is,  the  workers  and 
their  families  who  had  not  been  able  to  get  border 
crossing  documents  or  overstayed  their  visas,  many  of 
whom  had  been  resident  in  San  Francisco  for  years  and 
had  legally  resident  relatives  here. 

After  the  completion  of  the  murals  on  three  sides  of  the 


minipark  in  San  Francisco's  Mission  District  in  the 
summer  of  1975,  the  reaffirmation  of  Raza  heritage  and 
the  need  to  build  on  it,  which  they  and  other  local  murals 
expressed,  by  now  seemed  to  have  made  its  point.  A  base 
had  been  created  from  \\  hich  local  artists  could  move  on 
to  specific  controversial  issues  and  support  specific  pro- 
posals. The  BART  mural  had  been  an  uncertain  effort  in 
this  direction.  There  was  a  danger  that  more  celebrations 
of  Latino  identity  might  play  into  establishment  efforts 
to  turn  the  Mission  District  into  a  picturesque  area 
catering  to  tourists  and  new  upper-income  residents. 

By  spring  of  1976  the  mural  scene  in  San  Francisco 
was  a  mixed  picture.  Rene  Yanez  had  been  hired  by  the 
city  to  coordinate  murals  in  all  neighborhoods.  He  says 
that  he  was  run  out  of  the  Black  community  of  Hunters 
Point  when  he  tried  to  carry  out  his  responsibilities 
there.  He  resigned  because  it  was  clear  that  the  different 
neighborhoods,  especially  different  ethnic  groups,  would 
have  to  manage  their  own  art.  Finally  he  and  the  Galeria 
withdrew  altogether  from  making  arrangements  for 
murals  in  their  own  Mission  District.  Conflicts  had  been 
developing  with  another  local  group,  and  the  Galeria 
decided  that  it  had  other  tasks  to  absorb  it.  Yariez  also 
believed  that  a  number  of  the  muralists  associated  with 
the  Galer'ia  were  more  concerned  about  meeting  their 
obligations  to  CETA  and  collecting  their  checks  than 
responding  with  sufficient  sensitivity  to  the  issues  of  the 
neighborhoods.  The  murals,  he  said,  had  performed  an 
important  function — creating  a  sense  of  local  identity  and 
pride.  They  had  lent  strength  to  the  battle  against  rede- 
velopment. But  they  were  not  dealing  with  currently 
important  issues — drugs,  vandalism,  and  the  deportation 
of  undocumented  workers.  He  felt  that  they  had  not 
really  broken  loose  from  decoration.  In  the  Bicentennial 
year  murals  had  become  "trendy"  and  lost  their  bite. 
Yanez  felt  that  topical  posters,  for  instance  the  lino-cuts  of 
a  new  non-Latino  group,  the  San  Francisco  Poster 
Brigade  (formerly  the  Wilfred  Owen  Brigade)  which 
pasted  their  work  to  walls  throughout  the  shopping 
streets,  would  have  more  effect  than  recent  murals.  He 
also  believed  that  painted  billboards  would  be  a  more 
flexible  vehicle  for  current  issues,  and  the  Galer'ia  carried 
on  a  running  battle  to  put  up  its  own  images  that  were 
relevant  to  the  Mission  District  on  one  on  its  streetside 
that  was  owned  by  the  Foster  &  Kleiser  ad  agency.  The 
disillusionment  of  Yariez  was  partly  a  product  of  the 
bitter  conflicts,  suspicions  and  jealousies  of  groups  not 
only  in  the  Mission  District,  but  among  neighborhood 
organizations  in  general  that  were  struggling  for  their 
own  existence  and  the  development  of  their  communities 
with  the  meager  funds  that  the  establishment  dispensed. 
The  answer,  of  course,  was  for  local  groups  to  cooperate 
where  they  could  and  particularly  combine  to  press  for 
larger  allcKations  of  public  funds  for  community  arts. 

Although  the  Galeria  abandoned  its  former  role  of 
coordinating  large  mural  projects  in  the  .Mission  District, 
it  did   not  give   up  related  efforts.    The  ground-level 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  243 


Xavier  Viramontes:  Avoid  Junk  Food,  1978,  Galeriade 
la  Raza,  Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


billboard  it  liberated  in  1976  became  in  fact  a  frequently 
changed  topical  mural  that  maintained  elaborate  imag- 
ery, but  used  words  much  more  extensively  in  the  man- 
ner of  billboards.  The  messages  sometimes  supported 
neighborhood  culture  like  salsa  but  more  frequently  of- 
fered advice  against  cigarettes  and  junk  food,  pointing 
out  particularly  what  Latino  foods  were  nutritious. 
Many  of  these  billboard  murals  were  painted  by  Xavier 
Viramontes.  They  were  conceived  as  antiads,  directed 
against  the  commercial  signs  that  abounded  in  the 
neighborhood.  (They  sometimes  resembled  the  big 
mural  Angel  Bracho  did  on  behalf  of  the  fruits  that  yield 
Vitamin  C  on  a  ceiling  of  the  Abelardo  Rodriguez 
Market  in  Mexico  City  in  the  mid- 1930s.)  As  part  of  its 
outreach  activities  the  Galena  interested  local  shopkeep- 
ers in  having  their  facades  embellished  with  ethnic  de- 
signs and  small  murals,  like  the  Aztec  in  full  regalia 
painted  at  the  entrance  of  a  local  bakery.  The  staff  would 
contact  local  artists  and  make  the  arrangements,  and  the 
effect  w  as  to  enhance  further  the  identity  and  pride  of  the 
neighborhood.  In  the  summer  of  1978  the  Galena 
reaffirmed  its  belief  in  murals  with  an  exhibition  of  the 
preliminary  drawings  of  Bay  Area  artists,  which  in- 
cluded the  work  of  Black,  Asian,  and  Anglo  muralists,  as 
well  as  Latinos. 

.Meanwhile,  in  the  East,  well-knit  muralist  organiza- 
tions were  experiencing  the  difficulties  of  their  own 
growth  and  the  passage  of  time.  At  the  end  of  the  1974 


season  of  painting  the  Chicago  Mural  Group  realized  that 
it  was  spreading  itself  thin  and  decided  to  consolidate 
within  the  neighborhoods  where  it  had  roots  and  to 
provide  help  for  other  groups  to  get  started  elsew  here,  it 
also  turned  from  mural  teams  made  up  of  a  professional 
artist  and  untrained  local  assistants  to  collaborations 
among  its  own  artists  and  seminars  directed  toward  their 
development.  Also  during  the  mid-seventies  some  of  its 
veteran  members  were  lost:  Ray  Patlan,  Santi  Is- 
rowuthakul  and  then  Jim  Yanagasawa  and  Caryl  Yasko 
left  the  Chicago  area  altogether,  while  William  Walker 
went  his  separate  way. 

Bicentennial  Murals  in  the  Bay  Area 

The  celebration  of  the  nation's  birthday  in  practically 
every  community  across  the  land  provided  the  occasion 
for  commissions  for  many  muralists.  Some  murals  done 
in  1974  and  1975  for  the  Bicentennial  have  already  been 
noted.  The  art  form  had  reached  the  height  of  its  famil- 
iarity to  the  public,  and  it  was  to  be  expected  that  since 
the  festivities  maximized  the  demand  for  public  art, 
there  would  be  a  spate  of  superficial  patriotic  murals. 
This  may  have  occurred  in  some  places,  but  in  general 
this  did  not  happen.  One  example  of  a  lighthearted 
decorative  piece  was  the  three  sides  of  a  frozen-foods 
warehouse  that  Sam  Frankel  did  north  of  San  Francisco 
in  Marin  County.  Drivers  along  the  highway  could  take 
in  a  landscape  with  a  rising  (or  setting)  siin  whose  rays 
unfurled  like  an  American  flag  on  one  side,  and  a  sea- 


244  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

scape  with  waves  rolling  with  the  same  stars  and  stripes 
on  the  other.  Both  were  done  in  the  flecked  style  of  van 
CJogh,  and  the  first  was  in  fact  an  improvisation  on  Starry 
Sight.  Between  these  two  wails  vsas  a  third  with  huge 
portraits  of  Washington,  Franklin,  Jefferson,  and  Lin- 
coln, also  in  the  Dutch  expressionist's  swirling  color. 
Fhere  was  nothing  pompous  about  the  ensemble;  it  was 
all  in  the  spirit  of  a  cheery  birthday  card. 

In  San  Francisco  the  National  Park  Service  funded  the 
painting  of  the  interior  walls  of  a  roofed-over  pier  at  Fort 
Mason  that  had  been  turned  into  a  public  exhibition  hall 


for  crafts  and  book  fairs  as  part  of  the  Golden  Gate 
National  Recreation  Area.  Fwelve  local  muralists  coor- 
dinated by  Arthur  Monroe  and  Jack  Frost  were  com- 
missioned to  do  interpretations  of  the  city's  history, 
emphasizing  its  ethnic  and  cultural  diversity.  Fhe  results 
were  a  pleasant  abstraction  of  the  Bay  Area's  yellow  hills 
and  green  chaparral,  scenes  of  North  and  Central  Ameri- 
can indigenous  peoples  and  the  missions,  San  Francisco's 
Chinatown  in  the  189()s,  a  view  of  construction  workers 
high  in  the  skyscrapers,  and  a  panorama  of  familiar  sites 
about  the  city.  The  whole  provided  a  bright  frieze  of 


Sam   Frankel:    Bicentennial    Murals,    1976,    Mann 
County,  California. 


''Some  Events  in  American  History,"  Bicentennial  Mural 
Exhibit,  1976,  San  Francisco  Museum  of  Modern  Art. 


predictable  subjects  around  the  interior  of  a  huge  barn  of 
a  place,  but  the  opportunity  of  saying  something  of  real 
significance  \\  as  either  missed  or  denied. 

Probably  every  fine-arts  museum  in  the  country 
mounted  exhibitions  for  the  Bicentennial.  While  the  San 
Francisco  Museum  of  Modern  Art  had  its  program  of 
largely  establishment  avant-garde  works,  it  did  offer  in 
its  main  gallery  a  month-long  show  of  "People's  Murals: 
Some  Events  in  American  History,"  a  display  of  seven 
portable  works  by  community  artists  that  it  had  com- 
missioned for  one  thousand  dollars  each.  While  one  of 
the  murals  was  a  delightful  work  concerned  with  local 
history  by  elementary  school  children,  the  other  pieces 
were  efforts  by  artists  to  take  seriously  the  revolutionary 
spirit  of  the  occasicm.  Horace  Washington  and  Caleb 
Williams  showed  in  their  narrative  illustration  of  Crispus 
Attucks  at  the  Boston  Massacre  that  one  of  the  first  to  fall 
in  the  Revolution  was  a  Black  man.  in  another  mural 
Graciela  Carillo  and  Irene  Perez  did  a  colorful  view  of  the 
indio  and  Native  American  heritage.  Roberto  and  Ver- 
onica Mendoza  painted  a  large  work  on  recent  Indian 
struggles  to  preserve  and  win  back  their  lands  in  the 
West.  Dewey  Grumpier  depicted  the  efforts  of  Third 
World  peoples  to  break  up  the  crust  of  racism  that  covers 
the  continent  by  literally  jackhammering  through  it  and 
planting  the  land  afresh,  while  in  the  background  a  \\  all 


Roberto  and  Veronica  Mendoza:  The  Struggle  of  Na- 
tive People  for  Sovereignty,  1976,  San  Francisco 
Museum  of  Modern  Art. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  245 

of  towering  cities  seemed  to  be  consumed  in  Hames.  Fhe 
Haight  Ashbury  Muralists  in  a  work  titled  Two  Hundred 
Years  of  Resistance  presented  a  frieze  of  people  of  all  races 
shoulder  to  shoulder  struggling  for  liberation  v\  ith  bow  s 
and  arrows,  guns,  sheer  muscle,  machine  tools,  and 
books.  1  he  work  was  in  bright  colors  and  heavy  black 
outlines  reminiscent  of  the  Socialist  Realism  of  (Chinese 
posters  of  the  sixties.  It  w  as  later  mounted  outdoors  in 
the  Haight. 

Mike  Rios  and  Fony  Machado  provided  the  most 
impassioned  political  statement.  In  it  naked,  almost 
faceless  people,  some  with  raised  fists,  others  falling, 
throw  themselves  upon  a  rank  of  boar-faced,  helmeted 
and  greatcoated  soldiers  v\  hose  U.S.  and  Nazi  Hags  have 
beefi  knocked  to  the  ground.  Fhe  protesters  lift  their 
banner  aloft  that  bears  the  words  of  Che  Ciuevara,  "Ksta 
Gran  Humanidad  Ha  Dicho  jBasta!"  (  Fhis  great  hu- 
manity has  said:  Enough!)  Rios  borrowed  from  a  poster 
he  had  seen  in  Cuba,  w  here  he  had  been  invited  by  the 
government  the  previous  year.  Even  some  sympathetic 
viewers  thought  that  it  was  a  tactical  error  to  identify  the 
United  States  w  ith  Nazism  although  there  w  as  a  risk  that 
we  could  move  in  that  direction.  In  fact,  a  neo-Nazi 
group  had  surfaced  in  San  Francisco  and  w  as  appearing 
in  public.  Watergate  was  still  a  live  issue.  U.S.  corporate 
and  CIA  involvement  in  the  overthrow  of  the  demo- 
cratically elected  Allcnde  government  in  (^hile  by  a 
brutal  military  dictatorship  three  years  earlier  remained  a 


Miranda  Bergman,  Vicky  Hamlin,  Jane  Norling,  Miles 
Styker,  and  Arch  Williams  (Haight  Ashbury  Muralists): 
Two  Hundred  Years  of  Resistance,  7976,  mounted 
first  at  San  Francisco  Museum  of  Modern  Art,  later 
permanently  in  the  Haight -Ashbury. 


Michael  Rios  and  Anthony  Machado:  ''This  Great  Hu- 
manity Has  Said,  Enough!"  1976,  San  Francisco 
Museum  of  Modern  Art. 


continuing  concern  for  progressive  people  in  San  Fran- 
cisco, particularly  w  ith  the  assassination  in  Washington 
of  the  former  ambassador  of  Chile,  Orlando  Letelier,  in 
1976.  Whatever  arguments  there  might  be  about  the 
tactfulness  of  the  painting  of  Rios  and  Machado,  it  vv  as 
clear  that  they  were  willing  to  employ  murals  to  make 
controversial  statements,  and  as  at  the  Bank  of  America, 
in  the  belly  of  the  beast. 

The  most  striking  aesthetic  innovation  of  the  exhibit 
was  a  large  V-shaped  mural  dramatizing  the  battle  of  the 
elderly  Filipino  and  Asian-American  tenants  of  the  In- 
ternational Motel  against  efforts  of  its  o\\  ners  to  replace  it 
with  something  more  profitable  than  low-rent  housing. 
This  was  the  second  effort  of  Jim  Dong  and  Nancy  Hom 
to  bring  the  fight  to  save  the  hotel  before  the  public.  Its 
V-shape  and  accomplished  draftsmanship  captured  visi- 
tors' attention.  The  mural  depicts  an  elderly  resident 
reaching  forward  to  deflect  a  wrecker's  ball.  Vleanwhile, 
a  developer  puts  coins  into  one  of  the  scales  of  justice  a 
judge  holds  as  he  orders  the  eviction  of  the  tenants.  Ihe 
shadow  of  the  Transamerica  pyramid,  symbol  of  San 
Francisco  finance,  crosses  behind  them.  The  artists  not 
only  adopted  the  shaped  surfaces  of  avant-gardists  like 
Frank  Stella,  they  adjusted  the  lunging  perspectives  of 
Siqueiros  to  this  kind  of  format,  so  that  the  wrecker's  ball 
and  elderly  tenant's  cane  plunge  into  our  space.  Dong 
explains  that  in  fact  the  idea  of  the  tenant's  hand  on  the 
iron  ball  came  from  Rivera's  Man  at  the  Crossroads,  where 
the  central  dials  are  grasped  by  a  great  hand.  Dong 
designed  the  figures  in  a  flat  style  that  suggests  Asian 
woodblock  prints  and  the  modern  comic  strip  like  the 
first  I-Hotel  mural.  There  is  also  some  stylized  imitation 
of  oak  grain  in  the  judge's  rostrum.  All  of  this  would 
seem  to  make  for  a  pretty  rich  mixture,  but  it  is  ingeni- 
ously unified  and  executed.  While  sophisticated  in  its 
melding  of  styles,  the  mural  is  nevertheless  simple  and 
direct  in  its  impact,  and  its  allusions  are  accessible.  Dong 
believes  it  is  a  considerable  improvement  over  his  more 
episodic  earlier  work.  It  does  in  fact  demonstrate  that 
people's  art  offers  opportunities  for  the  widest  range  of 
visual  invention.  What  was  particularly  important  was 
that  the  mural's  craftsmanship  gave  the  cause  it  sup- 
ported authority  in  the  city's  modern-art  museum. 

The  two  I-Hotel  murals  undoubtedly  contributed  to 
the  support  the  tenants  received  from  people  in  the  Bay 
Area.  More  than  five  thousand  turned  out  to  a  demon- 
stration in  front  of  the  old  building  in  1977.  Years  of 
public  organizing  with  the  tenants'  tight  association  car- 
ried the  case  through  City  Hall  and  the  courts.  The  city 
offered  to  acquire  the  hotel  by  eminent  domain  and  then 
sell  it  back  to  a  tenants'  nonprofit  corporation  that  hoped 
to  raise  foundation  funds.  But  the  courts  supported  the 
rights  of  the  property  owners,  and  a  long  delayed  evic- 
tion order  was  finally  carried  out  during  an  August  night 
in  1977  as  thousands  of  demonstrators  tried  to  resist  the 
sheriff  and  police.  Even  after  the  tenants  were  dispersed, 
the  battle  continued  in  the  courts,  and  the  mural  painted 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  I'M 

on  the  hotel,  though  severely  battered,  remained  a  sym- 
bol of  the  struggle  for  low-income  housing  and  the 
elderly  and  minorities  to  maintain  their  communities. 
Finally  the  mural  and  building  were  demolished  to- 
gether. The  V-mural  w  hich  had  originally  been  planned 
as  a  space  divider  in  the  recreation  room  of  the  I-Hotel, 
was  installed  after  the  eviction  in  the  Mission  (>ultural 
Center,  for  many  Latinos  identified  w  ith  the  hotel  strug- 
gle particularly  because  of  the  Spanish-speaking  Filipino 
tenants. 

Bicentennial  works  were  also  done  in  the  neighbor- 
hoods. One  was  painted  on  fence  slats  in  the  Fillmore.  It 
certainly  was  The  Spirit  of  16,  but  the  fifer  and  drummer 
were  Black,  and  another  drummer  wore  a  .sombrero.  It 
had  a  swing  to  it  and  was  executed  w  ith  skill,  but  left 
unfinished  and  unsigned,  a  cryptic  and  moving  state- 
ment. 

Besides  the  work  that  the  Haight-Ashbury  Muralists 
had  done  for  the  Modern  Art  Museum  exhibition,  they 
painted  another  and  much  larger  working  people's  ver- 
sion of  American  history  that  year  in  an  effort  to  correct 
official  Bicentennial  sagas.  Two  of  the  painters,  Miranda 
Bergman  and  Jane  Norling,  had  recently  been  in  Mexico 
and  were  impressed  by  Rivera's  historical  panoramas. 
Together  with  Arch  Williams,  Vicky  Hamlin,  Peggy 
Tucker,  and  Thomas  Kunz,  they  created  an  eight-foot- 
high,  three-hundred-foot  long  mural  on  a  retaining  wall 
around  the  yard  and  parking  lot  of  the  John  Adams 
Community  College.  Starting  in  the  summer  of  1975, 
they  finished  only  the  follow  ing  May.  They  called  it  Our 
History  Is  No  Mystery  and  said  in  the  handbill  that  they 
distriiauted  to  passersby  that  the  mural  was  "about  the 
real  makers  of  history."  They  continued: 

.  .  .  Working  people  have  created  everything.  History 
is  not  just  the  story  of  rich  men,  presidents  and 
kings — it  is  the  story  of  the  building  of  societies  by  the 
creative  energy  of  human  hands,  by  the  sweat  and 
blood  of  the  w  orking  people,  by  the  joy  and  pow  er  of 
people's  cultures,  and  by  the  struggles  against  oppres- 
sion. 

The  mural  consists  of  a  series  of  scenes  of  San  PVancisco 
history  beginning  with  the  Indians  and  moving  forw  ard 
through  the  frontier,  the  Chinese  working  the  mines  and 
railroads,  the  Longshoremen  and  General  Strike  of 
1934,  war  work  in  the  shipyards  in  the  forties  that 
brought  many  Black  people  to  the  city,  the'  interning  of 
Japanese-Americans  in  concentration  camps,  and  the 
demonstrations  of  the  sixties  and  seventies  with  portraits 
of  Malcolm  X  and  George  Jackson.  These  history  panels 
merge  into  scenes  of  present-day  workers:  a  woman  is 
shown  high  in  the  air  repairing  a  telephone  line  as 
another  happily  fries  an  egg  while  holding  her  infant, 
implying  the  need  for  women  to  have  a  choice.  Farm 
workers  are  harvesting  cabbages,  and  free  food  is 
distributed  to  the  poor;  a  Black  woman  doctor  cares  for  a 
patient,  while  a  Black  male  station  engineer  operates 


248  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Unsigned:  Spirit  of  76,  1976. 


Miranda  Bergman,  Vicky  Hamlin,  Thomas  Kunz,  Jane 
Norling,  Peggy  Tucker,  Arch  Williams  (Haight  Ashbury 
Muralists),  and  local  people:  Our  History  Is  No  Mys- 
tery (partial  view),  1976,  John  Adams  Community 
College,  San  Francisco. 


community  radio  equipment;  and  technicians  of  different 
races  and  sexes  are  shown  working  together.  The  artists 
also  brought  to  the  attention  of  passersby  the  ongoing 
struggle  of  the  International  Hotel  by  quoting  from  its 
mural.  They  took  a  few  imaginative  liberties  by  includ- 
ing Paul  Robeson,  Siqueiros,  and  Rivera  and  his  painter 
wife,  Frida  Kahlo,  in  the  procession  of  picketers  during 
the  1934  General  Strike  to  suggest  their  sympathy  with 
it,  though  not  their  presence.  The  young  muralists  seem 
also  to  refer  to  their  own  effort  to  learn  from  these  earlier 
"cultural  workers."  In  order  to  strengthen  the  sense  of 
reality,  Jane  Norling,  one  of  the  painters,  says  they  did 
"invented  portraits,"  giving  a  number  of  faces  the  idio- 
syncrasies of  actual  persons  by  synthesizing  details  from 
photographs.  The  total  result  is  a  monumental  but  also  a 
vernacular  reinterpretation  of  American  history.  It  is  an 
eye-level  chronicle  painted  by  the  trained  and  untrained 
without  the  magniloquence  of  official  memorials.  It 
clearly  meant  something  to  its  residential  neighborhood, 
for  when  it  was  vandalized  more  than  thirty  people  came 
out  to  restore  it. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  249 

What  can  be  described  as  "walking  murals"  made  their 
appearance  at  the  "Bicentennial  without  Colonies"  march 
in  the  Mission  District  of  San  Francisco  on  July  4,  which 
called  for  the  self-determination  of  the  victims  of  con- 
temporary imperialism.  Halfway  between  wall  murals 
and  picket  signs,  these  were  five-by-seven-foot  portraits' 
that  required  two  people  to  carry  each.  One  bore  the 
image  of  Lolita  Lebron  and  another  that  of  Lucio 
Cabanas,  the  schoolteacher  who  led  guerrillas  in  south- 
ern Mexico  and  had  been  killed  by  troops  two  years 
earlier.  The  third  was  a  full-length  image  of  General 
Augusto  Sandino,  who  fought  American  Marines  in 
Nicaragua  and  was  killed  by  the  Somozas  in  1934.  His 
name  was  taken  by  the  rebels  against  the  continuation  of 
their  regime  that  was  still  being  supported  by  the 
United  States.  These  big  portraits  were  painted  in  a 
high-constrast  graphic  style  by  Alfonso  Maciel  and  were 
later  mounted  at  the  Mission  Cultural  Center  for  long- 
term  display. 

Yet  another  example  of  how  muralists  met  the  oppor- 
tunity of  Bicentennial  commemoratives  was  A  People's 


Alfonso  Maciel:   Lolita  Lebron,   1976,    "Bicentennial 
'iVithout  Colonies"  March,  San  Francisco. 


Alfonso  Maciel:  Lucio  Cabanas,  1976 


250  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Osha  Neumann,  O'Brian  Thiele,  Janet  Krenzberg,  Dam 
Ga'lvez,  and  others  (People's  Wall  Muralists):  A  People 
History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (partial  view),  197> 
Berkeley. 

Alfonso  Maciel:  Augusto  Sandino,  1976,  "Bicentennial 
without  Colonies"  march,  San  Francisco. 


History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  that  a  group  of  Berkeley  artists 
undertook  on  the  old  People's  Wall  close  to  the  site  of 
People's  Park.  They  began  in  the  spring  of  1976  and  were 
ready  for  a  dedication  in  August.  The  title  appears  as  the 
banner  headline  of  a  new  spaper  that  a  busted  student 
reads  as  he  relaxes  on  his  back  with  his  feet  up  against  the 
bars  of  his  cell  that  have  been  sprung  open.  This  is 
painted  on  a  real  door  with  a  barred  window  in  the 
middle  of  the  mural.  In  keeping  with  the  earlier  paintings 
on   this   wall,   the  artists  identified   themselves   as  the 


People's  Wall  Muralists.  They  also  did  small  cartoons  of 
themselves  on  the  painted  newspaper  as  part  of  their 
signature.  While  some  thirty  worked  on  the  new  paint- 
ing, the  leading  spirits  were  Osha  Neumann,  Daniel 
Galvez,  Janet  Krenzberg,  and  O'Brian  Thiele.  .Materials 
cost  over  eight  hundred  dollars,  which  were  raised  from 
local  merchants,  a  jar  standing  in  front  of  the  wall  as 
work  proceeded  and  from  the  artists'  pockets.  Some  of 
the  painters  had  advanced  training  and  others  had  none, 
but  they  spread  their  efforts  throughout  the  mural  and 


produced  a  work  that  had  a  free  but  very  professional 
appearance.  In  fact,  it  might  even  be  criticized  for  being 
academic  in  its  narrative  illustration  and  drawing;  but 
that  would  be  nigghng  for  there  is  no  reason  that  people 
should  not  use  their  skills.  It  has  something  of  the 
Rubens-like  bosomy  women,  hectic  crowds,  and  urban 
bacchanals  of  Reginald  Marsh.  This  technique  is  paint- 
erly and  rich  in  bold  brush  strokes  of  mingled  colors, 
and  the  w  hole  is  a  rollicking  affair  full  of  v\  it  and  visual 
ingenuity.  The  different  scenes  tic  into  one  another  and 
summarize  the  sequence  of  protests  and  projects  of  the 
sixties.  These  are  cleverly  identified  by  a  diagram  of  the 
w  hole  mural  that  appears  on  the  front  page  the  fellow 
reads  in  jail. 

The  mural  itself  reads  from  left  to  right,  beginning 
with  student  leader  Mario  Savio  standing  atop  a  police 
car  that  thousands  of  students  held  captive  on  campus  for 
thirty-two  hours  in  1964.  Looking  out  the  back  window 
of  the  car  is  a  member  of  the  Congress  of  Racial  Equality 
who  had  been  busted  when  campus  organizations  defied 
the  university's  attempt  to  limit  student  political  advo- 
cacy. Savio's  words  are  printed  on  a  leaflet  that  lies  on  the 
hood  of  the  patrol  car: 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  25 1 

There  is  a  time  when  the  operation  of  the  machine 
becomes  so  odious  .  .  .  that  you  can't  even  tacitly  take 

f)art;  you've  got  to  put  your  bodies  on  the  gears,  the 
evers  and  all  the  apparatus,  and  you've  got  to  indicate 
to  all  the  people  who  run  it  and  own  it  that  unless 
you're  free,  the  machine  will  be  prevented  from 
working  at  all. 

Behind  Savio  Sproul  Hall,  the  administration  building, 
lifts  its  classic  columns,  which  turn  out  not  only  to  be 
hollow,  but  in  fact  heavy  guns  like  those  of  a  battleship, 
and  they  fire  an  artillery  shell  and  dollars — an  allusion  to 
the  university's  role  as  a  prime  war  contractor.  The 
columns  also  recall  cell  bars.  Richard  Nixon  and  the  UC 
president  Clark  Kerr  hang  precariously  from  lower  sec- 
tions of  them.  The  initials  of  the  Free  Speech  Movement 
are  draped  from  the  upper  floors,  which  have  been 
occupied  by  students.  lo  the  right  of  Savio  later  student 
protests  are  indicated:  one  young  man  burns  his  draft 
card;  a  Brown  Beret  brandishes  his  fist  at  square-headed 


A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (partial 

view). 


252  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

administrators;  some  figures  wear  buttons  of  the  farm 
workers  and  American  Indian  Movement;  others  carry 
posters  for  the  "Oakland  7"  and  the  Third  World  Liber- 
ation Movement.  A  Black  couple  is  selling  the  Panther 
newspaper  in  the  foreground.  Tumbling  from  above, 
TV  sets  bear  images  of  Ronald  Reagan,  Lyndon 
Johnson,  a  Viet  Cong  woman  soldier,  and  an  elegant 
feminine  hand  selling  soap. 

Next  there  is  a  procession  of  Hari  Krishna  folk  with 
shaved  heads  and  saffron  robes  before  panhandling  street 
people.  Musicians  with  congas  and  a  flute  are  blocking 
traffic,  and  the  reflection  of  tourists  taking  their  picture 
can  be  seen  in  the  eyeglasses  of  one.  This  is  followed  by  a 
scene  of  gardening  in  People's  Park. 

On  the  right  is  the  largest  scene  of  all — "Bloody 
Thursday,"  .May  15,  1969,  a  street  battle  between  police 
and  defenders  of  People's  Park  in  front  of  the  restaurant 
on  which  the  mural  is  painted.  Streaming  tear-gas  can- 
nisters  thrown  back  at  the  cops  arch  through  the  air 
above  a  Viet  Cong  flag  w  hich  had  been  painted  on  the 
street  earlier.  On  a  roof  in  monochromatic  grays — a 
sharp  contrast  w  ith  the  rest  of  the  mural — friends  bend 


over  the  body  of  James  Rector,  who  was  killed  by  police 
buckshot.  A  group  of  hunched  troopers  still  points  their 
shotguns  at  them  like  a  firing  squad.  Rising  from  the 
police  lines  a  giant  helmeted  and  gas-masked  head  is 
painted  just  where  actual  telephone  lines  come  down 
from  an  adjacent  pole  and  attach  to  the  wall.  The  wires 
seem  to  plug  into  the  helmet  to  suggest  that  the  police  are 
mechanical  marionettes  of  not  only  the  communications 
industry  but  the  whole  corporate  system.  Behind  the 
student  lines  is  another  huge  police  head,  but  its  goggles 
are  shattered  and  its  wires  have  been  cut  and  unplugged 
.so  that  they  fall  loosely  as  the  head  smokes  inside  its 
helmet  and  mask.  Whether  the  artists  wanted  to  signify 
that  the  system  will  be  done  in  by  street  fighting  or 
whether  it  w  ill  self-destruct  is  unclear. 

This  omission  is  crucial  for  the  next  scene  offers  a 
vision  of  the  future  but  does  not  show  what  will  bring  it 
about.  It  is  a  bucolic  idyl  of  gardeners,  musicians,  and 
naked  figures  dancing  down  Telegraph  Avenue.  The 
revelers  have  skewered  a  police  helmet,  a  gas  mask,  and  a 
TV  on  stakes  as  trophies  of  the  battle  against  the  old 
regime.  It  is  a  happy  ending  and  meant  light  heartedly. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  the  weakest  part  of  the  painting,  and 
one  of  the  painters,  Osha  Neumann,  was  later  to  ac- 
knowledge this.   Vague  symbolism  is  resorted  to — the 


A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (partial 


A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (partial 

view). 


A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (partial 

view). 

bacchanal  appears  in  the  branches  of  a  tree  that  breaks 
through  a  sidewalk  amid  a  dozing  street  artist,  a  guzzling 
wino,  and  a  panhandler.  The  caption  on  the  newspaper 
key  describes  the  scene  as  "The  Future  grows  out  of  the 
Present."  This  final  scene  of  dancing  does  not  take 
seriously  the  organizing  and  struggles  that  will  be  neces- 
sary to  produce  it  nor  suggest  much  more  than  good 
times  to  come,  instead  of  a  more  tough-minded  vision  of 
the  good  society  as  meaningful  work. 

The  net  effect  of  the  mural  is  a  celebration  of  the 
exciting  moments  of  the  last  decade  rather  than  convey- 
ing the  urgency  to  build  on  them.  The  mural  risks  being 
retrospective  and  picturesque — revolution  a  la  Renoir. 
This  is  partly  because  of  the  ingratiating  painterly,  often 
Impressionist  style.  But  the  mural's  weakness  derives 
mainly  from  its  lack  of  political  direction.  The  painters  in 
their  statements  at  the  dedication  made  clear  the  serious- 
ness of  their  commitment  to  radical  change.  But  the 
difficulty  of  taking  a  clear  stand  on  how  to  go  about  it 
may  have  even  affected  the  icomposition  as  a  whole  and 
weakened  its  impact,  for  the  past  is  presented  as  a  series 
of  separate  episodes  rather  than  as  a  continuous  move- 
ment into  the  future.  And  this  inadvertantly  expresses 
the  uncertainties  and  divisions  among  progressives  in 
1976. 


254  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Nevertheless,  the  mural  is  pow  erful  and  is  a  part  of  its 
place.  Osha  Neumann,  writing  about  it,  remarks  that 
photographs  taken  the  day  of  the  dedication 

show  a  sea  of  people  in  the  street  that  seems  to  extend 
up  the  wall  into  the  crowds  we  painted. 

Ihat's  the  way  we  like  to  think  of  our  work — 
immersed  in  the  community  for  which  it  was  con- 
ceived.'* 

In  their  subsequent  painting  together  the  artists  were  to 
provide  more  guidance  to  their  viewers  and  as  a  result 
their  composition  became  more  unified  and  forceful. 

San  Francisco 

Kevin  .McCloskey  had  been  seeking  permission  from 
the  Fire  Commission  for  three  months  in  1976  to  paint  a 
"Save-the-Whales"  statement  on  one  of  its  retired  Victo- 
rian firehouses.  Finally  he  took  matters  into  his  own 
hands.  He  invested  two  hundred  dollars  in  paint  and  on 
the  Labor  Day  weekend  he  and  friends,  figuring  that 
officials  would  be  out  of  town,  took  to  the  wall.  He  says 
that  the  police  and  firemen  who  drove  by  waved.  The 
result  was  a  ninety-foot  life-size  portrait  of  a  great  blue 
leviathan  that  cavorts  across  the  tongue  and  groove  siding 


of  an  old  firehouse.  It  was  not  until  the  following  January 
that  the  Fire  Commission  bowed  to  x\\cfait  accompli  and 
voted  to  accept  the  gift.  By  then  .McClonsky  was  think- 
ing about  doing  a  gray  whale.'' 

In  spite  of  the  extensive  mural  activity  that  had  been 
taking  place  here  in  the  mid-seventies,  it  still  had 
difficulty  in  making  its  way  into  the  Black  sections  of  the 
city.  The  continuing  effects  of  urban  renewal  in  the 
Fillmore  District — the  displaced  people  and  those  wait- 
ing to  be,  the  still-barren  blocks,  the  new  trade  center, 
hotels,  and  more  modest  rentals  too  new  to  paint  on — all 
this  did  not  encourage  murals.  However,  in  1976  close  to 
the  Civic  Center  a  West  African  symbolic  design  in 
brilliant  yet  subtle  colors  was  painted  above  the  Afro- 
American  Historical  Society  by  Arthur  Monroe,  its  di- 
rector, and  local  students  who  became  absorbed  with 
researching  imagery  for  it.  Enveloped  in  sawtooth  de- 
signs from  the  royal  crowns  of  Yoruba  they  presented  a 
central  double-eyed  mask  of  the  Bateke  people  of  the 
Congo  looking  into  the  present  and  past  with  an  Ashanti 
throne  and  other  tribal  symbols  below.  To  one  side  were 
the  symbols  of  Islam,  Judaism,  and  Christianity,  the 
other  religions  of  Black  people  beneath  a  camel  suggest- 
ing Africa  and  the  Cradle  of  Civilization;  and  to  the  other 
was  a  large  fist  expressing  current  struggles. 


Kevin  McCloskey:  Untitled,  1976,  San  Francisco. 


Arthur  Monroe  and  students:  Facade  of  Afro- American 
Historical  Society ,  1976,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


Bob  Gayton:   Blacks  from   Egypt  to  Now,   1976, 
Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


Camille  Breeze:  Untitled,  1976,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


256  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Around  the  corner,  facing  a  well-traveled  boulevard, 
Bob  Gayton  provided  a  long  panorama  of  a  monumental 
Sphinx,  Queen  Nefertiti,  King  Tutankhamun,  and  a 
balding  fieldhand  in  overalls  who  loom  above  vignettes  of 
Black  history  of  the  Old  and  New  Worlds.  He  called  it 
Blacks  from  Egypt  to  Now. 

Also  in  the  Fillmore  that  year  Camille  Breeze  did  a 
sports  mural  alongside  a  neighborhood  playground  that 
transformed  the  New  Democracy  of  Siqueiros  into  an 
Olympic  torch-bearing  Black  man  from  whose  chest  and 
arms  boxers,  divers  and  trackmen  spring  toward  you  and 
into  a  pool  below,  while  a  whole  panorama  of  athletes 
of  all  races  spreads  across  the  background. 

In  1977  Bob  Gayton,  drawing  on  his  skill  as  a 
portraitist,  painted  the  meeting  room  of  the  Fillmore's 
Booker  T.  Washington  Center  with  the  faces  and  scenes 
of  its  history. 

Meanwhile  an  effort  of  neighborhood  children  with 
the  aid  of  grown-ups  to  create  a  very  temporary  garden 
and  playground  in  the  long  vacant  tracts  of  the  Fillmore 
owned  by  the  Redevelopment  Agency  was  commemo- 
rated by  two  White  artists.  Nan  Park  and  Joe  Perretti,  on 
a  wall  outside  the  Raphael  Weill  School.  It  was  a  user- 
developed  and  maintained  park  that  had  the  blessing  of 
the  authorities  as  the  portraits  of  Governor  Brown  and 
former  Mayor  Alioto  attest.  But  what  is  moving  about 
the  People^s  Game  Mural  is  the  vivid  record  of  scores  of 
kids  of  every  race,  gardening,  doing  artwork,  and  play- 
ing where  houses,  perhaps  in  some  cases  their  own 
families',  once  stood. 

Camille  Breeze:  Detail,  1976. 


Nan  Park  and  Joe  Perretti:  People's  Game  Mural, 
1977,  Raphael  Weill  School,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


Frank  Ferro:  Orale  Raza  (Raza — All  right),  1974-79, 
Estrada  Courts,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Kamol  Tassananchalee  (Citywide):  Great  Arm  of 
Friendship,  1975,  with  artist,  Los  Angeles.  (Photo  © 
SPARC) 


William  F.  Herron  III  and  "Gronk":  Untitled,  1973, 
City  Terrace  Park,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Jesus  Campusam,  Michael  Rios,  Luis  Cortazar,  and 
assistants:  Bank  of  America  Mural,  1974,  Mission 
District,  San  Francisco. 


Nancy  Thompson  and  students:  Untitled  mosaic  mural, 
1970,  Alvarado  School,  San  Francisco. 


Sondra  Chirlton  and  friends:  Eddy  and   Divisadero 
(detail),  1973,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


Curtis  and  Royal  Barnes:   Omowale,  1972,  Garfield 
Park,  Seattle.  (Photo:  the  Barneses) 


Classic  Dolls  (Citywide):  A  Sculpture  of  a  Woman  Is 
Very  Special,  1974,  Los  Angeles. 


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i.ink  Prussing  and  Manuel  Vega:  The  Spirit  of  East 
iiarlem,  1974-78,  New  York. 


Local  youth  directed  by  Alan  Okada  (City arts):  Chi 
Lai — Arriba — Rise  Up!  1974,  Chinatown,  New  York. 


ucy  Mahler,  director,  artists  of  the  Peace  and  Freedom 
iural  Project,  and  students:  Let  a  People,  Loving 
"reedom,  Come  to  Growth,  1973,  Wright  Brothers 
chool,  Washington  Heights,  New  York  City. 

[rtemio  Guerra  Garza:  Untitled  (partial  view),  1975, 
'entro  Campesino  Miguel  Hidalgo,  San  Juan,  Texas. 


William  Walker  (CMC):  History  of  the  Packinghouse 
Worker,  Amalgamated  Meat  Cutters  and  Butcher  Work- 
men local.  South  Side,  Chicago.  (Photo  Tim  Drescher) 


Caryl  Yasko,  Celia  Radek,  Lucyna  Radycki,  Justine 
DeVan,  and  local  people  (CMG):  Razem  (Together), 
1975,  Northwest  Side,  Chicago. 


James  Arthur  Padgett:    Shaw   Community    Health 
Center  Murals,  1972,  Washington,  D.  C. 


Mitchell  Caton,  Justine  DeVan,  Celia  Radek  and  Caryl 
Yasko  (CMG):  Prescription  for  Good  Health  Care, 
1975,  Southwest  Side,  Chicago. 


Judy  Baca,  Christine  Schlesinger,  and  prisoners:  When 
the  Prison  Doors  Open,  1973,  California  Institute  for 
Women,  Frontera.  (Photo  ©  SPARC) 


Robert  Hieronimus:   America's   Bicentennial,    1974, 
Baltimore. 


Daniel  Galvez,   Osha  Neumann,  and  O'Brian  Thiele: 
Winds  of  Change,  1978,  Berkeley  Co-op,  Berkeley. 


Osha  Neumann,  0' Brian  Thiele,  Ray  Patldn,  and  Anna 
de  Leon:  Song  of  Unity,  1978,  La  Pern,  Berkeley. 


Roderick  Sykes  and  local  youth:    Untitled,   1976,   St. 
Elmo's  Village,  Los  Angeles. 


Urban  renewal  in  the  Fillmore,  as  elsewhere  around 
the  country,  proceeded  not  only  by  the  demolition  of 
aging  housing;  redevelopment  agencies  also  bought  up 
properties  with  once  handsome  structures  occupied  by 
low-income  people  and  sold  them  to  speculators  for 
refurbishing  and  resale  far  beyond  the  means  of  their 
tenants.  During  the  seventies  hundreds  of  run-down 
high-ceilinged  frame  Victorians  in  San  Francisco  were 
transformed  into  elegant  residences.  This  finally  pro- 
voked a  confrontation  between  the  Black  community  and 
the  Redevelopment  Agency  in  1977.  WAPAC  (Western 
Addition  Project  Area  Committee),  the  designated  repre- 
sentative of  the  residents  and  merchants  of  the  Fillmore, 
was  fed  up  w ith  negotiating  and  occupied  one  of  the  old 
Victorians.  It  had  been  trying  to  insure  that  local  people 
were  hired  in  the  construction  work  and  that  displaced 
tenants  would  be  provided  for  in  the  rehabilitated  hous- 
ing. For  the  first  time  the  agency  agreed  to  stop  demoli- 
tion, and  it  promised  to  help  residents  create  a  nonprofit 
community  development  corporation,  which  would 
make  all  arrangements  for  renovation  and  decide  which 
of  the  former  renters  might  buy  them.  In  the  meantime, 
the  agency  would  permit  local  people,  using  their  own 
skills  as  electricians,  plumbers,  and  carpenters,  to  start 
work  on  one  of  the  houses  as  a  pilot  project.  Details 
remained  to  be  worked  out,  but  the  community  con- 
sciousness that  achieved  this  breakthrough  is  exhibited 
by  a  mural  that  was  painted  on  the  side  of  WAPAC's 
office  in  an  old  Victorian  a  few  months  later. 

Arnold  Townsend,  WAPAC  director,  describes  how 
he  got  together  with  his  staff  and  board  to  decide  what 
they  wanted.  He  says  that  they  believed  that  the  com- 
munity did  not  want  chains  and  fists.  It  knew  too  well 
what  it  was  to  be  mad.  It  needed  a  lift.  They  worked  out 
in  some  detail  the  concepts  to  be  expressed.  The 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program  sent  over  a  number  of 
artists  before  David  Bradford,  a  graphic  arts  instructor  at 
Merritt  College  in  Oakland,  w  as  selected.  His  first  mural 
experience  had  been  doing  a  woman  and  child  on  the 
Wall  of  Respect  in  Chicago  in  1967  where  he  was  stopping 
over  for  a  few  days  and  OBAC  artists  invited  him  to  join 
them.  He  had  grown  up  in  Chicago  and  recalls  paintings 
of  William  Walker  on  his  family's  walls.  They  were 
pictures  of  long-necked  women  from  Jamaica  that  were 
popular  in  the  fifties.  Walker,  who  was  a  family  friend, 
gave  him  his  first  canvas  to  paint  on  when  he  was  fifteen, 
and  Bradford  regards  him  as  one  of  the  principal 
influences  on  his  art.  After  this  first  taste  of  murals,  he 
worked  on  walls  in  Oakland  as  early  as  1970  at  .Merritt 
College  and  the  East  Oakland  Development  Center.  But 
most  of  his  art  was  in  graphics,  and  he  regarded  Charles 
White  as  his  other  principal  mentor.  He  went  down  to 
Southern  California  to  get  White's  advice  on  his  prelimi- 
nary drawings  for  the  WAPAC  mural.  White,  nearly 
sixty,  best  known  for  his  graphic  art,  had  also  done 
important  murals  since  the  WPA,  notably  the  Contribu- 
tion of  the  Negro  to  American  Democracy  at  the  Hampton 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  257 
Institute  in  1943  and  in  the  last  two  years  a  mural  at  the 
-Mary  Bethune  Public  Library  in  Los  Angeles.  White 
became  famous  for  his  sensitive  draftsmanship,  and  this 
is  recalled  by  the  refinement  of  Bradford's  work,  which 
also  has  the  high-contrast  effects  and  graininess  of  a 
lithograph. 

The  WAPAC  mural  is  dominated  by  a  bare-chested 
Black  man  who  raises  his  arms  over  his  head;  they  still 
have  irons  on  them  from  which  chains  have  been  re- 
moved. This  gesture  of  liberation  is  reminiscent  of 
.Muhammad  Ali,  whose  portrait  in  fact  was  originally 
considered,  but  a  figure  suggesting  a  member  of  the 
community  was  decided  on.  His  arms  are  held  high 
above  neighborhood  landmarks:  a  Victorian  house  repre- 
sentative of  those  WAPAC  had  been  struggling  over; 
Jimbo's  Bop  City,  which  Townsend  describes  as  the 
"baddest  jazz  place  in  the  Fillmore"  in  its  heyday  during 
the  forties  and  fifties;  McCann's  City  Barbecue,  a  favorite 
neighborhood  spot;  the  Fillmore  Auditorium,  home  to 
the  rock  concerts  of  the  sixties,  and  the  WAPAC  head- 
quarters. Beneath  are  Black  artists  and  heroes:  Billie 
Holiday;  Jotin  Coltrane;  Duke  Ellington;  Wilt  Cham- 
berlain (with  Bill  Russell's  number);  Jonathan  Jackson 
holding  a  machine  gun  as  he  raided  the  .Marin  County 
courtroom  to  free  his  brother  (the  artist  gave  him  George 
Jackson's  face);  .Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.;  Malcolm  X. 
And  against  a  background  of  steps  bearing  the  names  of 
Turner,  Tubman,  Garvey,  and  Lumumba  are  a 
neighborhood  child  strutting  confidently  into  our  space 
and  a  figure  representing  the  older  generation.  At  the 
base  of  it  all  is  the  strong  face  of  a  woman.  Bradford  says 
that  he  had  seen  such  women  in  Ghana  and  that  he 
wanted  to  convey  in  bold  black-and-white  terms  that 
Africa  was  the  mother  of  everything  above  her.  She,  the 
child,  and  the  man  at  the  top  gaze  at  you  w  ith  intense 
power,  which  is  matched  by  their  swelling  muscles  and 
veins.  WAPAC  would  like  to  develop  a  small  park  in 
front  of  the  mural. 

But  the  struggle  was  not  over,  for  Redevelopment 
rescinded  its  agreement  in  1978  and  put  out  to  general 
bid  the  rehabilitation  of  the  Victorians.  But  work  on  the 
buildings  was  marking  time,  as  negotiations  continued 
and  Redevelopment  did  not  w  ant  another  confrontation. 
In  the  meantime,  WAPAC  was  working  on  an  urban 
design  plan  for  the  new  Fillmore  commercial  center  and 
was  seeking  federal  funding  for  rehabilitated  housing. 
The  WAPAC  mural  may  mark  the  beginning  of  a  new 
era  in  the  Fillmore.  As  for  Bradford,  he  went  on  in  1978 
to  set  his  students  to  doing  two  murals  at  .Merritt  Col- 
lege, one  in  the  library  and  another  in  the  cafeteria,  and 
he  hoped  these  would  clear  the  way  to  his  offering  a  class 
on  murals  there. 

Outside  the  Fillmore  District,  Dewey  Grumpier  re- 
turned to  Hunter's  Point,  where  he  had  painted  one  of 
the  first  community  murals  in  the  Bay  Area  in  1970,  to 
do  a  new  work  in  1977.  He  was  now  a  CE TA  employee, 
and  materials  were  secured  through  the  city's  community 


258  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


David  Bradford   WAP  AC   mural   and  neighborhood, 
1977,  Fillmore,  San  Francisco. 


arts  development  fund.  He  had  grown  up  at  Hunter's 
Point  and  played  in  the  recreation  center  where  he  was  to 
paint.  For  years,  he*says,  he  had  in  mind  doing  a  mural 
on  one  of  its  walls  and  had  rapped  with  his  friends, 
community  groups,  and  senior  citizens  who  met  there 
about  what  they  would  like  to  see.  He  says  that  he 
wanted  "to  capture  not  only  the  spirit  of  this  community 
but  the  spirit  of  Black  people  and  people  who  are 
struggling.  Third  World  people  in  general."*  He  did  a 
great  deal  of  research  in  preparation  and  was  struck  by 
the  imagery  of  fire  as  a  symbol  of  "rebirth  and  regenera- 
tion, and  .  .  .  spirituality — strength  and  struggle.  .  .  ." 
The  result  is  a  wall  of  violently  curling  flame,  the  source 
of  which  in  the  center  is  a  symbol  of  omnipotence 
crowned  by  a  horned  headdress  of  the  African  people  of 
Dogon  signifying  the  duality  of  things.  Beneath  it  are  a 
monumental  naked  couple  symbolic  of  Black  humanity, 
and  to  either  side  are  images  of  Harriet  Tubman,  who 
had  led  slaves  north  along  the  Underground  Railroad, 
and  Paul  Robeson,  the  Black  athlete,  actor,  opera  star, 
spokesman  of  human  rights  and  avowed  Communist  who 
had  recently  died.  In  the  upper  corners  are  two  massive 
carved  birds  that  presided  over  the  fertility  and  well- 
being  of  the  Senufo  people.  Opening  out  of  the  fire  are  a 
pair  of  doors  like  those  on  which  the  Dogon  people 
carved  their  history,  but  here  they  depict  the  recreation 
center  itself  and  th',-  barrackslike  housing  of  Hunters 
Point.  Figures  of  the  present  and  the  past,  symbolizing 
Black  achievement  in  religion,  the  arts,  dance,  and  sports 
also  emerge  from  the  flames.  Crumpler  called  it  Fire  Next 
Time  and  at  the  side  painted  a  key  to  the  imagery. 
Assisted  in  the  painting  by  Tim  Drescher,  Crumpler 
worked  ten  months  at  the  wall.  As  a  result  of  the  mural, 


local  people  came  to  him  asking  for  instruction  in  doing 
wall  art,  and  he  agreed  to  work  with  other  artists  to  set 
up  workshops.  He  says  that  it  is  not  sufficient  for  only 
the  professional  painters  to  be  doing  community  murals. 
"Everybody  should  be  able,"  he  insists,  "and  should 
participate."  "The  whole  question,"  he  adds,  ".  .  .  is 
about  communication."^  But  to  be  able  to  communicate 
effectively  through  murals,  he  says,  requires  serious 
study,  both  for  the  professionals  and  the  lay  painters. 

At  San  Francisco  State  University  where  he  taught  for 
three  semesters,  Ray  Patlan  and  his  students  worked  on  a 
wall  in  the  Student  Union  in  1976  showing  the  coopera- 
tion and  surge  of  naked  figures  into  the  future.  The 
robust,  free  style  was  recognizably  Patlan's. 

During  the  same  year  new  murals  were  done  by 
veterans  in  the  Mission  District  that  were  socially  con- 
cerned but  tended  to  be  decorative  and  did  not  come  to 
grips  with  controversial  issues.  Mike  Rios  and  Graciela 
Carrillo  each  did  a  large  panel  on  the  family  for  the 
entrance  of  the  Mission  Neighborhood  Health  Center. 
Rios,  who  frequently  has  sought  a  classic  generalizing  of 
form,  adopted  for  his  archetypal  parents  and  child  the 
sculptural  style  of  Siqueiros's  Image  of  Ourselves  with  its 
powerful  naked  body  and  featureless  face.  Carrillo,  on 
the  other  hand,  offers  a  more  lush  set  of  symbols:  a 
woman  giving  birth,  as  images  of  earth,  air,  fire,  and 
water  hover  around  her;  a  hand  holds  up  a  cloth 
suggesting  the  creation  of  color,  and  below  it  a 
pagodalike  building  indicates  past  cultures.  At  the  bot- 
tom the  woman,  Carrillo  says,  is  planting  the  seeds  of 
procreation. 

On  a  new  mural  at  Bernal  Public  Housing,  Carrillo 
had  hardly  completed  the  monumental  head  of  an  Indian 
woman  when  she  had  to  leave  the  scaffolding  to  have  a 
baby  herself.  Fran  Velasco,  Rios,  and  Sekio  Fuapopo 
completed  the  work,  but  its  images  did  not  come  together 


Problem  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  259 


Michael  Rios  (left  panel)  and  Graciela  Carrillo  (right): 

Untitled,  1976,  Mission  Neighborhood  Health  Center, 

San  Francisco. 

Wind  rising  wind  falling 
Sun  rising,  sun  falling 
.     ^  ,,         .,,  .  .      ,  .       J  Clouds  rising,  lightning  falling 

meaningfully;  still  it  remained  an  attractive  decorative  j^jj-^  ^\^\^„  death  falling 

piece.  Also  in  1976  Rios  and  Fuapopo,  who  is  Samoan,  Tide  rising  tide  falling 

did  a  large  wall  indoors  at  the  Paradise-Hawaii  Theater  Man  rising,  man  falling 

Restaurant  (popularly  known  as  Kabuki  Hot  Springs)  in  Tree  of  life  rising,  rising,  rising 

the  Japanese  Trade  Center.  Here  Rios's  taste  for  a  block- 

and-boulder  classicism  was  countered  by  Fuapopo's  rich  The  two  panels  together  are  titled  Family  Life  and  Spirit  of 

Polynesian  design  and  color.   In  both  paintings  there  Mankind.  The  first  presents  a  Tree  of  Life  which  was 

are   swirling   semiabstract   waves,   flickering   fish,   and  inspired  by  the  70-year-old  acacia  trees  in  the  park.  The 

vegetation.   In  the  restaurant  mural  the  central  figure  mural's  tree  is  formed  by  an  embracing  couple,  one 

swings  a  fiery  torch  that  is  echoed  by  the  curves  of  dark-skinned,  the  other  light,  both  of  them  in  princely 

fishnets   and    boats.    From   these   ornamental   heritage  garb  with  floral  ornamentation  that  connects  them  with 

murals,  Rios  returned  to  a  more  political  theme  in  a  small  the   lush    landscape.    The   details   derive   from    varied 

work  he  did  on  the  outside  of  a  community  law  office  cultures — Samoan,  Jamaican,  North  and  South  Ameri- 

across  the   street   from   Mission   Dolores.   There   with  can.   Above  their  heads  a  light  burns  that  seems  to 

classic  figures  reminiscent  of  Rivera  and  Siqueiros,  he  uncoil,  incorporating  them  with  the  animals,  flora,  and 

offered  a  simple  affirmation  of  human  labor,  education,  plowed  fields  around  them.  The  whole  is  more  like  a 

and  justice.  Persian  tapestry  or  a  manuscript  illustration  from  India 

Meanwhile  the  impulse  to  elaborate  decoration  was  rich  with  lovingly  wrought  and  restless  butterflies,  fowls, 

carried  yet  further  by  Susan  Cervantes  and  Judy  Jamer-  insects,  and  mushrooms.  The  "Spirit  of  Mankind"  offers 

son  in  two  two-story  panels  for  the  Le  Conte  elementary  another  coil,  this  one  a  flaming  spiral  nebula  among  the 

school  facing  the  small  park  of  Precita  Valley  on  the  edge  heavens,  and  in  its  midst  are  an  indio  torch  bearer  who 

of  the  Mission  District  where  a  large  Samoan  community  holds  an  end,  an  Egyptian  queen,  and  a  crowd  of  recog- 

mixed  with  Latino  and  Black  people.   They  offer  an  nizable  local  people,  a  few  with  numbers  on  their  sports 

explanation  in  an  Aztec  poem  they  painted  in  the  center  jerseys.  A  salsa  group  is  at  the  bottom.  As  you  stand 

of  the  composition:  before  it,  people  will  come  by  and  point  themselves  out. 


Graciela  Carrillo,  Fran  \'elasco,  Sekio  Fuapopo,  and 
Michael  Rios:  Untitled,  1976,  Bernal  Housing,  Mission 
District,  San  Francisco. 


Sekio  Fuapopo  and  Michael  Rios:  Untitled,  1976,  Para- 
dise-Hawaii Theater  Restaurant,  Japantown,  San  Fran- 


Michael  Rios:  Untitled,  1977,  Community  Law  Firm, 
Mission  District,  San  Francisco. 


'R    U    O    L 


Susan  Cervantes  and  Judy  J amerson:  Spirit  of  Mankind, 
1977,  Le  Conte  School,  Precita  Valley,  San  Francisco.  (© 
All  rights  reserved) 


Susan  Cervantes  and  Judy  J  amerson:  Family  Life,  7977, 
Le  Conte  School,  Precita  Valley,  San  Francisco.  (©  All 
rights  reserved) 


262  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

It  is  a  lyrical  paean  to  the  neighborhood  and  an  effort  to 
heighten  IcKal  people's  sense  of  their  life  together  by 
identifying  it  with  the  vitality  of  the  universe.  To  the 
extent  that  the  mural  does  bring  people  together,  its 
impact  is  social,  if  not  political.  In  recent  years  Cervantes 
and  Jamerson  had  designed  a  children's  playground  in 
the  three-block-long  park  and  painted  the  equipment.  At 
one  end  the  muralists  led  a  workshop  that  had  already  in 
1975  decorated  the  outside  staircase  of  a  community 
center  u  ith  a  colorful  peacock  and  images  of  Latino 
culture. 

Also  in  1977  Cervantes  refreshed  and  modified  the 
painting  of  children  in  Balmy  Alley  with  which  she  had 
heljjed  four  years  earlier.  She  now  added  the  scene  of  a 
neighborhood  street  where  trees  and  gardens  have  re- 
placed the  pavement,  and  a  lettered  message  encouraged 
viewers  to  keep  their  calk  clean.  She  says  that  her 
orientation  is  not  social  protest  but  toward  the  affirma- 
tion of  community  and  cooperative  work.  This  was  the 
direction  of  a  new  racially  mixed  group  of  local  artists 
that  she  organized  as  Precita  Eyes  Muralists,  and  it  was 
also  the  thrust  of  their  first  major  work.  In  1978  they 
were  commissioned  by  China  Books,  the  principal  dis- 
tributor of  literature  from  the  People's  Republic  in  the 
Bay  Area,  to  do  a  work  for  the  facade  of  their  shop  in  the 
Mission  District.  The  mural  that  fills  the  upper  stories  is 
an  adaptation  of  the  murals  and  watercolors  of  the  peas- 
ants of  Huhsien  County  done  during  the  early  seventies. 
The  Precita  Eyes  Muralists  obviously  observed  the  simi- 
larity of  what  they  were  trying  to  do  and  the  efforts  of 
the  Chinese  to  create  an  art  that  is  socially  conscious  and 
produced  both  by  professional  artists  in  close  touch  with 
common  life  and  by  workers  in  their  spare  time.  The 
dedication  of  the  bookstore  mural,  which  had  taken  three 
months  to  do,  was  timed  to  coincide  with  an  exhibition  of 
the  Chinese  watercolors  in  San  Francisco. 

The  mural  celebrates  the  careful  cultivation  of  the  land 
and  the  satisfactions  of  working  together,  using  both 
manual  and  machine  labor.  The  precision  and  orderly 
pattern  with  which  everything  is  painted  correspond  to 
the  pride  in  the  painstaking  tending  of  fields  and  the 
stonemason's  work  on  the  bridge;  in  both  the  rural  labor 
and  the  art  of  depicting  it  there  is  a  sense  of  loving  skill. 

One  of  the  artists,  Denise  Meehan,  says  that  they  tried 
to  link  the  Chinese  subject  with  the  struggles  of  other 
jjeople  around  the  world,  and  particularly  the  residents 
of  the  Mission  where  the  bookstore  is  located.  Therefore, 
they  showed  alongside  Chinese  peasants  working  among 
the  furrows  people  of  different  races;  and  from  the  bridge 
of  friendship  in  the  center  Native  Americans,  Africans, 
Polynesians,  and  Anglos  smile  and  wave.  However,  the 
mural's  preoccupation  with  farming  is  not  clearly  con- 
nected with  the  concerns  of  the  city  people  who  pass  by 
every  day.  But  Cervantes  says  that  the  painters  checked 
their  designs  with  neighborhood  people  and  received 
wide  approval.  A  frequent  comment,  she  says,  was  that 
the   design   showed   "a   clean   life."    Nevertheless,    the 


bright,  flat  patterns  of  the  Chinese  folk  painters  relate  to 
a  street  where  vivid  Latino  murals  abound.  And  con- 
nected with  this  is  the  fact  that  both  are  forms  of  popular 
painting,  which  has  commonly  sought  to  heighten  the 
everyday  with  intense  color,  schematic  pattern,  and 
highly  legible  detail.  This  combination  of  sensory  appeal 
and  social  content  had  been  the  strength  of  public  art  in 
the  Mission  District.  The  painters  included,  in  addition 
to  Cervantes  and  Meehan,  Margo  Bors,  Jose  Gomez,  and 
Tony  Parrinello,  and  they  were  assisted  by  Catherine 
Brousse,  Thomas  Gaviola,  Sherry  McVickar,  and  Pete 
Anoa'i. 

In  1978  Precita  Eyes  did  a  portable  mural  titled  Mask  of 
God,  Soul  of  Man,  which  combined  varied  interpretations 
of  the  human  face  from  many  cultures  in  order  to  remind 
viewers  of  their  uniquely  human  condition,  Cervantes 
says.  The  faces  of  actual  community  people  were  in- 
cluded in  the  border.  The  work  was  exhibited  at  the 
Mexican  Museum  in  the  Mission  District  and  elsewhere 
around  the  city.  Additional  portable  murals  were  under 
way  at  the  group's  workshop  in  the  Mission  Cultural 
Center  and  were  to  tour  libraries,  schools,  and  other 
public  buildings.  This  was  a  unique  and  promising  idea. 
The  designs  for  a  large  decorative  work  on  underwater 
life  intended  for  the  outside  of  the  Garfield  Park  pool 
building  in  the  Mission  were  delayed  because  the  city 
was  unwilling  to  allow  the  muralists  to  hold  the 
copyright  without  a  considerable  reduction  in  their  fee, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  California  law  guaranteed  the 
right  to  artists.  Finally  an  agreement  was  reached,  and 
painting  began  in  1979.  Precita  Eyes  was  a  new  depar- 
ture for  San  Francisco.  They  were  local  people  of  differ- 
ent ethnic  backgrounds  and  art  training — some  with 
none  at  all.  Sixteen  to  twenty  met  together  for  a  work- 
shop one  evening  a  week  to  teach  one  another  and  to  get 
ahead  on  their  portable  murals,  which  they  would  also 
come  by  to  work  on  individually  in  their  spare  time.  By 
spring  of  1979  the  group  was  competing  for  grants  and 
commissions  and  was  planning  to  incorporate. 

During  1978  Miranda  Bergman  worked  as  a  CETA 
muralist  helping  young  women  in  Juvenile  Hall  paint  the 
insides  of  their  cell  doors.  This  was  an  undertaking  of  the 
Alvarado  Art  Project,  which  had  been  responsible  for  the 
revival  of  murals  in  local  public  schools  years  earlier.  The 
girls  Bergman  worked  with  had  committed  felonies  and 
were  in  lockup.  She  would  spend  on  an  average  three 
hours  a  day  with  each,  every  day  for  two  weeks,  talking, 
drawing,  and  finally  painting.  She  wanted  them  to  do  as 
much  as  they  could  by  themselves.  She  says  that  because 
she  came  from  the  inner  city  she  was  able  to  gain  their 
confidence.  Some  painted  peaceful  scenes  of  landscapes 
and  animals,  some,  who  they  were  or  wanted  to  be,  often 
with  the  symbols  of  their  ethnic  cultures.  One,  a  Native 
American  who  had  been  turning  tricks  since  she  was 
eleven,  painted  herself  getting  married  amid  Indian 
signs.  Another,  Sonya,  showed  herself  with  corn  rolls 
looking  at  an  unlocked  door,  while  overhead  were  what 


she  described  as  the  "crossed  swords  of  righteousness." 
In  the  course  of  a  year  seventeen  doors  were  painted. 
Bergman  says  that  she  had  been  troubled  by  the  con- 
tradictions of  painting  in  the  institution.  The  murals 
became  a  stop  on  tours  to  demonstrate  how  enlightened 
was  what  she  regarded  a  prison.  Nevertheless,  she  be- 
lieved that  the  young  women  were  helped  by  the  paint- 
ing. 

In  the  early  summer  of  1979  while  the  Sandinistas 
were  liberating  one  city  after  another  in  Nicaragua  and 
finally  drove  Anastasio  Somoza  from  Managua,  the  cap- 
ital, Casa  Nicaragua  was  set  up  in  the  Mission  District  of 
San  Francisco  as  a  local  support  and  communications 
center.  More  people  of  Nicaraguan  descent  lived  in  San 
Francisco  than  anywhere  else  in  the  United  States,  and 
they  represented  the  largest  group  of  Latinos  in  the  city. 
The  opening  of  the  Casa  at  the  corner  of  Balmy  Alley, 
along  which  murals  had  been  painted  for  years,  occurred 
at  the  same  time  that  the  Brigada  Orlando  Letelier  was 
formed  in  San  Francisco  to  build  support  for  a  free  Chile. 
Its  four  painters  took  their  name  from  the  ambassador  of 
democratic  Chile  who  had  been  murdered  in  Washington 
three  years  earlier  by  the  military  junta.  Two  of  them 
were  his  sons,  Jose  and  Francisco,  and  the  others  were 
Rene  Castro  and  Beyhan  Cagri.  The  conjunction  of 
events  resulted  in  a  mural  that  wraps  around  two  sides  of 
Casa  Nicaragua  and  is  done  in  the  manner  of  earlier 
Chilean  works.  Across  the  top  on  the  alley  side,  two 
hands  marked  with  the  flags  of  both  countries  reach  out 
and  greet  each  other.  Liberty  holds  a  torch  from  which 
the  Chilean  colors  stream.  Below  a  Chilean  soldier  in  a 
Nazi  helmet  appears  behind  bars,  and  nearby  a  rifle  is 
painted  with  the  tools  of  rebuilding.  Facing  Twenty- 
fourth  Street  is  the  portrait  of  Augusto  Sandino,  who,  as 
we  have  seen,  led  Nicaraguans  against  U.S.  Marines  in 
the  twenties  and  thirties  and  was  murdered  by  the  father 
of  Somoza,  then  head  of  the  National  Guard  who  became 
dictator  like  his  son.  By  their  signature  the  Brigada 
painted  "No  ©,"  rejecting  the  idea  of  a  copyright  by  the 
country  that  had  abetted  the  overthrow  of  democracy  in 
Chile  and  propped  up  the  Somoza  tyranny  for  fifty 
years.  After  San  Francisco  the  Brigada  moved  on  to 
Chicago  and  other  cities,  doing  more  murals. 

During  1978  and  early  1979  the  mural  scene  in  San 
Francisco  underwent  significant  changes.  Jim  Dong  and 
the  artists  of  the  Kearny  Street  Workshop  were  evicted 
with  the  other  residents  of  the  International  Hotel  in 
1977.  The  workshop  could  only  afford  new  quarters 
outside  its  old  community.  Dong  was  mainly  absorbed  in 
photography  and  some  of  his  work  was  exhibited  at  the 
San  Francisco  .Museum  of  Modern  Art  in  1979.  In  the 
Mission,  the  focus  of  most  previous  activity,  the  large 
Latino  works  were  no  longer  being  done.  Precita  Eyes 
had  introduced  what  for  the  city  was  a  new  method  of 
organizing  and  training  community-based  muralists,  and 
the  start  that  it  had  made  with  outdoor  and  portable 
murals  was   promising.   The   Galena  de  la   Raza   was 

Sonya:  Untitled,  1978,  cell  door,  Youth  Guidance  Center 
San  Francisco. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  263 

continuing  its  socially  conscious  billboards,  com- 
missioning .Mike  Rios  to  do  one  announcing  its  exhibition 
of  art  by  local  people  on  the  theme  of  Frida  Kahlo  in  1978 
and  another  in  1979  calling  attention  to  the  International 
Year  of  the  Child.  For  the  latter  Rios  did  a  spirited  work 
adopting  his  highly  generalized  figurative  style  to  the 
paper  cutouts  of  kids.  The  Galeria  also  funded  Rios's 


264  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Jose  and  Francisco  Letelier,  Rene  Castro,  and  Bey  ban 
Cagri  (Brigada- Orlando  Letelier):  Viva  Nicaragua 
Libre,  7979,  Casa  Nicaragua,  Balmy  Alley,  Mission 
District,  San  Francisco. 


freshening    his    fading    Quetzalcoatl    in    the    minipark 
nearby. 

Mural  activity  was  not  large,  but  it  was  occurring  in 
varied  places  around  San  Francisco — at  the  zoo,  the 
downtown  YWCA,  and  the  Fillmore.  Some  of  the  new 
works  were  decorative,  some  were  ethnic,  and  others  had 
social  content,  but  there  were  none  except  the  Chile- 
Nicaraguan  work  with  strong  political  impact.  Muralists 
who  had  worked  extensively  in  the  city,  Miranda 
Bergman,  Arch  Williams,  and  Bob  Gayton,  were 
employed  as  CETA  artists  to  do  wall  art  in  Juvenile  Hall 
and  the  women's  prisons  in  1978  and  1979.  Arch  Wil- 
liams reported  that  officials  were  making  it  difficult  for 
the  muralists  to  paint  what  they  wanted  to  express.  The 
seven  CETA  muralists  employed  at  this  time  were  due  to 
be  laid  off  in  September  1979,  when  the  program  was  to 
end  because  of  a  federal  cutback.  Jane  Norling,  a 
longtime  member  of  the  Haight  Ashbury  Muralists,  was 
having  to  do  graphic  art.  Meanwhile  the  Booker  T. 
Washington  Center,  which  had  commissioned  Bob 
Gayton  to  do  a  five-by-seventy-foot  frieze  on  its  exterior 
detailing  the  biography  of  the  Black  educator,  ran  out  of 
funds  to  pay  him.  Gayton  volunteered  to  carry  on  and  in 
the  spring  of  1979  was  transferring  to  the  wall  the  design 
on  which  he  had  spent  weeks  of  research,  hoping  to  draw 
local  youth  into  the  project,  but  it  was  held  up  because  of 


a  delay  in  state  support  that  he  had  applied  for.  During 
the  summer,  as  a  result  of  the  lobbying  of  city  hall  by  the 
Art  Commission's  coordinator  of  murals,  Anne  Thielen, 
a  last  minute  allocation  of  CETA  funds  was  made  that 
provided  positions  for  five  painters,  two  less  than  the 
previous  year.  The  first  four  months  they  would  be 
assigned  to  doing  panels  with  teenagers  in  the  neighbor- 
hoods that  would  be  mounted  on  the  construction  site 
fence  downtown  around  the  George  R.  Moscone  Con- 
vention Center,  named  for  the  recently  assassinated 
mayor.  CETA  muralist  positions  were  now  limited  to 
eighteen  months,  and  the  remaining  time  of  the  five 
artists  would  be  occupied  with  additional  assignments  for 
the  city  and  public-service  organizations.  In  the  summer 
of  1979  the  Art  Commission  had  a  backlog  of  seventeen 
requests  from  such  groups  for  murals  and  had  created  a 
Mural  Resource  Center  to  connect  mainly  artists  who 
were  not  on  CETA  with  such  opportunities  and  to 
generate  more.*  But  the  crux  of  the  problem  remained 
the  scarcity  of  funding  for  these  projects. 

The  East  and  South  Bay 

While  community-based  murals  had  begun  in  Oakland 
during  1969  and  1970  at  the  height  of  the  period  of  ethnic 
militancy,  it  was  not  until  the  second  half  of  the  seventies 
that  they  were  again  pursued.  An  isolated  effort  was 
made  in  1975  and  1976  by  Gary  Graham,  a  part-time  art 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  265 


I 


Raymond  and  Xochitl  Nevel  and  Ray  Pat  Ian,  based  on 
ideas  of  prisoners  at  Vacaville  State  Facility:  Liberation 
through  Education,  1977,  Oakland. 

instructor  at  Laney  College,  where  he  directed  a  student 
mural  in  the  lounge  and  cafeteria  that  expressed  the 
struggle  of  people  of  all  races  for  advancement.  But  it  was 
primarily  in  the  Chicano  areas  of  the  East  Bay  that 
murals  began  to  take  root.  Among  those  that  were  done 
in  the  business  district  around  14th  and  Fruitvale  was  a 
work  that  Raymond  "Zala"  Nevel  designed  based  on  the 
ideas  of  prisoners  at  the  state  corrections  facility  at 
Vacaville.  It  was  the  liberating  power  of  Raza  culture 
that  he,  his  daughter  Xochitl  and  Ray  Patlan  took  as  their 
theme  for  a  work  they  painted  in  1977.  At  the  right  in  a 
section  that  Patlan  was  mainly  responsible  for,  a  circle  of 
pintos  (prisoners)  are  engaged  in  a  rap  session,  but  one  of 
them  has  tuned  out,  covering  his  ear  with  one  hand  and 
concentrating  on  his  transistor  radio,  for  which  the 
building's  gas  meter  was  used.  Meanwhile  a  prisoner  is 
breaking  out  of  chains  with  the  aid  of  books,  one  of 
which  bears  the  title:  Empleopor  Unidad  (Work  for  Unity). 
Unity  based  on  Raza  culture  and  education.  For  rearing 
up  behind  him  is  Quetzalcoatl,  the  god  of  culture,  and  a 
Raza  family  springs  from  its  tongue.  The  plumed  serpent 
winds  among  ma^guay  whose  roots  reach  into  the  earth 


from  which  beautifully  painted  ancient  faces  stare,  and  a 
sculptured  Aztec  head  utters  a  speech  volute.  Overhead 
an  eagle  soars  with  a  Pachuco  cross  on  its  back,  suggest- 
ing that  the  culture  of  the  forties  is  not  to  be  forgotten 
either.  The  artists  called  their  work  Liberation  through 
Education. 

A  few  blocks  away  that  year  Xochitl  Nevel  designed 
and  the  rest  of  her  family  joined  her  in  painting  a  mural 
that  filled  the  side  of  La  Clinica  de  la  Raza.  It  shows  the 
optometrist  and  dentist  who  had  their  offices  inside 
enveloped  by  figures  from  the  entire  Raza  heritage — 
indios  to  campesinos  to  college  graduates.  Teenage  boys, 
one  carrying  a  book  contemplate  this  panorama  and  seem 
to  be  considering  how  they  can  add  to  it. 

In  1978  Zala  Nevel  did  two  portable  works  without 
charge  for  the  Narcotics  Education  League  nearby.  He 
had  grown  up  in  Mexico  City  and  recalls  watching 
Rivera  painting  there. ^  He  began  painting  at  seventeen, 
teaching  himself,  and  earned  his  living  as  a  longshore- 
man, farm  worker,  and  factory  hand  in  the  States.  More 
recently  he  has  taught  mural  classes  in  Berkeley  and 
Oakland  and  was  planning  more  wall  art. 

A  few  miles  to  the  southeast  where  factories  and  new 
housing  developments  spread  out  on  the  narrow  flatland 
between  hills  and  bay,  Chicano  college  students  in  1976 


266  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Liberation  through  Education  (detail). 


Xochitl  Nevel,  designer,  and  painted  with  Raymond  Nevel 
and  family:  Untitled,  1977,  Clinicade  laRaza,  Oakland. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  267 


Rogelio  Cardenas,  director,  assisted  by  Ray  Pat  Ian,  Ray- 
mond Nevel,  and  college  students:  En  Decoto  Si  Se 
Puede  (In  Decoto  It  Is  Possible),  1976,  Decoto,  Califor- 


brought  public  art  to  Decoto,  a  pushed-aside  barrio  in 
Union  City.  The  students  invited  local  residents  to  par- 
ticipate in  a  Comite  de  Murales  para  Decoto,  and  to- 
gether they  decided  that  education  was  to  be  their  theme 
on  a  wall  provided  by  Casados'  Market.  They  assembled 
images  of  a  student  bending  over  a  microscope,  a  planned 
middle  school,  a  construction  worker,  and  portraits  of 
local  people  including  the  owners  of  the  grocery.  There 
were  also  the  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  and  Olga  Talamante, 
the  student  farm  worker  activist  from  California,  who 
while  visiting  progressive  friends  in  Argentina  was  im- 
prisoned and  tortured  for  more  than  a  year.  Altogether 
18  people  worked  on  the  mural;  it  was  directed  by 
Rogelio  Cardenas,  an  art  student  at  Cal  State  Hayward, 
and  help  was  provided  by  Zala  Nevel  and  Ray  Patlan, 
while  local  people  contributed  materials  and  funds. 
Blessed  by  a  priest  from  the  community  at  its  dedication  on 
Cinco  de  Mayo,  the  mural  was  seen  by  residents  as  the 
beginning  of  a  barrio  improvement  campaign.  Within  a 
few  months  additional  paintings  were  completed  at  a 
local  youth  center  and  clinic. 

Cardenas,  the  leading  figure  in  this  small  renaissance, 
had  recently  entered  college  after  three  years  in  Vietnam. 
He  said  that  he  wanted  to  use  art  as  a  means  of  teaching 
Third  World  young  people  to  think  for  themselves  and 
build  self-respect.  In  1978  he  turned  to  nearby  Hayward, 
where  the  frustration  among  Chicanos  was  high,  and 


assembled  a  mural  team  of  high  school  students.  La 
Mexicana,  a  tortilla  factory  and  market,  offered  a  20  by 
90  foot  wall  and  contributed  funds  along  with  other  local 
groups;  altogether  $1400  was  raised,  $60  of  which  the 
students  earned  from  a  week-long  car  wash.'"  Cardenas 
was  supported  by  a  CETA  salary.  A  number  of  the 
young  people  said  that  they  joined  the  project  because 
they  wanted  to  do  something  worthwhile  during  vacation 
time  since  they  could  not  go  to  summer  school  (which 
had  been  eliminated  across  the  state  by  the  Proposition 
1 3  tax  revolt). 

The  team  desired  an  image  of  La  Raza  at  the  center  of 
the  wall  but  decided  that  instead  of  the  usual  three  faces 
of  a  male  mestizo,  those  of  a  woman  would  be  more 
appropriate.  They  borrowed  the  design  of  Sequeiros's 
New  Democracy,  but  when  the  bare-bosomed  image  at- 
tracted graffiti  and  protests,  they  covered  her  breasts 
with  a  rainbow  of  colors  representing  the  different  races 
of  the  neighborhood  and  added  a  Virgin  of  Guadalupe 
and  a  triangle  symbolic  of  local  high  schools.  Beneath 
her  they  placed  a  pair  of  low  riders,  the  chief  art  form 
of  their  youth  culture.  Behind  La  Raza  the  .Mexican 
eagle  and  serpent  grasp  heavy  iron  links  about  which 
Cardenas  commented:  "You  can't  use  the  chains  as  an 
excuse  any  more.  .  .  .  They  are  still  there,  but  they 
are  loose  and  you  have  to  reach  out  for  opportunities." 
And  so  the  central  figure  does.  In  one  fist  she  raises 
a  hammer  of  struggle,  while  the  other  arm  opens  in- 
to an  Aztec  calendar  with  the  symbols  of  the  four 
elements  and  flags  representing  the  local  population  of 


268  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Rogelio  Cardenas,  director,  assisted  by  high  school  students: 

En   la   Lucha   Punte  Trucha   (In   the  Struggle  Get  now  took  a  leading  role.  But  this  federal  money  termi- 

Yourself  Together) ,  1978,  Hayward,  California.  nated  in  the  fall  of  1979. 


Mexican,  Filipino,  Puerto  Rican,  and  African  heritage. 
In  the  center  is  a  tree  of  life.  To  either  side  of  La  Raza  are 
images  of  the  negative  and  positive  life  choices  viewers 
can  make.  At  the  left  are  drugs  and  violence  presided 
over  by  the  Aztec  god  of  darkness,  Tezcatlipoca,  while  at 
the  right  are  carefully  arranged  symbols  of  the  profes- 
sions and  skills,  including  farming.  The  work's  title  calls 
on  viewers  to  choose  well:  En  la  Lucha  Punte  Trucha  (In 
the  Struggle  Get  Yourself  Together). 

During  the  latter  half  of  the  seventies  in  San  Jose 
professional  Chicano  artists  were  doing  murals  with  resi- 
dents and  young  people  in  order  to  build  confidence  and 
political  consciousness  on  the  East  Side  where  a  third  of 
the  houses  were  officially  designated  as  dilapidated  and 
unemployment  was  over  15  percent.  At  the  Tierra 
Nuestra  housing  project  in  1976  Jaime  Valadez  worked 
with  the  tenants'  council  and  teenagers  in  painting  the 
walls  at  the  back  of  yards.  One  of  them  by  Joey  Alvarado 
was  done  on  behalf  of  Vietnam  vets.  In  the  following 
years  Valadez  joined  with  other  painters  associated  with 
the  Centro  Cultural  Autoctono  de  la  Gente  de  San  Jose  to 
form  a  mural  group  that  called  itself  Sol  y  Tierra  and 
painted  murals  with  children  in  a  succession  of  schools. 
Other  artists  from  the  Centro  organized  Flor  En  La 
Comunidad  in  the  late  seventies,  which  with  CETA 
funding,  did  one  work  at  the  Black  Council  on  Al- 
coholism and  others  at  East  Side  schools  where  Rogelio 
Cardenas,  who  had  painted  in  Hayward  and  Union  City, 


Berkeley 

Part  of  the  sudden  surge  of  mural  activity  in  the  East 
Bay  was  the  work  that  was  done  at  nearby  social  agencies 
and  a  restaurant  in  1975  and  1976  by  students  at  the 
University  under  the  direction  of  Ray  Patlan  and  Patricia 
Rodriguez,  who  were  sharing  teaching  positions  in  the 
Chicano  Studies  art  program.  Meanwhile  two  of  the 
artists  who  worked  on  A  People's  History  of  Telegraph 
Avenue  in  1976,  O'Brian  Thiele  and  Osha  Neumann, 
joined  with  Daniel  Galvez  and  Stephanie  Barrett  to  paint 
a  scene  of  a  huge  semi  and  trailers  parked  on  the  Berkeley 
shore  with  San  Francisco  and  the  Golden  Gate  in  the 
background  and  a  dirigible  overhead  with  Viva  la  Raza  on 
its  side.  The  panels  of  the  truck  become  the  surfaces  of  a 
mural  full  of  familiar  imagery  painted  in  an  accomplished 
and  witty  manner.  Siqueiros's  big-bosomed  New  De- 
mocracy stretches  out  her  three  arms  over  a  march  of  farm 
workers  carrying  their  banners  and  the  Virgin  of 
Guadalupe,  all  led  by  Zapata  and  his  white  horse  as 
depicted  by  Rivera  at  Cuernavaca.  And  there  el  maestro  is 
on  his  ladder  in  front  of  the  truck  laying  in  a  few  last 
touches.  Close  at  hand  is  a  bier  with  a  farm-worker  flag 
presided  over  by  a  woman  and  priest,  while  a  field  of 
maiz  reaches  into  the  distance  beneath  the  Toltec  deities 
of  Tula.  On  the  trailer  panels  are  indio  dancers,  the  ritual 
acrobats  of  El  Tajin  hanging  by  their  feet  and  a  final 
vignette  of  the  fishermen  of  Patzcuaro  with  their  but- 
terfly nets.  In  the  foreground  are  self-portraits  of  the 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  269 


Daniel  Galvez,  Osha  Neumann,  O'Brian  Tbiele,  and 
Stephanie  Barrett:  Viva  la  Raza,  1977  partial  view, 
Berkeley. 

painters  at  work  on  the  trucit  alongside  Rivera.  The  point 
seems  to  be  that  these  are  the  traditions  that  Mexicans 
have  transported  to  this  country,  but  the  painting  is 
clever  rather  than  moving. 


booklet,  another  with  groceries  and  food  stamps,  a 
woman  with  a  handsome  handbag.  Black  people  and 
others,  all  led  by  a  Black  child  blowing  a  horn  into  the 
faces  of  corporate  power.  There  are  a  media  magnate 
with  a  TV  head,  an  oil-barrel-headed  mogul  with  a 
dripping  hose,  a  junk-food  manager  with  a  huge  ham- 
burger for  a  noggin,  a  bank  executive  with  a  red-lined 


But  in  their  next  mural  that  year  the  painters  were  able  house  in  his  belly  and  a  briefcase  face  losing  bills,  and 

to  make  a  decided  advance.  Winds  of  Change,  painted  by  finally  a  computer-headed  administrator  retching  read- 

Osha  Neumann,  O'Brian  Thiele,  and  Daniel  Galvez  on  ""^s.  There  was  some  complaint  from  the  co-op  board 

the  side  of  the  Co-op  Credit  Union  in  Berkeley  in  1977  about  the  last  because  it  was  said  the  co-op  used  comput- 

and  1978,  marks  an  important  development  in  the  mural  ^""^  itself.  Neumann  replied  that  the  painters  had  nothing 

movement.   In  the  first  place  it  addressed  a  new  and  against  technology;   it   was  only   its   replacing  human 

broadened  audience — working  people  in  general,  who  intelligence  that  they  opposed.  The  mural  explicitly  pits 

included  middle-class  members  of  a  consumers'  coopera-  ^'^""t  and  determined  consumers  against  those  who  mis- 

tive  that  had  branches  elsewhere  in  the  Bay  Area.  Like  '^ad  through  advertising,  those  who  promote  waste,  who 

similar  co-ops  around  the  country,  it  had  roots  in  the  adulterate  and  profiteer.  That,  the  painters  say  clearly,  is 

more-than-century-old  cooperative  movement  of  Britain  what  the  co-op  should  be  all  about, 

and  America.  The  Berkeley  Co-op  had  supported  peace  ^nt  there  is  much  more  to  the  mural  than  this.  The 

and  antiracist  as  well  as  consumer  and  ecological  issues,  consumers  are  shown  coming  out  of  a  field  of  corn.  One 

and   it   had   opened   branches   to   serve   lower   income  woman  holds  a  young  plant  and  behind  her  are  naked 

people.  But  in  recent  years  conservatives  dominated  its  figures  among  larger  sheaves,  one  looking  like  Bacchus, 

board  and  seemed  primarily  concerned  about  making  the  Above  them  a  huge  bird  sweeps  down,  and  throughout 

co-op  a  commercial  success,  which  the  painters  say  made  ^^^   painting   other   birds    merge   with   the    marchers, 

them  wonder  whether  they  wanted  to  do  a  mural  for  it.  suggesting  that  humans  are  part  of  the  natural  world  and 

Through  it  all,  the  co-op  remained  a  place  where  people  its  impulse  to  live  and  to  overcome  its  abuse.  At  the  far 

of  progressive  persuasion  met,  chatted,  and  signed  one  "^'ght  the  birds  appear  again,  prevailing  over  the  traffic 

another's  petitions.  The  muralists  took  full  advantage  of  ^hat  crowds  University  Avenue.  The  power  of  the  mural 

the  commission,  which  was  won  in  a  competition  with  's  the  great  sweep  of  its  movement  from  left  to  right;  the 

over  twenty  other  designs.  child  blowing  the  horn — art  itself — is  part  of  this.  This 

Winds  of  Change  presents  a  procession  of  enlightened  motion  unifies  the  composition  and  conveys  its  meaning, 

patrons — a  young  woman  in  carpenter's  overalls,  a  man  Instead  of  appearing  unbalanced  by  thrusting  off  the 

in   a   suit  coat   carrying   an   unemployment   insurance  "ght  edge,  the  mural  is  closed  off  at  both  ends  by  the 


270  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


O'Brian  Thiele,   Osha  Neumann,  and  Daniel  Galvez: 
Winds  of  Change,  1978,  Berkeley  Co-op. 


great  arc  of  the  birds,  first  swooping  down  and  then 
rising. 

The  painterly  technique,  which  is  unusual  in  murals, 
is  particularly  well  adapted  to  convey  lyrically  the  sense 
of  streaming  movement  and  change.  Figures  are  modeled 
by  the  play  of  color  rather  than  light  and  shade,  and  there 
is  a  trailing  of  brush  strokes  across  the  surface.  This 
heightens  the  vitality  of  the  scene  and  gives  it  the  sense  of 
"ecstasy"  that  Neumann  says  belongs  to  art.  He  and  his 
fellow  artists  had  tried  to  approximate  it  in  the  scene  of 
dancing  naked  in  the  street  in  their  vision  of  the  future  in 
A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue,  but  he  feels  this  was 
unsuccessful.  Art,  he  says,  should  be  "visionary,"  should 
point  the  way  to  the  happy  union  of  people  and  the  world 
in  which  real  life  sings.  Telegraph  Avenue  tried  to  achieve 
this  by  recalling  climactic  moments  in  the  ongoing  efforts 
for  social  change  and  presenting  these  as  spectacular 
episodes.  Winds  of  Change,  on  the  other  hand,  envisions  a 
continuous  awareness  and  activism  in  the  marketplace. 
And  by  its  design  it  shows  everyday  life  animated  by  a 
grass-roots  movement.  The  shift  from  an  episodic  com- 
position to  a  more  unified  one  is  not  only  aesthetic;  it 
seems  to  express  the  artists'  social  thinking.  The  only 
weakness  of  the  later  painting  is  that  like  the  earlier  one  it 
risks  overstatement  by  its  palette  of  saturated  rainbow 
hues. 

Neumann  says  that  he  is  a  product  of  the  sixties  with 
its  consciousness  of  community  and  in  those  years  had  no 
use  for  artists,  believing  that  they  were  egomaniacs.  Now 
he  was  concerned  about  the  credibility  of  the  images  of 
social  change  in  many  murals.  Too  often  they  were 
propaganda  that  simply  did  not  square  with  firsthand 
experience.  "We  have  had  enough  of  clenched  fists,"  he 


adds.  He  says  that  he  felt  profoundly  the  tension  of 
public  issues  and  actual  personal  experience.  What  he 
wanted  to  be  able  to  do  was  to  create  images  of  authentic 
community  that  viewers  could  believe.  They  would  have 
to  be  powerful  images  that  showed  that  life  could  be  full 
of  meaning  and  feeling.  For  instance,  the  memorable 
design  of  Siqueiros.  In  contrast  to  conceptual  artists  of 
today  who  were  skeptical  of  the  effectiveness  of  imagery, 
he  said  he  wanted  to  revindicate  its  power. 

The  basic  challenge  to  the  advance  of  murals,  he  says, 
was  thinking  through  the  concrete  means  to  social  change 
and  creating  imagery  to  express  it.  This  required  the 
serious  development  of  skills.  Although  he  saw  the 
legitimacy  of  children  and  young  people  doing  murals, 
he  was  concerned  that  the  mural  movement  was  being 
reduced  to  school  and  recreation  projects  and  losing  its 
stature  in  the  eyes  of  the  public.  He  feared  that  murals 
were  far  from  establishing  their  legitimacy  in  comparison 
to  the  fine  arts.  Therefore  it  was  crucial  that  artists  who 
wanted  to  become  full-time  muralists  find  the  economic 
security  and  institutional  support  that  would  give  them  a 
chance  to  mature.  Funds  raised  from  local  people  and 
firms  were  simply  insufficient.  The  $800  the  artists  had 
collected  for  Telegraph  Avenue  from  local  merchants  and  a 
can  by  the  wall  only  covered  paint,  brushes,  and  scaf- 
folding. The  artists  had  contributed  their  skills.  The 
material  costs  for  Winds  of  Change  were  about  the  same, 
but  the  co-op  could  afford  only  $2,500  for  the  whole 
project,  which  left  little  for  the  artists'  months  of  work. 
Neumann  looked  for  a  solution  in  autonomous  mural  and 
community  arts  groups  that  received  public  funds,  like 
Commonarts,  which  he  helped  to  organize  in  Berkeley. 

The  next  major  project  of  these  artists  was  the  facade 
of  La  Pena,  a  cultural  center  and  Latin  American  restau- 
rant in  Berkeley  opened  by  refugees  from  Chile.  The 
name  means  "rock,"  and  there  is  a  tradition  oipenas  that 


goes  back  to  Chile  and  Argentina  where  peasants 
gathered  in  makeshift  communal  huts  to  eat,  talk,  and 
sing  together.  In  recent  yesirs  penas  had  been  the  focus  of 
people's  culture  and  resistance  especially  in  Chile.  The 
Berkeley  La  Peiia  is  a  nonprofit  collective  with  volunteer 
labor  where  since  1976  there  has  been  a  nightly  program 
of  art,  music,  film,  and  dancing  dedicated  to  progressive 
social  action  around  the  world.  It  commissioned  Neu- 
mann, Thiele,  Anna  de  Leon  and  Ray  Patlan  in  the 
summer  of  1978  to  do  a  mural  for  its  facade. 

The  mural  depicts  the  continuous  building,  painting, 
and  making  of  music  that  is  La  Pena.  The  imagery 
implies  the  union  of  work  and  art  in  a  people's  culture — 
production  and  creativity.  Carpenters — one  a  young 
Black  man,  the  other  a  blond  woman — and  a  woman 
plasterer  and  painter  work  about  the  door,  while  musi- 
cians and  artists  of  the  common  people  from  around  the 
world  come  out  of  the  wall  toward  visitors  who  approach 
the  entrance.  Some,  such  as  Satchmo,  Luis  Valdez,  the 
director  of  the  Teatro  Campesino,  and  Malvina  Reyn- 
olds,  the  activist  songwriter  who  had  recently   died. 


Osba  Neumann,  O'Brian  Thiele,  Ray  Patlan,  and  Anna 
de  Leon:  Song  of  Unity,  1978,  La  Pena,  Berkeley. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  27 1 

are  recognizable.  But  most  are  folk  musicians  playing 
their  instruments  or  singing.  Rising  out  of  the  midst  of 
them  like  an  apparition,  but  larger  and  more  palpable 
than  the  rest  is  Victor  Jara,  the  Chilean  guitarist  whom 
the  muralists  say  they  had  "chosen  as  a  symbol  of 
people's  artists  in  struggle."  Jara,  who  was  known  inter- 
nationally for  his  protest  songs  and  reviving  Chilean  folk 
music,  was  captured  by  the  junta  that  overthrew  the 
democratic  Allende  government  in  1973.  Herded  with 
thousands  of  others  into  the  stadium  in  Santiago,  he  was 
recognized.  His  captors  brought  him  out  before  the 
crowd  and  then  proceeded  to  cut  off  his  hands.  As  he  was 
bleeding  to  death,  he  began  to  sing  and  the  crowd  sang 
with  him.  The  muralists  created  a  high-relief  image  of 
Jara  with  his  hands  hacked  off  and  his  whole  face  con- 
centrated in  a  song.  And  above,  Jara's  hands  continue  to 
play  the  guitar.  The  composition  crests  with  raised  heads 
of  an  eagle  and  condor  symbolic  of  the  people  of  North 
and  South  America,  executed  in  ceramics  by  Anna  De 
Leon,  while  below  on  the  doors  effigies  of  native  people 
greet  each  other.  The  muralists  called  their  work  The 
Song  of  Unity. 

Coming  down  at  you  as  you  approach,  the  figures 
visually  raise  your  angle  of  view  above  them,  and  tend  to 


272  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

lift  you,  which  adds  to  the  elation  they  impart.   The  murals.   The  painters  had  come  a  long  way  from  the 

sharp  perspective  pulls  together  dozens  of  faces  and  retrospective  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  of  two 

bodies  for  a  powerful  impact.  The  figures  in  the  fore-  years  before.  They  had  moved  from  an  episodic  to  a 

ground  with  conga,  flute,  a.nd  sampom  (pipes  of  the  Andes)  highly  concentrated  design,  and  they  had  adopted  their 

are  reminiscent  of  the  Spirit  of  16.  And  the  surge  of  the  technical  skill  and  imagination  much  more  effectively  to 

whole  march  out  of  the  wall  recalls  the  advancing  miners  their  social  vision.  The  mural  was  cosponsored  by  La 

in  Siqueiros's  From  Porfirio's  Dictatorship  to  the  Revolution.  Pena  and  Commonarts,  which  had  been  organized  in 

That  is  a  provocative  mix  of  allusions.  The  painterly  1977  to  undertake  murals  as  well  as  other  community  arts 

rendering  is   rich   in   mingled  tones;  the  shadows   for  activities.  CETA  provided  it  with  a  full  and  a  half-time 

instance  are  alive  with  blues  and  reds.  But  the  purple  position  for  muralists,  which  Patlan  and  Thiele  were 

bunting  that  was  added  at  the  end  to  pull  the  composition  holding  down,  while  Neumann  was  serving  on  the  board 

together   is   a   bit  too   rich   for   it.    The   most   striking  of  directors. 

technical  feature  is  the  high-relief  face  and  arm  of  Jara,  In  1979  the  three  completed  a  mural  in  the  entrance 
which  was  achieved  by  papier-mache  made  of  strips  hall  of  the  East  Bay  Skills  Center  in  Oakland  that  illus- 
dipped  separately  in  transparent  Politec  and  outdoor  trated  the  training  the  school  offered  with  images  of 
laytex  medium.  The  whole  work  is  painted  in  Politec  welding,  drafting,  and  computer  programming  along 
acrylic  on  masonite  with  a  two-inch  plywood  support,  with  the  oil  refineries  of  the  area.  The  painters  succeeded 
The  cost  of  paint  and  materials  alone  was  $1,500.  Thiele  in  opening  up  the  narrow  vestibule  by  treating  a  pro- 
pointed  out  that  high-relief  sculpture,  some  in  stone,  jecting  corner  as  if  it  were  a  steel  beam  behind  v\  hich  the 
some  in  plaster,  has  an  ancient  Latin  American  tradition,  whole  scene  spread  out.  In  this  relatively  small  mural  they 
for  instance  the  stucco  Mayan  figures  of  Palenque. 

Neumann  observed  that  the  buildings  on  both  sides  of 
La  Peiia  were  being  purchased  by  community-oriented 
owners,  and  he  dreamed  out  loud  about  a  whole  block  of 

Osha  Neumann,  0' Brian  Thiele,  and  Ray  Patlan:  Un- 
titled, 1979,  East  Bay  Skills  Center,  Oakland. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  273 


Osha  Neumann:  Untitled,  1979,  Irish  Pub,  Berkeley. 


worked  out  a  complex  pattern  of  pipes,  storage  tanks, 
factory  blocks,  and  high  rises  and  contrasted  these  with  a 
rippling  computer  printout  in  the  foreground  and  parallel 
to  it,  waves  of  colorful  smog  in  the  distance. 

After  this  collaboration  the  three  went  separate  ways, 
Neumann  directing  a  project  on  the  streetfront  of  a 
tavern  next  door  to  La  Peiia  in  which  Black,  Raza,  and 
White  people  are  shown  fending  off  the  Klan  and  police 
while  working  the  land  and  reaching  for  a  star.  On  a  door 
the  cause  of  free  Ireland  is  addressed  by  a  Celtic  interlace 
and  an  emerald  and  orange  map  of  the  isle. 

Meanwhile  Patlan  headed  for  Mexico  City  to  work 
with  Arnold  Belkin,  who  assigned  to  him  a  class  of  his 
students  at  the  San  Carlos  Academy.  More  than  half 
were  from  outside  Mexico,  and  together  with  Patlan  they 
designed  a  mural  for  a  ten-foot-high,  three-hundred- 
foot-long  wall  along  one  side  of  a  park  in  Magdalena 
Contreras,  a  textile  town  on  the  outskirts  of  Mexico  City. 
Each  student  produced  a  drawing  that  retold  an  incident 
from  the  town's  history  of  strikes  and  its  role  in  the 
Revolution.  The  drawings  were  projected  and  adjusted 


to  one  another  by  the  group  so  that  the  full  design  was 
worked  out  collectively  before  they  began  painting. 

Otber  Bay  Area  Sites 

After  "Chuy"  Campusano  returned  from  study  in 
xMexico  during  1974  and  1975,  he  began  doing  murals  in 
San  Mateo  County  just  south  of  San  Francisco.  In  1976 
he  painted  a  history  of  Daly  City  in  one  of  its  libraries 
and  then  became  a  director  of  CETA  muralists  in  the 
county.  In  the  spring  of  1979  he  was  finishing  off  a  mural 
for  the  San  Bruno  police  station  and  working  full-time  as 
an  administrator  in  the  San  Francisco  CETA  office. 
Although  the  new  job  did  not  involve  artists,  he  hoped 
to  use  the  experience  for  an  arts  management  position 
later. 

Meanwhile  in  downtown  Redwood  City  Gilberto  Bur- 
ciaga  and  Gilberto  Rodriguez  in  1978  painted  a  twenty- 
two-by-one-hundred-forty-seven-foot  mural  portraying 
the  regional  dances  of  Mexico.  The  artists  startled 
the  audience  at  the  dedication  by  hurling  bottles  of 
paint  at  their  work  (carefully  aiming  at  background 
areas)  to  protest  the  large  proportion  of  public  funding 
ostensibly  for  art  that  was  drained  off  by  administrators. 


274  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Also  in  Redwood  City  Emmanuel  Montoya  and  Robert 
Turnidge  collaborated  on  a  mural  depicting  the  hot- 
lunch  program  for  seniors  at  the  Pair  Oaks  Center,  and 
Turnidge  did  a  panorama  of  local  history  at  the  Millbrae 
City  Hall." 

Yet  another  form  of  people's  art  that  approximated 
murals  and  was  indeed  intended  to  be  a  wall  with  a 
message  was  a  throng  of  thirty-five  life-size  cardboard 
figures  of  mothers  with  infants,  children,  and  fathers, 
planted  in  a  playground  to  confront  developers'  bulldoz- 
ers that  were  set  on  turning  it  into  a  parking  lot.  There 
they  stood  drawn  up  like  a  solemn  procession  of  local 
people  staring  deeply  into  you  on  a  July  morning  in  1977. 
The  Cardboard  Front  was  created  by  Laura  Farabaugh, 
Chris  Hardman,  and  other  Waldo  Point  houseboaters  on 
behalf  of  their  neighbors — about  150  people  who  were 
one  of  the  few  low-income  communities  in  prosperous 
Marin  county,  just  north  of  San  Francisco.  They  had 
chosen  a  countercultural  style  of  life,  run  a  cooperative 
store,  an  ecological  sanitation  system,  and  had  a  local 
theater  group.  They  lived  in  personally  designed  quar- 
ters improvised  on  salvaged  landing  craft  built  nearby  at 
Sausalito  during  World  War  U,  and  the  area  around 
them  had  been  allowed  to  deteriorate  because  of  lack  of 
funds.  For  years  there  had  been  a  running  feud  between 

Laura  Farabaugh,  Chris  Hardman,  Evelyn  Lewis,  Larry 
Graber,  and  Heather  Wilcoxon:  The  Cardboard  Front, 
1977,  Gate  5,  Sausalito,  California. 


the  houseboaters'  Waterfront  Preservation  Association 
and  the  county  which  culminated  in  the  effort  to  extend 
Sausalito's  yacht  harbor  and  construct  piers  with  costly 
tieups  that  would  drive  out  all  but  affluent  houseboaters. 
It  was  in  response  to  this  that  five  members  of  the  Snake 
Theater  constructed  a  cardboard  community  to  confront 
the  bulldozers.  The  figures  were  finally  plowed  under, 
but  they  helped  capture  widespread  concern,  and  the 
struggle  continued.  The  cardboard  images  demonstrated 
the  same  impulse  that  has  created  inner-city  murals,  that 
of  people  making  public  art  together  to  maintain  their 
way  of  life. 

Sacramento 

The  inscription  of  the  .Mayan  glyph  at  the  center  reads 
"1976"  and  makes  this  a  Bicentennial  mural,  its  creator 
Armando  Cid  chuckles.  It  was  with  a  similar  mix  of 
ironic  humor  and  seriousness  that  he  painted  the  side  of 
the  Reno  Club  where  cantos — evenings  of  song,  drinking, 
and  camaraderie — frequently  took  place  in  the  barrio. 
The  mural  captures  their  anger,  mockery  and  lyricism 
that  make  life  endurable  there.  At  the  left  is  an  altar 
containing  el  Corazon,  the  heart  and  soul  of  La  Raza, 
which  Cid  says  he  wanted  to  show  pouring  its  life  into 
the  Church,  agriculture,  and  industry  signified  by  the 
cross,  field,  and  big  gear.  But  the  surrounding  cadaver- 
ous figures  also  indicate  their  oppression  of  Chicanos.  In 


contrast  there  are  vignettes  of  music,  literature,  and  the 
Revolution,  including  Pancho  Villa's  face.  Sprouting 
from  the  inscribed  glyph  are  ears  oimaiz,  pointing  to  the 
cardinal  directons  of  the  earth,  and  below  it  the  head  of 
an  indio  woman  emerges  from  maguay  and  the  land.  The 
"swastika"  nearby  symbolizes  movement  and  power.  At 
the  right  there  is  a  half-humorous  head  of  an  indio  priest 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  7  275 

with  an  elaborate  headdress,  part  of  which  is  the  plumed 
serpent  with  a  parrot's  head,  Cid's  version  of  Quetzal- 
coatl  as  god  of  culture.  While  below  birds  are  caged  in 
rows,  a  flock  cavorts  freely  above.  A  half-human,  half- 
iguana  glyph  and  a  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  or  Tonantzin 
suggest  the  resources  of  the  past  that  can  still  strengthen 
Chicanos.  The  wall  was  titled  Par  Libre  Vida  de  mi  Raza. 


Armando  Cid:  Por  Libre  Vida  de  Mi  Raza,  1976, 
Reno  Club,  Sacramento. 


Por  Libre  Vida  de  Mi  Raza  (detail). 


276  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Cid  himself  had  studied  under  Esteban  Villa  and  Jose 
Montoya  and  \\  as  now  director  of  the  Barrio  Education 
Center  of  Sacramento  City  College,  which  attempted  to 
attract  local  Chicanos  to  higher  education  and  offered 
courses  to  prepare  them,  including  one  in  art  history  that 
Cid  taught. 

One  of  the  major  achievements  of  the  RCAF  during 
this  period  was  the  painting  of  the  outdoor  stage  in 
Southside  Park  in  1977.  The  park  in  the  midst  of  a  barrio 
had  been  neglected  and  was  the  hangout  of  junkies  and 
w'inos  until  the  RCAF  painted  the  old  concrete  structure 
and  then  proceeded  to  turn  it  into  the  site  of  its  Mexican 
and  indio  ceremonies  each  year.  Here  was  an  exemplary 
instance  of  a  mural  that  continued  to  be  used  after  the 
painting  was  completed.  Ihe  work  itself  was  done  by 
trained  artists  and  students.  The  outer  wings  were  oc- 
cupied by  a  celebration  of  womanhood  by  Loraine  Gar- 
cia. The  left-hand  panel  of  the  concave  area  by  Jose 
.Montoya  showed  a  pair  of  present-day  cholos  with  their 
low  rider  looking  back  at  the  zoot  suits  and  heavy  coif- 
fures of  the pacbuco  era,  and  yet  further  back  at  zcampesino 
army  of  the  .Mexican  Revolution.  Next  to  it  Juanishi 
Orosco  did  an  abstract  design  based  on  the  woven  god's 
eyes  of  the  Huichol  indios  and  the  designs  of  the  Hopi.  In 
the  center  Esteban  Villa  painted  another  mujer  cosmica 
with  a  child  in  her  arms  and  the  three-faced  mestizaje  at 
the  bottom.  A  figure  bearing  a  huge  butterfly  over  w  hich 
the  phases  of  the  moon  spread  was  done  by  Stan  Padilla 
to  evoke  the  idea  of  natural  metamorphosis  and  social 
change  that  connected  with  the  RCAF's  interest  in 
indio  lore.  And  at  the  right  Juan  Cervantes  showed 
QuetzalcoatI  with  a  farmworker  carrying  a  UFW  banner, 
suggesting  the  return  of  the  indio  god.  One  sign  of  the 
RCAF's  success  was  that  the  stage  had  been  selected  by 
couples  as  the  site  of  their  weddings. 

By  1979  the  RCAF  filling  station  and  auto-servicing 
co-op,  the  Aeronaves  de  Aztlan,  was  being  embellished. 
Assemblage  figures  had  been  constructed  from  auto 
parts,  and  murals  were  under  way. 

That  year  also  the  RCAF  was  at  work  on  its  largest 


Loraine  Garcia,  Jose  Montoya,  Juanishi  Orosco,  Esteban 
Villa,  Stan  Padilla,  and  Juan  Cervantes  (RCAF):  Stage 
murals,  1977,  Southside  Park,  Sacramento. 


Esteban  Villa  (RCAF):  Mestizaje,  1977,  Stage  mural, 
Southside  Park. 


I 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  111 


Luis  ''The  Foot"  Gonzales  and  Juan  Cervantes  (RCAF): 
Aeronaves  de  Aztlan,  1979,  Sacramento. 


project  yet — the  exterior  walls  for  a  four-story  city 
parking  garage  next  to  the  Macy's  department  store  in  the 
new  downtown  area  of  Sacramento.  Winning  the  com- 
petition was  testimony  to  a  decade  of  work  and  was  one 
of  the  first  of  community  muralists'  commissions  for  a 
prominent  public  structure  in  a  large  city.  The  thirty-six 
thousand  dollars  the  RCAF  would  receive  was  a  large 
sum,  but  not  really,  considering  the  size  of  the  project, 
the  fact  that  it  included  the  cost  of  materials  and  the 
year's  work  the  artists  were  putting  into  it.  The  designs 
that  Juanishi  Orosco  was  working  on  in  June  were  based 
on  the  study  of  pre-Columbian  culture  that  the  RCAF 
had  been  absorbed  with.  The  artists  said  that  Sac- 
ramento with  its  valley,  rivers  afld  trees  and  mountains  in 
the  distance,  was  a  "spiritual  place"  long  before  the 
White  man  had  come  and  that  they  wanted  to  convey 
this.  The  early  sketches  showed  a  celebration  of  the  land 
and  its  indigenous  people.  One  of  the  artists'  problems, 
Orosco  admitted,  would  be  to  convey  the  full  seriousness 
of  their  vision  and  to  prevent  the  murals  from  being  a 
harmless  picturesque  affair. 

The  RCAF  also  was  commissioned  to  do  murals  on  the 
pedestrian  tunnel  that  connects  the  garage  with  the 
restored  covered  sidewalks  and  old  buildings  with 
boutiques  and  restaurants  of  Old  Sacramento.  There 
Esteban  Villa  had  earlier  conducted  a  graffiti  raid  of  his 
students  from  Sac  State  with  spray  cans,  because  what 
had  become  widely  known  as  "the  mousehole"  had  re- 
mained one  ofthe  eyesores  of  downtown  Sacramento.  In 
the  past  twenty  years  urban  redevelopment  had  turned 


the  area  into  a  concrete  canyonland  of  government 
buildings,  banks,  and  commercial  establishments  remi- 
niscent of  Mussolini  and  Hitler's  efforts  at  creating  a 
noble  modern  style.  The  Nationalist  Chinese  investors 
had  hardly  relieved  this  by  topping  off  their  massive 
edifices  in  the  California  capital  with  swooping  oriental 
gables.  It  would  take  a  good  deal  for  the  RCAF  to 
humanize  any  of  this. 

Los  Angeles 

The  murals  of  the  Watts  Towers  Arts  Center  got 
under  way  at  the  end  of  1975,  ten  years  after  the  riots, 
and  were  still  being  painted  in  1979.  The  center  itself 
was  built  in  1970  close  to  the  fantasy  of  seashells,  broken 
crockery,  bottles,  reinforcement  rods,  and  cement  that 
Simon  Rodia,  an  Italian  immigrant  tile  setter  and  night 
watchman,  had  constructed  in  the  course  of  thirty-three 
years  alongside  his  cottage  and  the  railroad  tracks  in  this 
dusty  and  remote  part  of  Los  Angeles.  In  1954  he  deeded 
his  work  to  a  neighbor  and  departed.  A  group  of  artists 
and  art  lovers,  recognizing  his  achievement,  bought  the 
towers  and  maintained  them  for  sixteen  years  until  1975 
when  the  city's  Municipal  Arts  Department  acquired 
both  the  towers  and  the  center.  It  hired  as  director  John 
Outterbridge,  who  had  headed  the  Communicative  Arts 
Academy  in  Compton  where  he  had  coordinated  murals 
by  local  artists  and  created  his  own  assemblage  walls. 
The  center's  program  now  could  be  enlarged  v\  ith  free 
classes  for  young  people  and  adults  in  the  visual  arts, 
drama,  and  music.  People  came  not  only  from  nearby 
but  from  all  over  the  city  to  study  with  its  accomplished 
artists  who  also  taught  in  local  schools. 


278  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Part  of  this  burst  of  activity  were  the  murals  on  the 
center's  outer  and  inner  walls.  Its  peaked  exhibition  hall 
and  inwardly  gabled  wings  where  studios  were  located, 
all  painted  a  buff  color  and  gradually  enveloped  with  big 
images,  suggested  the  painted  clay  homes  and  civic 
structures  of  the  people  of  Nubia  and  Nigeria.  Alonzo 
Davis  carried  across  one  side  and  around  a  corner  a 
composition  of  arrows,  zebra  stripes  against  red  earth,  a 
rainbow,  and  a  heavenly  body  against  a  deep  blue  sky. 
Nearby  Elliot  Pinkney  did  a  set  of  portraits,  and  Vernell 
DeSilva  pictured  a  Black  Egyptian  with  a  striped  head- 
dress and  radiating  halo  against  the  night.  Milton  Young 
painted  the  cavity  of  the  main  entrance  with  handsome 
asymetrical  shapes,  and  Nancy  Cox  recalled  the  riots  on 
a  door.  Around  the  back  Reflections  of  a  Child's  Eye  was 


painted  in  1977  by  sixteen  teachers,  aids  and  parents,  all 
of  whom  had  no  previous  art  training.  Under  the  direc- 
tion of  Joan  Kleihauer,  an  art  education  specialist,  they 
did  research  on  African  imagery  and  each  produced  a 
figure  that  was  incorporated  in  the  composition.  Addi- 
tional murals  were  done  by  David  Mann,  who  painted  a 
portrait  of  Simon  Rodia,  and  Richard  Haro,  who  pic- 
tured a  great  hand  holding  up  the  towers.  Inside  there 
were  mounted  two  large  panels  from  a  construction-site 
fence  that  had  been  painted  in  1976  during  the  building 
of  seniors'  housing  named  for  Guy  Miller,  a  local  Black 
sculptor  who  had  worked  in  the  streets  with  addicts. 
Both  of  the  panels  commemorate  the  riots.  The  one  by 
Elliot  Pinkney,  who  was  also  publishing  his  poetry, 
combined  a  dedicatory  inscription  with  relief  and  painted 


Murals,  left  to  right,  by  Alonzo  Davis,  Elliot  Pinkney, 
Vernell  DeSilva,  and  Milton  Young:  Watts  Towers  Art 
Center  (photographed  in  1979),  Watts,  Los  Angeles.  In 
background:  Simon  Rodia:  Watts  Towers,  1921-54. 


Murals,  left  to  right:  Richard  Haro:  Untitled;  Joan 
Kleihauer  and  workshop:  Reflections  of  a  Child's  Eye, 
1977;  David  Mann:  Portrait  of  Rodia. 


faces.  Roland  Welton's  offered  a  montage  of  strong 
Black  heads  and  images  drawn  from  old  photos  of  the 
violence.  By  recalling  the  past,  the  imagery  of  the  build- 
ing helped  guide  the  vitality  that  the  center  was  bringing 
to  Watts. 

During  the  second  half  of  the  seventies  Black  murals  in 
Los  Angeles  were  also  advanced  by  covering  over  the  old 
images  by  new  ones  at  the  Wall  of  Visions  on  Crenshaw 
Avenue,  which  CBS  covered  in  a  documentary  in  1979. 
Roderick  Sykes  painted  there  while  still  supervising  the 
painting  of  children  at  Saint  Elmo's  Village  where  school 
buses  brought  kids  during  the  week  for  one-day  work- 
shops and  local  youngsters  came  regularly.  Across  the 
street  in  1976  the  boarded-up  windows  of  an  abandoned 
cottage  were  decorated,  and  a  large  mural  on  which 
Sykes  was  working  with  young  people  was  in  progress.  It 
showed  boldly  frontal,  brightly  colored  faces  with  fea- 
tures cut  sharply  like  African  sculpture,  while  tears 
dripped  from  the  eyes  of  some.  In  front  of  it  three  years 
later  a  large  vegetable  garden  was  flourishing.  Looking 
back  from  1979,  Sykes  said  that  his  work  with  young- 
sters at  the  village  had  been  an  effort  to  help  them  realize 
that  they  were  somebody  by  discovering  their  creativity. 
He  could  go  on  doing  this  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  he 
added.  The  murals  had  changed  the  neighborhood. 
People  now  wanted  murals  on  their  houses,  and  he 
complied  with  bigger-than-life  portraits  of  them  on  out- 
side walls.  They  took  better  care  of  their  neighborhood 
now,  he  said.  The  lawns  were  green  and  trimmed,  and  if 
he  left  his  keys  in  his  door,  someone  would  watch  over 
the  house. 

Meanwhile,  the  increasing  difficulty  that  Citywide 
Murals  had  in  securing  funding  as  an  agency  of  Los 
Angeles's  Recreation  and  Parks  Department  prompted 
members  to  go  independent  as  a  public  service  nonprofit 
corporation  in  1976  and  to  seek  support  from  varied 
sources,  particularly  CETA.  Its  staff  took  the  acronym 
of  SPARC  (Social  and  Public  Art  Resource  Center)  but 
sought  to  preserve  its  identity  as  Citywide  as  long  as 
funds  could  be  obtained  from  the  city.  Under  this  double 
identity  it  undertook  the  largest  unified  mural  yet  on  the 
side  of  Tujunga  Wash,  a  concrete  channel  in  the  San 
Fernando  Valley  that  is  dry  most  of  the  summer.  During 
1976,  the  first  year,  ten  thousand  square  feet  were 
painted  along  a  quarter  mile  stretch  by  eighty  teenagers 
who  had  been  busted  at  least  once  and  were  referred  by 
local  juvenile  justice  authorities.  The  aim  was  to  help 
these  young  people  gain  a  new  sense  of  themselves  by 
identifying  with  the  achievements  of  their  heritage  and 
producing  something  together  that  would  be  widely 
recognized  as  worthwhile.  It  was  decided  to  take  as  their 
theme  the  contribution  of  minority  people  to  California 
from  prehistoric  times  to  1920.  In  subsequent  summers, 
it  was  planned,  new  groups  would  do  the  succeeding 


Elliot  Pinkney:  The  Time  Is  Now,  1976,  originally 
construction  fence  panel,  later  exhibited  at  Watts  Towers 
Art  Center. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  279 

decades.  The  first  year's  youngsters  were  guided  by  ten 
professional  artists  and  five  consultants  of  different 
ethnic  backgrounds  who  were  hired  to  help  with  re- 
search. The  entire  project  was  coordinated  by  Judy  Baca. 
Tujunga  Wash  was  about  seventeen  feet  deep,  and  the 
crews  had  to  be  trucked  in  every  morning  from  a  ramp 
two  and  one-half  miles  away.  Once  down  in  the  channel 


L8r, 

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280  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Roland  Wei  ton:  Untitled,  1976,  originally  construction 
fence  panel,  later  exhibited  at  Watts  Towers  Art  Center. 


the  painters  had  to  remain,  and  food  and  sanitary 
faciUties  were  provided.  Scaffolding  and  materials  had  to 
be  brought  from  under  a  bridge  hundreds  of  feet  away 
each  day.  Because  of  the  chance  that  the  channel  locks 


above  might  have  to  be  opened  or  that  there  would  be  a 
rainstorm,  the  working  area  was  sandbagged;  forty-seven 
tons  of  sand  were  delivered  and  the  crew  filled  the  sacks. 
On  Labor  Day  weekend  there  was  a  downpour,  and 
water  was  released  at  the  dam  upstream  without  the 
authorities'  warning  the  painters.  The  result  was  a  six- 
inch-deep  flash  flood  that  carried  away  all  the  muralists' 
materials.  But  the  project  went  on. 

The  first  year  thirteen  panels  were  painted,  each  one 
hundred  feet  in  length.  Styles  varied  with  each,  but 
figures  had  to  be  very  large  and  simple  to  carry  the 
distance  across  the  channel  to  where  they  could  be  seen. 
By  bringing  in  ethnic  resource  people,  the  staff  hoped  to 
give  the  youngsters  perspectives  on  their  past  they  did 
not  get  in  history  books.  The  teenagers  decided  to 
portray  the  achievements  of  ordinary  people's  daily  labor 
rather  than  the  deeds  of  the  famous.  But  the  historical 
retrospect  of  earlier  ethnic  murals  and  the  Bicentennial 
helped  shape  the  project. 

The  scenes  begin  in  20,000  b.c.  with  woolly  mam- 
moths and  saber-toothed  tigers  and  go  on  to  Indians 
hunting,  fishing,  and  grinding  meal.  In  a  simple  but 
stunning  detail  a  big  white  hand  uproots  a  Native  Ameri- 
can from  the  New  World  while  the  cotiquistadores  arrive. 
The  trek  of  Mexicans  north  is  shown  and  the  missions, 
rancheros,  and  life  on  the  hacienda.  There  are  panning  for 
gold,  the  vigilantes,  and  Juaquin  Murieta.  The  coming  of 
immigrants  from  Asia  is  depicted  in  a  panel  that  adopts 
the  flat  style  of  Japanese  woodcuts.  There  are  the 
Chinese  working  in  mines  and  building  the  railroads  and 
their  persecution  by  Whites  who  feared  for  their  jobs. 
Then  follow  the  crossing  of  the  Sierra  by  Black  people 
in  covered  wagons,  town  life,  and  the  suffragettes  at  the 
turn  of  the  century.  In  the  next  panel  immigrants  from 
all  over  the  world  standing  together  with  their  flags  are 
rendered  in  a  sensitive  style  of  wiry  lines  and  contrasting 
strong  and  subtle  color.  The  panels  of  1976  conclude 
with  the  First  World  War  and  the  names  of  the  muralists. 

A  cut  in  funding  canceled  work  in  1977  and  provided 
for  only  thirty-six  young  painters  the  following  year. 
However,  about  fifteen  of  these  had  painted  there  during 
the  first  season,  which  made  for  a  passing  on  of  what  had 
been  learned  to  the  newcomers.  The  1978  painting  in- 
cluded scenes  from  early  cowboy  movies  and  Charlie 
Chaplin  in  the  trenches  of  World  War  I.  Another  panel 
emphasized  the  Mexican  descent  of  Thomas  Alva  Edi- 
son, which  current  research  was  establishing.  In  the 
spring  of  1979  plans  were  well  advanced  for  a  new  season 
of  work,  but  in  spite  of  a  large  contribution  of  paint  by 
the  Army  Engineers,  funds  did  not  materialize  by  sum- 
mer to  pay  the  staff  and  the  project  was  postponed  for 
another  try  in  1980. 

Although  the  skills  of  the  painters  varied,  their  work  is 
truly  impressive,  particularly  when  viewed  as  a  whole, 
but  also  in  its  separate  parts.  There  are  a  seriousness  and 
imagination  that  the  entire  unfolding  panorama  reveals. 
It  is  painted  on  a  section  of  Tujunga  Wash  that  runs 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  28 1 


Social  and  Public  Art  Resource  Center  and  City  wide  crew 
directed  by  Judy  Baca:  Tujunga  Wash  Mural,  1976, 
San  Fernando  Valley.  (©  SPARC) 

Pat  Doyle:  ''1522  Spanish  Arrival"  (detail),  Tujunga 
Wash  Mural,  1976. 


beneath  the  playing  field  of  the  Los  Angeles  Valley 
College,  and  nearby  is  a  residential  neighborhood.  Hence 
it  can  be  seen  daily  by  many  people  whether  they  drive 
along  a  parallel  boulevard  or  take  it  in  at  their  leisure 
from  a  sidewalk  that  runs  its  length. 

.  Retrospect  and  history  figured  in  other  Citywide  mu- 
rals during  these  years.  Among  them  was  Ocean  Park  Pier 
designed  by  Jane  Golden  and  painted  by  Peggy  Edwards 
and  Barbara  StoU  in  1976.  It  is  a  decorative  re-creation  of 
the  waterfront  of  Santa  Monica  during  the  early  part  of 
the  century.  The  artists  offered  a  panorama  of  the 
boardwalk,  lighthouse,  the  beach  umbrellas,  deck  chairs, 
and  roUercoaster,  a  horseless  carriage  and  strollers  in 
knickers  and  bloomers,  striped  shirts,  and  floppy  broad- 
brimmed  and  cloche  hats.  The  details  are  all  brought 
together  by  the  flat  patterned  style  that  generalizes  even 
the  faces  to  featureless  profiles  and  disks.  Like  a  number 
of  artists  during  the  Bicentennial  the  muralists  here 
sought  out  the  picturesque  and  festive  in  the  past. 

Meanwhile  in  1976  some  East  Los  Angeles  muralists 
continued  to  find  in  the  past  a  relevance  to  present-day 
struggles.  Willie  Herron  in  a  work  he  had  begun  the 
previous  year  connected  the  Mexican  War  for  Indepen- 
dence with  the  U.S.  Bicentennial,  taking  as  his  subject 
the  name  of  the  drugstore  where  he  painted — the  Far- 
macia  Hidalgo.  The  mural  wraps  like  a  frieze  around  the 


SPARC  and  Cityivide  cre-ix: 
junga  Wash  Mural,  1976. 


''1868  Sojourners,"  Tu-     ^p^j^fj  ^^^^.  ^Charlie  Chaplin,''  "Thomas  Aha  Edi- 
son," and  "William  S.  Hart,"  Tujunga  Wash  Mural, 


1978. 


Jane  Golden,  designer,  Peggy  Edwards  and  Barbara  Stoll, 
painters  (Citywide):  Ocean  Park  Pier,  1976,  Santa 
Monica. 


upper  half  of  the  corner  building  and  shows  the  soldier- 
priest  urging  on  La  Raza  today  with  the  same  cry  with 
which  he  began  the  independence  movement  against 
Spain.  The  banner  behind  him  is  inscribed  La  Doliente  de 
Hidalgo — the  suffering  of  the  leader  who  was  executed 
and  whose  spirit  today  is  still  harried.  Borrowing  from 
the  great  staircase  mural  of  Orozco  in  Guadalajara,  Her- 
ron  shows  Chicanos  trying  to  break  out  of  the  oppression 
of  the  past  and  surging  forward  to  claim  a  role  for 
themselves  in  modern  civilization,  symbolized  by  a 
streaming  train  and  plane,  science-fiction  towers,  and  a 
bird  in  flight.  He  says  he  wanted  to  suggest  freedom, 
especially  the  freedom  to  go  where  you  want  to.  Al- 
though the  vehemence  of  Herron's  earlier  work  remains, 
it  was  not  strengthened  by  the  smooth  technique  and 
modernistic  style  of  the  1930s  he  adopted  to  suggest  the 
future. 

It  was  a  related  and  moving  call  to  struggle  against 
poverty  and  racism  that  Carlos  Almaraz  and  members  of 
Los  Four  projected  from  the  end  wall  of  a  public  housing 
block  at  Ramona  Gardens  in  1976  with  their  image  of 
Adelita,  the  legendary  woman  guerrilla  leader  of  the 
Mexican  Revolution. 

The  following  year  Wayne  Alaniz  Healy  and  David 
Botello  completed  an  elaborate  set  of  heritage  panels  on 
the  streetside  wall  of  the  Crocker  Bank  at  a  busy  intersec- 
tion of  North  Broadway  in  East  Los  Angeles.  Calling 
themselves  Los  Dos  Streetscrapers,  they  titled  their  work 
Chicano  Time  Trip.  But  their  old-fashioned  style  of 
magazine  illustration  and  movie  posters  with  heroic-scale 
figures  glamorize  the  Mexican  past  and  present.   The 


William  F.  Herron  III:  La  Doliente  de  Hidalgo  (The 
Suffering  of  Hidalgo),  1975-76,  East  Us  Angeles. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  283 
largest  panel  shows  a  young  Chicano  family,  the  macho 
father  in  a  team  shirt,  his  wife  simply  sexy  and  their  kids 
merely  cute.  They  are  posed  against  conventional  vig- 
nettes of  local  life,  while  the  other  panels  present  history 
in  a  similarly  picturesque  manner.  The  caption  pro- 
claims: "Our  heritage  is  the  foundation  of  our  destiny. 
The  power  of  our  desires  and  imagination  will  determine 
the  future."  However,  the  inflated  commercial  style  of 
the  mural  corresponds  to  the  effort  to  adopt  Mexican 
history  to  the  conventional  upward-bound  middle-class 
dream.  Compared  to  the  Bank  of  America  in  San  Fran- 
cisco's Mission  District  of  three  years  earlier,  this  was  a 
missed  opportunity.  Compared  also  to  Botello  and 
Healy's  earlier  murals,  in  which  their  commitment  to 
their  heritage  is  robust,  Chicano  Time  Trip,  in  spite  of  its 
ostensive  .Mexicanism,  is  disappointing.  In  Ghosts  of  the 
Barrio  Healy  in  1974  worked  out  an  unpretentious  u  ay  of 
raising  questions  about  the  connection  of  past  and  pre- 
sent, and  Botello  in  his  1975  Read  between  the  Lines  con- 
trasted the  inspiration  of  heritage  with  exploitation  by 
modern  technology  and  media  spectacles.  But  Chicano 
Time  Trip  succumbs  to  both. 

So  did  their  Moonscapes,  completed  in  1979  on  the 
Department  of  Motor  Vehicles  building  in  Culver  City,  a 
community  in  the  Los  Angeles  basin.  The  mural  com- 
pletely encircles  the  large  new  structure,  and  by  the 
entrance  Los  Dos  Streetscrapers  inscribed  an  explana- 
tion: 

The  painting  of  "Moonscapes"  represents  an  exposi- 
tion of  thought  related  to  our  position  in  the  universe. 
The  mural  poses  many  questions  to  those  who  look 
beyond  the  graphic  design.  For  instance.  Why  does 
the  mind's  ability  to  comprehend  lifespans  that  vary 


284  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Carlos  Almaraz  and  Los  Four:  Adelita,  1976,  Ramona 
Gardens,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Wayne  Alaniz  Healy  and  David  Botello:  Chicano  Time 
Trip,  1977,  East  Los  Angeles. 

BIH"* 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  285 


David  Botello  and  Wayne  Alaniz  Ilealy:  Moonscapes 
(partial  view),  1979,  Department  of  Motor  Vehicles 
Building,  Culver  City,  California. 


Moonscapes  (detail). 


286  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

from  stars  to  subatomic  particles  oftentimes  come 
easier  than  our  willingness  to  understand  the  ideas  of  a 
fellow  earthling?  Or:  How  can  we  allow  our  society's 
overburden  of  advertising  belligerence,  "labor-saving" 
electrical  nonsense,  and  strategic  arms  overkill  to  take 

grecedence  over  the  care  and  maintenance  of  spaceship 
arth  as  we  hurtle  through  the  cosmos? 

The  painters  themselves  might  be  asked  similar  ques- 
tions. For  the  most  prominent  part  of  the  work,  that 
facing  a  boulevard,  is  a  panorama  of  man's  first  landing 
on  the  moon  in  1969  and  the  future  construction  of  a 
space  station  named  for  2001  director  Stanley  Kubrick. 
While  varied  space  vehicles  explore  the  lunar  surface,  an 
astronaut  grasps  the  tail  of  a  comet  in  one  hand  and  a 
panel  showing  the  frame  of  an  earthbound  automobile  in 
the  other.  On  his  shoulder  is  a  patch  bearing  the  Mexican 
flag,  and  his  face  glass  reflects  the  actual  boulevard  before 
him  with  il  pachuco  jauntily  taking  in  the  mural.  Other 
references  to  Mexican  culture  include  the  name  of  one  of 
the  extraterrestrial  ships.  Qua  Te  Mac,  a  play  on  the  name 
of  the  last  Aztec  king.  By  such  means  the  painters 
attempt  to  pose  their  questions  about  mankind's  technical 
sophistication  and  backwardness  in  human  relations. 
Another  wall  shows  Einstein  riding  a  bicycle  next  to 
indio,  Asian,  and  African  sages  peering  into  the  sky.  On 
the  third  side  is  a  highway  of  the  future  seen  from  inside 
a  car  with  the  driver  switching  to  "alternate  energy," 


and  finally  an  enormous  view  of  Los  Angeles  at  night 
with  its  streets  illuminated  like  beads  of  moisture  on  a 
spider  web  stretches  beneath  asteroids  dashing  past  the 
moon.  The  composition  is  imaginatively  tied  together 
around  the  building  by  neon-tube-like  loops  of  color  that 
suggest  oscilloscopes  and  time  warps.  The  scale,  trompe 
I'oeil  effects,  and  visual  tricks  probably  owe  something  to 
the  Los  Angeles  Fine  Arts  Squad,  whose  work  will  be 
discussed  in  chapter  9.  And,  as  with  it,  the  painters  here 
seem  more  interested  in  something  other  than  their  an- 
nounced subject.  Moonscapes  gets  carried  away  with  de- 
picting science  fiction  worlds  rather  than  real-life  prob- 
lems at  home  and  close-at-hand  ways  of  dealing  with 
them.  Like  Botello  and  Healy's  other  work.  Moonscapes 
displays  their  professional  skills — Healy  is  a  space  vehi- 
cle designer  and  Botello,  an  ad  illustrator  for  department 
stores.  But  they  had  shown  earlier  that  they  could  use 
their  training  in  coming  to  grips  with  community  issues. 
What  has  greater  authenticity  is  a  reconstruction  of 
community  history  that  Judy  Baca,  Sonya  Williams, 
Arnold  Ramirez,  and  Joe  Bravo  accomplished  in  1977  on 
two  sides  of  a  Pacific  Telephone  building  in  the  Highland 
Park  neighborhood  of  Los  Angeles.  There  are  vignettes 
of  working  on  the  railroad,  warehousing,  the  old  trolley 


Judy  Baca,  Sonya  Williams,  Arnold  Ramirez,  and  Joe 
Bravo  (SPARC):  Pacific  Telephone  Building  Mural 
7977,  Highland  Park,  Los  Angeles. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  287 


Pacific  Telephone  Building  Mural  {detail). 


line,  a  local  artist,  a  high  school  football  team,  the 
community  improvement  association,  and  the  visit  of 
Teddy  Roosevelt.  Much  of  this  was  laid  out  by  a  Chicano 
architectural  firm  that  subcontracted  the  painting  to 
SPARC,  but  the  muralists  insisted  on  updating  it  with 
portraits  of  seven  street  youths  grinning  in  front  of  their 
low  rider.  This  is  the  only  section  in  color;  the  rest  is  in 
monochromatic  browns  and  yellows.  Baca  was  especially 
pleased  that  the  painters  had  worked  out  a  quick  and 
effective  method  of  Photo-Realism  in  four  gradations  of 
hard-edged  tones. 

It  was  also  a  heritage  work  that  took  the  place  of  Frank 
Romero's  Un  Corazon  par  la  Gente  at  the  busy  intersection 
of  Soto  and  Brooklyn  in  East  Los.  Directed  by  John 
Valadez  and  painted  by  a  crew  of  fifteen,  this  work  done 
with  Citywide  funds  makes  clear  at  the  bottom  that  it 
was  "the  last  mural  sponsored  by  the  City  of  Los 
Angeles."  Its  panels  attempt  to  illustrate  the  text  over- 
head: "The  Beauty  of  our  people  is  our  Culture,  the 
Strength  of  our  Culture  lies  within  our  Struggle."  The 
central  panel  pictures  the  living  generations  strolling 
before  the   Los   Angeles  city   hall   and  the  crumbling 


"observatory"  at  Chichen  Itza,  one  of  the  centers  of 
Mayan  civilization.  In  the  first  panel  to  the  left  a  pair  of 
monumental  children  raise  their  clenched  fists,  and  in  the 
next  a  young,  attractive  mother  holds  her  son.  At  the 
right  two  indio  girls  feed  ducks  beneath  a  cactus,  and 
further  along  over-sized  faces  of  local  young  adults,  he 
with  silvered  sunglasses  and  she  with  her  hair  in  her  face, 
grin  back  at  you.  At  the  far  right  a  life-size  couple 
contemplates  a  window  display  in  a  trompe  I'oeil  panel 
that  you  first  mistake  for  real  since  the  wall  belongs  trf  a 
shoe  store.  The  whole  is  competently  painted,  but  the 
images  do  not  do  credit  to  the  caption.  The  only  sugges- 
tion of  struggle  is  the  gesturing  kids,  and  there  is  little 
shown  that  has  to  do  with  a  sustaining  culture. 

In  1976,  the  year  that  Herron  completed  La  Doliente  de 
Hidalgo,  he  turned  from  history  as  a  means  of  dealing 
with  the  present  to  grapple  with  a  set  of  current  issues 
that  anticipated  changes  that  were  to  occur  in  other  Los 
Angeles  murals  as  well.  With  the  assistance  of  Alfonso 
Trejo,  Jr.,  he  undertook  a  work  on  the  side  of  another 
drugstore  owned  by  the  proprietor  of  Farmacia  Hidalgo. 
The  artists  took  the  pharmacy  itself  as  their  point  of 
departure,  laying  out  a  highly  detailed  but  legible  com- 
position in  three  panels  that  contrast  the  humane  works 


288  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


City  wide  crew  directed  by  John  Valadez:  The  Beauty  of 
Our  People  Is  Our  Culture  .  .  .  ,  1978,  East  Los 
Angeles. 


of  invention  and  science  with  the  destructive.  They 
called  it  Some  of  the  Advancements  of  Man.  Ihe  central  scene 
shows  an  operating  room  with  doctors  and  nurses  caring 
for  a  patient  whose  blood  vessels  are  exposed  as  in  an 
anatomical  atlas.  This  is  set  against  the  cloud-shrouded 
earth,  which  penetrates  into  the  other  panels.  At  the  left 
we  are  in  a  spaceship  cockpit  approaching  a  planet,  an 
atom  bomb  is  sending  up  its  cloud,  and  a  tangle  of 
highways  circles  around  tombstones.  On  the  other  side 
there  is  a  montage  of  steelworkers  in  a  mill,  a  barrio  gang 
member  shooting  from  a  car,  a  skeletal  cow,  a  field 
attacked  by  locusts,  and  the  poor  holding  out  their  hands 
pleadingly.  The  mural  asks  you  to  choose.  The  anger  of 
Herron's  earlier  works  has  by  now  been  transformed  to 
the  sharp  contrasts  of  need  and  waste,  and  the  benign 
and  malign  uses  of  technology.  The  style  of  science 
fiction  illustration  that  weakens  the  earlier  pharmacy 
mural  here  serves  effectively  as  an  ironic  way  of  treating 
the  abuses  of  science  and  mechanization. 

In  1979  Herron  returned  to  Estrada  Courts  to  com- 
plete Chicano  Moratorium,  which  he  and  "Gronk"  had  left 
unfinished  five  years  earlier.  He  now  rendered  portraits 
of  his  wife  and  himself  embracing  with  slight  touches  of 
color  that  provide  the  only  warmth  and  tenderness  in  the 
harsh  contrasts  of  the  monochromatic  news  images. 

The  depiction  of  human  caring  and  affection  was 
widened  in  a  quiet  breakthrough  for  murals  that  Ann 


Elizabeth  Thiermann  and  assistants  achieved  on  the  out- 
side of  the  Venice  Health  Center  in  1977  in  a  project 
sponsored  by  Citywide.  Amidst  a  scene  of  people  caring 
for  each  other — young  and  old,  parents  and  children  of 
different  races — there  are  a  pair  of  women  attending  to 
each  other  and  two  men  embracing.  It  is  all  done  with 
straightforward  simplicity.  The  artists  titled  their  work 
Nurturance  and  added  the  caption:  "Our  stay  here  is  a 
communion.  I  draw  strength  from  my  people.  We  have 
learned  that  we  cannot  live  alone."  Judy  Baca  says  that 
the  subject  did  not  cause  controversy  among  clients  or 
staff  when  it  first  appeared,  but  that  the  muralists  did 
have  to  contend  with  graffiti  until  they  began  talking 
with  passersby  and  finally  put  up  an  additional  caption  in 
Spanish  and  English:  "Please  honor  my  wall.  If  you  want 
to  paint  please  call.  ..."  A  year  afterward  the  embracing 
men  were  defaced  with  spray  paint,  but  the  artists 
returned  to  restore  them. 

In  the  later  seventies  the  widespread  concern  for  all 
living  things  as  part  of  a  shared  ecosystem  motivated  a 
number  of  murals  that  had  been  anticipated  by  wall  art 
during  the  first  half  of  the  decade.  In  1978  Jane  Golden 
and  Peggy  Edwards  painted  a  massive  stand  of  sequoias 
on  both  sides  of  a  corner  building  of  the  John  Muir 
School  in  Santa  Monica  with  sun  streaming  through  their 
trunks  and  foliage.  There  was  an  obvious  appropriate- 
ness of  the  imagery  to  the  school  named  for  the  naturalist 
of  the  Sierras,  and  the  trees  facing  the  busy  intersection 
suggest  both  conservation  and  vacations. 

That  year  in  Venice  a  pair  of  reveling  blue  whales,  one 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  289 


with  a  peace  sign  for  a  blowhole,  refused  to  be  contained 
within  their  wall  and  illustrated  the  broad  interest  in 
ecology.  The  painters  sponsored  by  City  wide  Murals  were 
Randi  Geraldi,  Margaret  Garcia,  David  Gatchel,  Samuel 
Myring,  and  Marcia  Alvarez. 


William  F.  Herron  III  and  Alfonso  rrejo,Jr.:  Some  of 
the  Advancements  of  Man,  1976,  East  Los  Angeles. 


Ann  Thiermann  and  assistants  (Citywide):  Nurturance, 
1977,  Venice  Health  Center,  Venice. 


Jane  Golden  and  Peggy  Edwards:  Redwoods,  1978,  John 
Muir  School,  Santa  Monica. 


Randy  Geraldi,  Margaret  Garcia,  David  Gatchel,  Samuel 
My  ring,  and  Marcia  Alvarez  (City  wide):  Save  the 
Whales,  1978,  Venice. 


Joe  Bravo  (SPARC):  Technological  and   Spiritual 
Man,  1977,  Venice. 


A  related  concern  about  technology  and  its  relation  to 
the  environment  and  the  human  spirit  appeared  in  a 
number  of  works  by  Joe  Bravo,  at  that  time  a  SPARC 
artist.  A  1977  wall  he  did  in  Venice  seems  to  break  open 
in  the  shape  of  a  head  and  reveal  within  its  dark 
silhouette  a  TV  set  for  an  eye  and  a  brain  absorbed  with 
rocketry  and  machines.  Opposed  to  this  Bravo  offered  a 
campesino  playing  his  guitar  to  a  fertile  field  and  the  sky, 
which  become  a  monumental  head  of  an  indio  that  bursts 
out  of  the  wall  towards  us.  The  black  cave  of  the 
mechanized  head  contrasts  with  the  other  face  which  has 
emphatically  modeled  features.  Bravo  titled  his  work 
Technological  and  Spiritual  Man.  On  a  portable  mural  of 
1978  intended  for  display  along  a  freeway  Bravo  con- 
trasted an  oil-well  pump  and  refinery,  which  are  shown 
shattering  the  land,  to  green  farm  country  with  a  woman 
pointing  to  a  blazing  sun.  At  the  bottom  a  naked  figure 
crucified  upside-down  on  the  earth  clenches  his  fist. 
Bravo  explains  that  he  wanted  to  speak  out  for  the  value 
of  solar  energy  and  human  scale  farming  for  both  work- 
ers and  users.  He  does  not  mean,  he  says,  that  technol- 
ogy must  be  eliminated,  but  that  it  must  be  made  to 
support  what  people  truly  are.  Although  he  had  not 
heard  of  "appropriate  technology"  he  was  projecting  the 
idea,  which  was  natural  for  a  painter  who  had  turned 
from  ad  art  to  community  murals. 

The  economic  and  political  issues  that  underlie 
ecological  concerns,  issues  that  Herron  and  Trejo  had 
already  opened  up,  were  pursued  further  by  Judy  Baca 
and  assistants  in  the  spring  of  1979  when  they  prepared 
a  portable  mural  for  display  on  Survival  Sunday  at  the 
Hollywood  Bowl  in  June,  a  rally  sponsored  by  the 
Alliance  for  Survival  and  Abalone  Alliance  to  protest  the 
development  of  nuclear  plants.   The  demonstration  of 


Judy  Baca  and  assistants  (SPARC):  Uprising  of  the 
Mujeres,  1979,  Exhibited  at  Survival  Sunday,  Holly- 
wood Bowl. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  291 

twenty  thousand  people  occurred  three  months  after  the 
near-disaster  at  Three  Mile  Island,  Pennsylvania,  where 
failures  of  equipment,  personnel,  and  government  super- 
vision exposed  the  dangers  of  the  growing  dependence  on 
nuclear  energy.  The  mural  however  was  not  directly 
about  any  of  this,  but  about  the  diversion  of  public  funds 
from  meeting  real  human  needs.  However,  the  connec- 
tion was  clear  enough  to  the  sponsors  of  the  rally  and  the 
SPARC  artists  who  created  the  eight-by-twenty-four- 
foot  work  mounted  so  that  it  could  be  free-standing.  On 
its  back  petitions  were  posted  for  people  to  sign.  Ihe  left 
half  of  the  mural  shows  Los  Angeles  city  hall  with  a 
politician  at  his  desk,  which  is  also  a  public  housing 
barracks.  In  its  doorway  a  tenant  discovers  another  who 
has  collapsed  in  the  foreground.  The  desk-top  roof  is  in 
addition  a  checkboard  with  empty  squares  marked 
"human  needs"  and  "quality  of  life"  while  the  official 
piles  all  his  silver  dollars  on  the  space  identified  as  "police 
budget."  At  his  side  there  are  other  desks  which  are  also 
public  housing  with  the  handles  of  coffins.  The  roofs  of 
some  are  branded  with  large  numbers,  as  those  in  Los 
Angeles  are,  to  help  police  helicopters  identify  "trouble 
spots."  The  whole  scene  is  bathed  in  the  eerie  blue-white 
illumination  of  their  search  lights.  Meanwhile  at  the  right 
the  coins  that  the  politician  allocates  are  being  produced 
by  farm  and  factory  workers  who  bend  oppressively  away 
from  us  toward  the  horizon,  while  others  rush  forward. 
Uprising  of  the  Mujeres  is  a  very  simple  and  direct  state- 
ment, and  it  was  one  of  the  first  efforts  to  make  the 
connection  between  the  needs  of  working-class 
minorities  and  the  antinuclear  campaign  that  was  still  an 
issue  being  pressed  primarily  by  the  White  middle  class. 
It  was  important  to  display  the  mural  at  Survival 
Sunday  to  broaden  the  awareness  of  those  who  attended; 
it  would  be  equally  important  to  do  murals  in  the  barrios 
for  people  there  to  understand  that  their  immediate  needs 


292  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

were  linked  to  the  way  the  current  energy  crisis  was  met. 
The  campaign  both  for  disarmament  and  abandoning 
nuclear  energy  had  been  building  during  the  second  half 
of  the  seventies  and  had  been  given  wide  credibility  by 
Three  Mile  Island.  The  derhonstration  of  125,000  pro- 
testers in  Washington  in  May  was  the  largest  since  the 
Vietnam  War.  It  was  noticeable  there  and  at  earlier 
antinuclear  rallies  that  few  minority  people  participated, 
and  most  labor  unions  had  been  cool  at  best  since  plant 
construction  provided  at  least  temjx)rary  jobs.  The  urgent 
issues  for  the  working  class  and  minorites  were  employ- 
ment, housing,  and  the  cost  of  living.  The  connection 
had  yet  to  be  clearly  drawn  between  the  two  sets  of 
issues:  how  funds  from  capital  intensive  nuclear  energy, 
both  its  peaceful  and  aggressive  uses,  could  be  diverted  to 
housing  and  human  services  and  how  solar  and  other 
types  of  renewable  energy  were  capable  of  creating  jobs 
in  the  neighborhoods.  .Moreover,  the  impact  of  increas- 
ing energy  costs  was  greater  on  lower-income  people 
than  the  well-to-do.  The  mounting  energy  crisis  in  gen- 
eral was  not  only  a  crisis  of  resources  and  technology,  but 
also  of  social  control — who  was  to  determine  the  charac- 
ter of  people's  lives.  Thus  there  were  related  issues  that 
directly  involved  people  of  lower  and  moderate  incomes 
that  could  bring  them  together  in  a  common  effort  at 
change.  The  Survival  Sunday  wall  and  Some  of  the  Ad- 
vancements of  Man  along  with  the  other  murals  on 
technology  and  the  environment  were  beginning  to  ad- 
dress these  issues  in  Lx)s  Angeles,  and  works  parallel  to 
these  were  being  painted  elsewhere  around  the  country 
at  the  same  time. 


San  Diego 

At  Logan  Barrio  in  1977  grievances  that  had  been 
galling  residents  for  years  boiled  over  in  a  pylon  of 
Chicano  Park  that  faces  a  main  thoroughfare.  "jVarrio 
Si!  Yonkes  No!"  it  shouts,  (yarrio  is  a  variant  oi barrio). 
Yonkes  refers  to  the  forty-eight  junkyards  that  had  in- 
vaded the  barrio.  It  was  only  while  the  painters  were  at 
work  that  they  realized  that  the  caption  also  sounded  like 
"Yankees  Go  Home."  Indeed  most  of  the  junkyards  that 
filled  the  community  with  their  clangor  and  endangered 
passersby  were  owned  by  Anglos  who  lived  elsewhere. 
Currently  the  Barrio  Planning  Association  was  mount- 
ing a  campaign  against  them.  Beneath  the  words  pickets 
are  shown  drawn  up  before  a  cyclone  fence  protecting 
not  only  a  secondhand  auto-parts  establishment  but 
also  a  utilities  plant  with  smoke  pouring  from  it,  dock- 
yards, and  a  Bank  of  America  branch.  In  the  back- 
ground is  the  bridge  itself.  Signs  reading  "More  houses, 
less  junkyards"  and  "Unity  is  power"  are  carried  by 
residents  who  stare  out  at  passersby.  There  is  nothing 
refined  about  it.  Everything  that  needs  to  be  shown  and 
said  is  packed  in  the  narrow  space;  it  is  all  pointblank. 
The  painters  were  Victor  Ochoa,  Raul  Jaquez,  and  ten  of 
what  Ochoa  calls  the  "hard  dudes"  who  hung  around  the 
park.  He  had  been  working  with  them  for  some  time  and 
regards  their  participation  on  the  mural  as  a  turning 


Alfred  Larin,  architect,  Antonio  de  Vargas,  muralist: 
Kiosko,  7977,  Chicano  Park,  San  Diego. 


t^^ 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  293 


point,  for  afterwards  they  became  the  nucleus  of  a  Barrio 
Renovation  Team  that  repaired  and  repainted  cottages  of 
local  elderly  people  and  the  impoverished.  The  city 
provided  funding,  and  the  team  grew  to  forty  formerly 
jobless  persons  from  Logan  and  other  barrios  who  did 
renovation  in  the  poorer  sections  of  the  city. 

To  accommodate  the  public  activity  in  the  park,  a 
kiosko  was  commissioned  in  1977  and  designed  by  Al- 
fredo Larin  in  the  manner  of  a  Mayan  temple  and  painted 
by  Antonio  de  Vargas,  whose  design  was  the  winning 
entry  in  a  competition.  The  following  spring  a  "Mural 
Marathon"  was  arranged  and  was  to  culminate  on 
Chicano  Park  Day.  Groups  from  San  Diego  high  schools 
and  Southwestern  College  as  well  as  individual  artists 
participated.  For  the  better-off  Chicano  high  schoolers 
from  outside  the  barrio,  which  they  regarded  as  a  rough 
place,  the  experience  was  a  difficult  breakthrough,  and 
their  pylon  with  images  of  Mexican  history  crowned  by  a 
powerful  eagle  remained  unfinished.  Another  pylon,  on 
which  Victor  Ochoa,  Felipe  Adame,  and  Vival  .Martin 
worked,  depicted  the  history  of  Chicano  Park.  Working 
from  photos  and  slides,  they  showed  the  takeover  and 
local  people  digging  and  planting.  At  its  base  a  torch- 
bearing  indio  is  pictured  running  the  Taraumara  race, 
which  is  held  in  the  barrio  every  December.  On  a  nearby 
column  a  moniimental  thunderbird  with  an  Aztec  eagle 
inscribed  within  it  was  painted  by  Tony  de  Vargas  for 
the  Chicano  Pinto  Union,  a  Raza  group  of  exprisoners 
helping  one  another  and  those  still  inside. 

On  another  pylon  a  large  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  floating 
over  the  world  was  painted  by  the  Lomos  Doradas  Mural 
Gang  that  was  coordinated  by  Golden  Hills  Outreach 
and  .Vlario  "Torero"  Acevedo.  On  the  opposite  side 
another  patroness  of  the  Mexican  people  appeared — 
Coatlicue,  the  rattlesnake-headed  Aztec  goddess  of  life 
and  death,  shown  standing  with  her  legs  apart  giving 
birth  to  a  child.  La  Raza.  While  this  was  done  in  a 
colorful  adaptation  oi  indio  painting,  beneath  it  serpents 
and  dragons  coil,  rendered  in  a  distinctly  Asian  style. 
This  side  of  the  pylon  marked  an  important  step  for 
Chicano  Park;  it  was  painted  by  the  first  non-Raza  people 
to  work  there — Michael  Schnorr,  an  art  instructor  at 
Southwestern  College,  and  one  of  his  students,  Susan 
Yamagata.  Her  part  of  the  work  was  an  effort  to  combine 
her  culture  with  the  barrio's.  Schnorr  says  that  they  were 
hassled  by  local  teenagers  because  they  were  not 
Chicano,  but  the  quality  of  their  painting  as  well  as  the 
sharp  basketball  game  of  Susan,  who  took  them  on  at  a 
nearby  court,  won  their  respect. 

One  of  the  innovative  designs  that  w  as  created  during 
the  Marathon  was  a  montage  of  portraits  of  Rivera, 
Orozco,  Siqueiros,  and  Frida  Kahlo.  The  faces  overlap 
each  other;  their  black  shadows  flow  together  and  the 
heads  are  larger  than  the  pylon  can  contain  so  that  they 
seem  to  burst  into  our  space.  The  imagery  derives  from 
silk-screen  prints  done  by  Rupert  Garcia,  an  ac- 
complished San  Francisco  graphic  artist,  who  arranged 


Victor    Ochoa,    Felipe    Adame,    and    Vival    Martin: 
Chicano  Park  Story,  1978,  Chicano  Park,  San  Diego. 

them  in  a  single  composition  that  was  tranferred  to  the 
pylon  and  painted  by  Victor  Ochoa  and  the  Barrio  Logan 
Renovation  team.  The  shadows  run  irregularly  like  ink 
across  the  faces  in  sharp  contrast  to  the  straight  edges  of 
the  pylon.  This  is  one  of  the  few  instances  of  a  break  with 
the  symmetrical  and  unfragmented  image  characteristic 
of  community  murals  and  opens  jhe  way  for  further 
advances  in  composition.  In  all  seven  new  murals  were 
painted  during  the  Marathon. 

The  muralists  who  have  worked  at  Chicano  Park  are 
aware  not  only  of  the  design  problems  that  the  pylons 
offer  but  also  of  the  unusual  opportunities  for  experi- 
ment. Salvador  Torres  has  been  interested  in  taking 
advantage  of  the  way  light  and  shadow  play  across  them 
and  has  embedded  tiny  glass  beads  on  some  so  that  when 
the  sun  strikes  their  surface,  they  glow.  He  also  uses  a 
large  mirror  to  play  reflected  sun  across  them  in  what  he 
calls  "light  sculpture."  He  is  critical  of  the  failure  of  most 


294  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Ruber t  Garcia,  designer,  Victor  Ochoa  and  Barrio  Reno- 
vation Team,  muralists:  Rivera,  Orozco,  Siqueiros 
and  Kahlo,  1978,  Chicano  Park,  San  Diego. 

painters  who  have  worked  there  to  take  advantage  of  the 
three-dimensional  surfaces  of  the  pylons.  In  a  few  in- 
stances imaged  wrap  around  columns,  but  no  artists  had 
yet  pushed  very  far  the  dramatic  possibilities  of  the 
three-dimensional  forms.  However,  Michael  Schnorr  has 
made  some  designs  that  would  carry  over  from  the 
pylons  to  the  undercarriage  of  the  bridge — its  concrete 
beams  and  skirting.  And  working  with  a  low-rider  club, 
he  was  planning  to  mount  pieces  of  cars  on  the  columns. 
The  significance  of  what  has  been  achieved  in  Barrio 
Logan  was  reinforced  when  "Corky"  Gonzales,  founder 
of  Denver's  Crusade  for  Justice  and  still  one  of  the 
principal  spokesmen  of  La  Raza  in  the  country,  ad- 
dressed four  thousand  people  from  the  kiosko  on  the 


eighth  anniversary  of  Chicano  Park  in  1978: 

Cultural  identity  brings  us  together  so  we  can  talk 
about  our  problems,  progress  and  identity,  such  as  the 
commemoration  of  Chicano  Park.  Chicano  Park  means 
we  believe  in  self-determination  and  that  we  believe  in 
coming  together  and  saying  "this  is  our  park." 

We  realize  that  it  takes  generations  of  struggle  to 
become  free.  But  people  make  fun  of  us  and  say  it's  a 
fantasy  ...  a  fantasy  they  say  is  Aztlan,  self-deter- 
mination and  liberation.  .  .  .'^ 

Clearly  he  believed  these  fantasies  could  be  made  real 
and  that  Chicano  Park  was  proof  of  that. 

Gonzales  told  the  crowd  that  similarly  they  could  get 
rid  of  their  junkyards,  racist  police,  narrow  teachers,  and 
administrators  who  did  not  live  in  the  community.  It  was 
"nationalism"  that  was  their  only  hope,  he  said: 


I 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  295 


Nationalism  means  that  we  must  use  the  resources  that 
are  our  own.  .  .  .  Our  resources  are  our  people.  We 
don't  have  capita!  or  money  to  put  into  multinational 
corporations.  We  have  time,  blood,  guts  and  courage 
to  put  into  ourselves,  and  to  save  ourselves.  That's  the 
economy  of  nationalism.'^ 

Nationalism  meant  community  self-help  and  self- 
determination.  To  Gonzales  it  was  their  culture,  their 
sense  of  their  collective  identity  and  commitment,  that 
was  the  principal  resource  of  their  economy.  Their  cul- 
ture that  was  made  visible  by  the  painted  pylons  around 
them  had  fired  their  exertions,  but  sometimes  it  was  not 
enough.  Four  months  later  at  the  dedication  of  the  work 
of  the  first  Mural  Marathon  and  while  folklorico  dancers 
were  performing,  a  killing  occurred  a  few  blocks  away 
that  the  press  and  TV,  which  had  ignored  the  dedica- 
tion, rushed  to.  In  spite  of  the  hopes  of  those  who  had 
contributed  to  Chicano  Park,  the  unemployment  rate  in 
the  barrio  in  1979  stood  at  24  percent.  But  the  park,  its 
murals  and  community  activity,  in  fact  the  survival  of  the 
barrio  itself,  were  contrary  to  all  predictions  of  nine  years 
before  except  those  people  who  set  about  to  save  it. 

During  spring  1979,  Michael  Schnorr,  Susan 
Yamagata,  Anna  Tellez,  who  came  regularly  across  the 
border  to  paint,  and  Ulf  Roloff,  a  student  from  Sweden, 
were  at  work  on  a  new  pylon  depicting  the  recent 
struggle  of  lettuce  pickers  in  the  Imperial  Valley  where  a 
striker  had  been  shot  and  killed  by  ranch  hands.  The 
artists  asked  the  Chicano  Federation  and  members  of  the 
farmworkers'  union  what  they  would  regard  as  a  solution 
of  the  conflict  and  how  it  should  be  represented.  The 
result  was  the  painters'  response  to  these  discussions. 
The  mural  is  capped  with  the  words  of  Emiliano  Zapata, 
which  translated  read:  "The  Earth  belongs  to  those  who 
work  it  with  their  own  hands."  Beneath  is  a  woman  with 
her  arms  extended  like  scales  of  justice.  In  one  hand  she 
carries  farmworkers  with  a  Mexican  banner;  in  the  other 
she  holds  the  plastic-wrapped  fruit  of  agribusiness.  Her 
pregnant  body  is  also  a  sun  around  which  a  gear  is  pulled 
in  opposite  directions  by  a  bare  brown  arm  and  the  sleeve 
of  agribusiness  which  ends  in  a  hook.  Below  a  truck 
bearing  lettuce  is  enveloped  in  UFW  flags,  and  beneath 
this  is  a  scene  of  the  struggle  and  death  of  strikers. 
Underneath  are  lettuce  harvesters  chained  through  the 
ground  to  the  lowest  level  where  fruit  and  vegetables  are 
spilling  into  a  pool  of  blood.  In  the  background  a  large 
skull  loom's  behind  a  plowed  field.  Rising  from  the  sod  in 
front  of  the  pylon  and  staring  at  the  mural  is  Ruben 
Salazar,  the  Lx)s  Angeles  reporter  who  had  been  killed 
years  before  by  the  police  and  whom  the  artists  had  now 
modeled  in  concrete  and  painted.  Around  him  lettuce 
was  to  be  planted. 

During  the  summer  of  1979  Chicano  Park  faced  a  new 
series  of  crises.  Exasperated  by  local  divisions  and  seek- 
ing to  expand  his  socially  committed  art,  mural  director 
Victor  Ochoa  resigned.  The  Chicano  Federation,  a  major 


Michael  Schnorr,  Susan  Yamagata,  Anna  Tellez,  and  Ulf 
Roloff:  The  Earth  Belongs  to  Those  Who  Work  It 
with  Their  Own  Hands,  1979,  Chicano  Park,  San 
Diego.  (Photo  Michael  Schnorr) 


sponsor  of  the  murals,  came  under  grand  jury  attack  for  a 
relatively  small  bookkeeping  discrepancy.  In  addition 
Logan  residents  felt  that  they  were  not  receiving  their 
share  of  services.  The  result  was  the  departure  of  the 
Federation  from  the  barrio  and  its  seeking  new  offices 
elsewhere.  At  night  Salvador  Torres  and  locals  guarded 
the  neighborhood  center  it  had  occupied,  fearing  that  the 
city  would  try  to  seize  it. 

The  Chicano  Park  Steering  Committee,  which  was 
made  up  of  barrio  residents,  carried  on  and  in  September 
approved  the  design  for  the  highest  mural  yet  to  be 
undertaken  there  or  anywhere  else  in  the  West.  It  was  a 
sixty-five-foot  column  that  could  be  seen  not  only  from 
the  park  but  also  from  a  bridge'  ramp.  .Michael  Schnorr 
again  organized  the  crew,  and  he  raised  funds  from 
MECHA  student  groups  around  the  county.  The  subject 
was  undocumented  workers,  which  Schnorr's  design 
presented  in  a  symbolic  way  that  combines  folklorelike 
images  with  a  "primitive"  and  surrealistic  kind  of  paint- 


296  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Michael  Schnorr  and  assistant:  The  Undocumented 
Worker,  1980,  Chicano  Park,  San  Diego.  (Photo  Michael 
Schnorr) 


ing.  The  mural  is  to  be  read  from  bottom  to  top  as  the 
struggle  of  migrants  to  seek  a  Hvehhood  in  an  unhospita- 
ble  foreign  country.  There  is  first  the  need  to  elude  the 
helicopter  and  monsters  of  la  migra  (immigration 
officers);  then,  the  danger  of  Icarus  "burning  out":  having 
to  endure  the  pull  on  the  heart  of  the  homeland  and  the 
mindlessness  that  replaces  the  human  head  with  a  latch 
and  yoke.  Toward  the  top  a  newcomer  reaches  for  the 
stars,  and  a  woman  tries  to  break  down  all  the  walls  that 
confine  people.  The  images  seen  from  the  park  are  simple 
but  require  time  to  think  about,  while  those  viewed  from 
the  ramp  convey  their  message  immediately.  On  both 
lateral  surfaces  the  painters  show  hoes  and  shovels,  axes, 
wrenches,  and  hammers,  suggesting  the  work  the  un- 
documented do.  The  mural's  imagery  breaks  with  the 
usual  Chicano  repertory.  Some  of  the  motifs  reflect  a 
visit  Schnorr  made  the  previous  summer  to  Sicily  where, 
he  says,  the  imported  workers  from  North  Africa  made 
him  aware  that  migrant  labor  was  a  worldwide  problem. 


Robert  Cruz,  director,  and  artists  of  La  Brocha  del  Valle: 
Untitled,  1979,  entrance,  Wakefield  School,  Fresno. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  297 

He  had  difficulty  in  getting  the  design  accepted  by  the 
Chicano  Park  Steering  Committee  and  provided  an  ex- 
planation of  the  images  at  the  base  of  the  column.  The 
mural  was  an  important  effort  at  enlarging  the  relevance 
of  community  art,  and  it  created  an  idiom  that,  rather 
than  spelling  out  familiar  messages,  could  express  a  new 
complexity  of  ideas  and  feelings.  Completed  in  January 
1980,  the  work  demonstrated  the  continuing  vitality  in 
Logan  Barrio,  where  painters  were  still  talking  about 
extending  the  murals  "all  the  way  to  the  bay." 

Fresno 

La  Brocha  del  Valle  (The  Brush  of  the  Valley)  was 
organized  here  by  veteran  muralist  Ernesto  Palomino 
and  younger  artists  in  1975  to  do  both  public  wall  art  and 
posters.  In  the  second  half  of  the  decade  they  did  murals 
at  schools,  community  centers,  and  a  swimming  pool 
and  involved  young  people  in  outlying  towns  in  doing 
walls.  Some  of  their  impressive  work  was  at  the  Wake- 
field School,  a  progressive  juvenile  hall  in  Fresno.  In  its 
gym  in  1978  Palomino  did  an  elaborate  framing  design. 


298  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Young  inmate  with  assistance  of  La  Brocha  del  Valle: 
Corridor  mural,  1978-80,  Wakefield  School,  Fresno. 


based  on  pre-Columbian  moldings,  which  the  young 
inmates  filled  in  with  their  own  imagery.  The  following 
year  La  Brocha,  under  the  direction  of  Bob  Cruz,  painted 
two  sides  of  the  entrance  hall  wit;h  a  Black  teenager 
striding  proudly  out  and  young  Chicanos  preparing  for 
freedom  by  learning  about  la  Raza.  La  Brocha  also 
helped  the  inmates  embellish  their  corridors  with  images 
of  themselves  as  old  dogs  shooting  pool  and  a  parrot  in 
prison  garb. 

Saticoy 

In  1975  here  among  the  lemon  groves  east  of  Ventura, 
farm  workers  refused  to  be  evicted  from  their  company 
cottages  when  the  growers  decided  to  sell  the  property 


rather  than  bring  it  up  to  the  building  code.  When  the 
bulldozers  came,  women  and  children  linked  arms  and 
stopped  them.  On  the  advice  of  Cesar  Chavez,  the 
eighty-two  families  raised  the  money  for  a  down  payment 
and  bought  the  eighteen  acres  of  what  they  organized 
as  Cabrillo  Village.  They  put  together  a  cooperative 
housing  corporation  to  rehabilitate  older  structures  and 
build  new  ones  themselves  with  funds  and  training  pro- 
vided by  the  government.  They  saw  their  new  skills  as 
construction  workers  and  cabinetmakers  as  means  of 
lifting  themselves  out  of  low-paying  orchard  work  for- 
ever. It  was  this  story  that  their  young  people  painted 
on  their  workshop  in  1979  with  the  help  of  Ventura 
artist  Richard  Delgado. 

Seattle 

In  1975  the  Seattle  Arts  Commission,  inspired  by 
Atlanta's  Urban  Walls  and  more  distantly  New  York's 
City  Walls,  created  a  mural  program  that  it  called  Seattle 
Walls.  The  city  provided  half  the  cost,  the  Downtown 
Seattle  Development  Association  and  building  owners 
carried  the  other  half.  There  was  a  competition  of  artists' 
designs,  and  those  selected  were  carried  out  by  Ackerly 
Communications,  the  big  billboard  firm  of  the  North- 
west. As  of  1979  there  were  six  works,  which,  predicta- 
bly, were  decorative  and  had  little  social  content.  In  1975 
Catherine  McNeff  designed  semiabstract  chimneys 
streaming  ribbons  of  smoke  for  the  side  of  the  old 
gasworks  that  had  been  converted  into  a  delightful  play- 
ground for  kids,  who  could  scramble  over  the  freshly 
painted  machinery.  Two  years  later  a  wedge  of  geese 
designed  by  Fay  Jones  routinely  soared  against  the  sky 
on  the  upper  stories  of  Warshal's  Sporting  Goods  Store 
downtown.  The  closest  approximation  to  community  art 
was  the  work  that  John  Woo  designed  in  1977  for  the  side 
of  an  old  hotel  facing  Hing  Hay  Park  and  its  oriental  gate 
in  the  International  District.  It  was  selected  from  fifteen 
entries  by  a  jury  made  up  of  art  and  social  service 
professionals  together  with  businessmen,  all  of  Asian- 
American  descent.  The  design,  executed  by  Ackerly  sign 
painters,  depicted  a  grimacing  good-luck  dragon,  and 
amid  its  coils  are  scenes  of  doll-like  Asian-Americans 
tilling  the  soil,  working  on  the  railroad  and  in  canneries, 
interned  in  a  concentration  camp,  and  finally  enjoying  a 
festival.  Also  included  is  a  vignette  of  local  buildings 
including  the  Kingdome. 

Meanwhile  in  1975  in  a  section  of  the  city  noted  for  its 
alternative  lifestyle,  Don  Barrie  with  CETA  and  NEA 
funding  did  a  high-relief  trompe  I'oeil  transformation  of 
the  two-story  Pelican  Bay  Artists'  Co-op  building,  mak- 
ing the  windows  appear  as  if  they  were  springing  out  of 
the  sky  over  a  landscape  built  up  three-dimensionally  on 
the  wall.  Two  years  later  on  the  long  side  of  a  warehouse 
in  a  Black  neighborhood,  Barrie  painted  mandalas  con- 
taining religious  symbols  of  the  world's  cultures  floating 
above  the  state  of  Washington  viewed  from  outer  space. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  299 


Young  people  ofCabrillo  Village  (including  those  pictured) 
with  assistance  of  Richard  Delgado:  Untitled  detail  of 
mural  showing  the  defense  of  their  homes,  1979,  Saticoy, 
California. 

By  the  second  half  of  the  seventies  there  were  about 
twenty-three  thousand  Chicanos  and  other  Latinos  living 
among  the  half  million  people  of  Seattle.  Finding  housing 
where  they  would  be  welcome  had  been  a  continuing 
problem,  and  they  lived  scattered  about  the  city;  there 
was  no  barrio  where  they  could  build  a  community  life. 
They  also  needed  help  in  finding  work,  medical  care, 
bilingual  education,  legal  aid,  and  other  social  services. 


John  Woo,  designer,  and  Ackerly  Communications  sign 
painter:  Untitled,  1977,  Bush  Hotel  at  Hing  Hay  Park, 
Seattle. 


Because  of  the  unresponsiveness  of  the  local  scene,  a 
group  of  them  in  1972  had  forcibly  seized  an  abandoned 
school  building  and  were  able  to  hold  it  through  the 
decade  in  spite  of  the  opposition  of  the  authorities.  They 
developed  an  English-as-a-second-language  program 
during  the  first  winter,  although  the  city  turned  off  the 
utilities.  Gradually  they  built  the  Centro  de  la  Raza, 
which  provided  a  wide  range  of  services  as  well  as  a 
rallying  place,  and  in  time  it  wrested  recognition  from 
the  city.  There  are  day-care  and  tenant  programs,  voca- 
tional counseling  and  training,  food  stamp  assistance, 
and  referrals  for  legal  and  medical  help.  A  Cocina  Popular, 


300  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

a  people's  restaurant,  v\  as  developed  providing  affordable 
cooking  of  varied  Latin  American  countries  on  different 
days.  The  printshop  publishes  a  periodical,  Recobrando 
(which  means  reclaiming)  that  brings  neus  and  com- 
mentary on  political  and  cultural  events  and  is  a  vehicle 
of  local  art.  The  Centro's  bookstore  makes  available 
literature,  posters,  and  recordings.  Gradually  the  inner 
walls  of  El  Centro  have  been  covered  by  murals — almost 
the  only  Latino  wall  art  in  the  city.  The  RCAF  from 
Sacramento  had  visited  in  1974  and  Esteban  Villa 
painted  a  small  panel.  The  following  year  Daniel  De 
Siega  filled  the  approach  to  the  main  office  with  agribusi- 
ness farming  equipment  clawing  and  rolling  across  the 
land  like  prehistoric  lizards  w  hile  an  indio  is  crucified  to 
the  ground  and  women  mourn.  Overhead  looms  a 
monumental  head  suggesting  an  earth  mother  who  wears 
indio  earrings.  Her  eyes  are  stained  glass  windows 
created  by  Armand  Lara,  and  through  them  light 
streams. 

Other  murals  embellish  the  rest  of  the  building. 
Roger  Fernandez  did  images  of  Native  Peoples  in  an 
office  used  by  an  Indian  organization.  Three  walls  of  a 
meeting  room  were  filled  w  ith  murals  by  both  Black  and 
Chicano  teenagers  during  a  Summer  Youth  project  in 
1977.  One  simple  but  significant  wall  using  the  Black 
nationalist  colors  and  show  ing  the  African  continent  with 


a  bloody  spot  and  weeping  face,  was  "dedicated  to  the 
students  of  Soweto,"  where  many  lost  their  lives  during 
the  South  African  riots.  On  the  opposite  wall  people  of 
the  different  races  are  shown  behind  bars  as  Richard 
Nixon  in  a  storm  trooper's  uniform  flashes  a  victory  sign. 
The  Centro's  cooperation  with  other  Third  World 
groups  was  a  noteworthy  feature  of  its  activities  and 
showed  as  well  in  the  frequent  articles  on  their  struggles 
in  Recobrando. 

Since  1975  the  Centro  had  been  trying  to  gain  posses- 
sion of  a  mural  of  Pablo  O'Higgins,  the  North  American 
painter  who  had  done  most  of  his  art  in  .Mexico,  often  in 
close  association  with  Rivera.  In  1945  he  had  painted  a 
set  of  large,  movable  fresco  panels  against  racial  dis- 
crimination for  the  union  hall  in  Seattle  of  the  Ship 
Scalers  and  Drydock  Workers  whose  membership  was 
predominantly  Third  World. '^  In  it  Lincoln  and 
Roosevelt  present  the  charter  of  the  Fair  Employment 
Practices  Commission,  and  laborers  are  looking  at  a  large 
inscription  that  reads  "Build  A  Free  World.  .  .  .  Work- 
ers of  the  World  Unite."  After  the  union  hall  was  torn 
down,  the  mural  was  packed  away  in  storage  at  the 
University  of  Washington,  remaining  in  obscurity  for 
twenty  years.  When  Chicano  students  sought  it  out,  they 


Daniel  de  Siega:  Untitled,  1975,  Centro  de  la  Raza, 
Seattle. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  301 


Pablo  O'Higgins:  Partial  vieiv  of  mural  painted  in  1945 
for  union  hall  of  Ship  Scalers  and  Dry  dock  Workers,  now 
mounted  in  Kane  Hall,  University  of  Washington. 

found  it  crated  in  sheds  open  to  the  weather.  They 
charged  that  the  University  had  deliberately  neglected  it 
because  of  its  content,  and  the  effort  to  secure  it  for  the 
Centro  de  la  Raza  and  a  public  closer  to  those  it  originally 
addressed  began.  Instead,  as  the  work  of  a  now  famous 
artist,  it  was  mounted  high  on  a  wall  too  large  for  it  in  the 
vestibule  of  a  new  lecture  hall  at  the  University. 

Emilio  Aguayo  had  done  a  number  of  murals  at  the 
Centro  but  later  fell  out  with  the  leaders.  In  1977 
with  city  Art  Commission  funding  he  painted  for  a 
social-service  agency  Los  ■Cinco  Cabalkros  de  Apocalypsis: 
Enemigos  de  mi  Gente  in  which  he  depicted  in  pale  tones 
monstrous  figures  attacking  their  victims.  A  painter  of 
vehement  imagination  and  skill,  he  was  a  serious  loss  to 
the  Centro.  The  following  year,  however,  Arturo  Ar- 
torez  came  to  the  Centro  from  Mexico  and  completed  a 
many-paneled  work  at  a  downtown  office. 

The  Daybreak  Star  Art  Center  is  the  result  of  the 
efforts  of  Seattle  Native  Americans,  who  numbered 
about  fifteen  thousand  in  1970,  to  establish  a  land  base 
for  cultural  and  economic  activities  as  well  as  the  delivery 
of  social  services.  After  long  negotiations  with  the  city, 
local  Native  groups,  inspired  by  the  seizure  of  Alcatraz 
in  1969,  decided  to  take  over  Fort  Lawton,  which  was 
being  declared  surplus  by  the  Army.  Led  by  Bernard 
Whitebear,  they  invaded  the  fort  in  March  1970,  set  up  a 
tepee  inside  the  grounds,  and  were  arrested  and  jailed. 
This  brought  additional  support,  much  of  it  from  non- 
Indians,  including  military  personnel  inside  who  sent  out 
messages  that  "We  cannot  help,  but  we  are  with  you."  A 
camp  of  teepees  was  maintained  outside  the  fort  which 
became  the  springboard  for  two  additional  invasions. 
The  turning  point  came  when  the  Department  of  Health, 
Education,  and  Welfare  submitted  an  application  for 
thirty-five  acres  on  behalf  of  the  Indians,  which  finally 
won  the  city's  agreement.  During  the  struggle  they  had 


organized  the  United  Indians  of  All  Tribes  Foundation 
to  press  for  the  economic,  social,  and  cultural  advance- 
ment of  all  Native  Americans,  but  especially  those  in  the 
Northwest.  While  some  social  services  continued  to  be 
delivered  from  offices  in  central  Seattle,  the  new  site 
provided  a  preschool,  an  after-school  youth  program, 
career  guidance,  and  adult  education.  Professionals  were 
employed  developing  Native  American  curricula  for 
schools  not  only  in  Seattle  but  around  the  country. 

In  1977  an  impressive  structure  constructed  according 
to  Indian  specifications  was  opened  to  house  these  ac- 
tivities and  ultimately  to  serve  as  an  arts  center  after 
additional  buildings  were  completed.  It  was  called  Day- 
break Star  after  a  vision  of  the  Sioux  medicine  man. 
Black  Elk,  who  describes  how  he  was  given  the  daybreak 
star  herb,  "the  herb  of  understanding,"  which  flowered 
into  four  blossoms  on  one  stem,  each  a  different  color 
that  emitted  rays  symbolizing  how  the  sacred  hoop  of 
his  people  was  one  of  many  hoops  that  made  a  single 
circle.  The  building  was  designed  on  this  principle  and 
looks  out  over  Puget  Sound.  The  Arts  Center  became  not 
only  the  site  of  cultural  activity  for  the  Indians  but  in 
addition  a  place  where  Native  artists  could  demonstrate 
the  making  of  their  crafts  and  sell  them.  It  was  also 
decided  to  exhibit  their  work  (permanently),  and  the  city 
under  its  1  percent  for  art  program  allocated  eighty 
thousand  dollars.  A  national  competition  was  held  for 
murals  in  indigenous  styles  juried  by  Indians  as  well  as 
non-Indian  specialists  in  Native  art  and  members  of  the 
city  Art  Commission.  The  result  \vas  a  wide  array  of 
work  executed  between  1976  and  1979  intended  to  ex- 
press the  coming  together  of  tribes  from  all  directions, 
corresponding  to  Black  Elk's  vision. 

Downstairs  facing  a  large  hall  and  the  view  out  to  sea 
are  three  panels  originally  intended  as  doors  carved  by 
Marvin  Oliver,  a  Quinault/Isleta  artist  from  the  Olym- 
pic Peninsula.  These  represent  clan  symbols  of  the 
raven/eagle  and  two  of  the  bear.  Upstairs,  Robert  Haoz- 
ous,  a  Chiricahua  Apache  artist,  carved  The  Masterpiece, 


302  /  COMMUNIPY  MURALS 


Marvin  Oliver:  Raven /Eagle  and  Bear  Clan  Symbols 
of  Northwest  Coast  Tribes,  1977-79,  Daybreak  Star 
Arts  Center,  Seattle. 


Robert  Haozous:  The  Masterpiece,  late  1970s,  Day- 
break Star  Arts  Center. 


a  more  than  thousand  pound  panel  of  Honduras 
mahogany  with  hgures  performing  dances  of  the  Pueblo 
Buffalo,  the  Navajo  Yei-bei-chai  and  Apache  Mountain 
Spirit.  Nearby  on  a  mural  done  in  acrylics  on  canvas  but 
in  the  manner  of  the  art  of  the  Kiva,  a  ceremonial  house, 
Robert  Montoya  (Soe-Khuwa-pin)  from  the  San  Juan 


Pueblo  of  New  Mexico  painted  a  hunter  pursuing  deer, 
which,  like  him,  have  prayer  feathers  of  eagle  fluff 
signifying  respect  for  animal  life  taken  for  food.  Man  and 
Killerwhaks  is  another  Northwest  Coast  work  and  was 
carved  and  painted  by  Nathan  P.  Jackson  of  the  Tlingit 
tribe.  He  dowled  the  red  cedar  boards,  adzed  their 
surface  and  painted  with  acrylics.  There  are  additional 
murals  representing  the  Plains  and  Eastern  Woodland 
peoples  as  well  as  free-standing  totems  by  an  Aleut 
craftsman.  The  murals  of  Daybreak  Star  are  unique 
examples  of  people's  art  because  they  were  done  for  a 
people's  institution  that  operates  on  a  local,  regional,  and 
national  scale.  They  suggest  w  hat  could  be  done  by  other 
coalitions  and  networks.  At  the  same  time  Native  People 
communities  continue  to  practice  their  traditional  art, 
which  particularly  in  the  Northwest  both  in  the  United 
States  and  Canada  includes  murals  on  lodges  and  long 
houses,  like  those  used  for  potlatches  and  ceremonies  at 
Alert  Bay  and  Courtenay-Comox  in  British  Columbia. 

Portland 

His  purpose  in  writing  the  proposal  for  the  Albina 
Mural  Project  and  assembling  the  artists  to  work  on  it 
was  to  show  that  Afro-Americans  "had  things  worth 
painting  about,"  says  Isaac  Shamsud-Din.  He  wanted 
them  to  have  the  chance  to  demonstrate  their  vitality  in 


Robert  Montoya  (Soe-Khuwa-pin):  Deer  Hunter,  late 
1970s,  Daybreak  Star  Arts  Center. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  303 

spite  of  years  of  being  pushed  around  and  their  art  subtly 
suppressed  by  the  local  cultural  establishment.  There 
were  to  be  twenty-one  panels  illustrating  the  Black  con- 
tribution to  the  city  and  the  Northwest,  and  these  were 
to  be  mounted  on  the  two  street  sides  of  the  Albina 
Human  Resources  Center  in  the  heart  of  their  commu- 
nity. Most  were  to  be  twenty  feet  square.  The  neighbor- 
hood center  itself  brings  together  county,  state,  and 
federal  services  ranging  from  food  stamps,  health  and 
dental  clinics,  and  veteran  and  vocational  counseling  to 
the  supervising  of  probation.  The  murals  were  funded  as 
a  CETA  special  project,  and  fifty-four  thousand  dollars 
was  allocated  for  what  was  originally  conceived  as  an 
undertaking  that  would  occupy  eight  months  during 
1977.  When  time  and  money  ran  out,  additional  funds 
for  four  months  more  were  raised,  partly  w  ith  the  help  of 
Mayor  Neil  Goldschmidt.  Shamsud-Din  estimates  that 
the  project  as  originally  conceived  would  have  taken 
three  years.  Seven  artists  participated,  all  Black  except 
one  who  was  of  Japanese  descent.  They  worked  together 
in  a  nearby  cramped  storefront  studio  that  had  to  be 
rewired;  the  one  sculptor  on  the  project,  Charles  Tatum, 
had  his  workshop  next  door.  Shamsud-Din  says  that 
their  problems  also  included  the  low  level  of  expectation 
of  the  artists  and  also  the  fact  that  most  of  them  were  not 
longtime  residents  of  the  community  they  were  to  paint 
about. 

The  panels  of  Shamsud-Din  who  had  grown  up  in 
Portland  deal  most  completely  with  the  Black  experience 
there.  The  first  he  titled  Vanport — The  Promise.  Vanport 
City  had  been  a  housing  project  just  outside  Portland 


304  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Nathan  P.  Jackson:  Man  and  Killerwhales,  late  1970s, 
Daybreak  Star  Arts  Center. 

Isaac  Shamsud-Din:  The  Flood,  1978,  Albina  Mural 
Project,  Albina  Human  Resources  Center,  Portland. 


built  for  workers  in  the  Kaiser  shipyards  during  World 
War  II.  In  1947  six-year-old  Isaac  arrived  with  his  family 
from  Texas,  like  many  of  the  other  Blacks  who  made  up 
one-quarter  of  the  eighteen  thousand  population.  For  the 
mural  he  depended  on  his  memories,  interviews  with 
residents,  and  researching  old  newspapers.  He  brought 
together  the  prows  of  the  vessels  Vanport  workers  had 
built,  Blacks  repairing  railroad  beds  and  working  as 
porters  on  segregated  trains  and  the  carousel  at  Jantzen 
Park,  one  of  the  few  places  where  they  could  spend  their 
leisure,  although  they  were  allowed  in  the  pool  only  one 
day  a  week.  One  panel  of  the  merry-go-round  depicted  a 
Black  "savage"  kneeling  before  a  White  man  with  a 
musket.  He  also  wanted  to  show  the  Native  Americans 
who  used  to  fish  up  the  Columbia  River.  Impressed  by 
their  having  maintained  their  way  of  life  for  perhaps  a 
thousand  years,  he  placed  a  totem  pole  and  proud 
fisherman  in  the  foreground.  "The  rainbow,"  he  says 
"symbolizes  the  promises  that  dissipated  when  it  came 
time  to  pay  up." 

Around  the  corner  he  painted  The  Flood.  It  was  on 
Memorial  Day,  a  year  after  his  family  came  to  Vanport, 
that  the  Columbia,  in  spite  of  the  reassurances  of  the  city 


'^Pf'jff; 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  305 


manager,  broke  through  the  dike  and  sent  a  twelve-foot 
wall  of  water  through  the  housing.  At  least  fourteen  lives 
were  lost  there,  forty-five  in  the  Portland  area.  The 
mural  shows  the  traffic  jam  of  people  trying  to  flee  and 
men  carrying  out  victims.  He  says  he  tried  to  convey  the 
terror  and  weirdness  by  the  yellow,  which  is  the  under- 
coat of  the  unfinished  panel.  The  effects  of  the  flood  were 
long-lasting.  Most  of  the  residents  lost  everything,  he 
says;  no  effort  was  made  to  compensate  them  for  the 
negligence  of  officials.  The  Blacks  were  relocated  in  new 
housing  projects  and  moved  again  and  again  to  make  way 
for  the  Emmanuel  Hospital  and  the  Colosseum  until 
most  were  concentrated  in  the  Albina  area.  It  was  always 
difficult  to  get  decent  housing,  and  no  strong  organiza- 
tion or  leadership  among  Blacks  emerged.  There  were 
cross  burnings,  and  the  police  were  heavy-handed.  He 
helped  put  together  Action  for  Rights,  a  citizens'  group, 
in  1961  that  lasted  only  a  few  years.  In  1968  at  the  height 
of  urban  violence  around  the  country,  shops  along  busy 
Union  Avenue  were  torched — sometimes  by  their  own- 
ers to  collect  insurance,  he  believes.  While  troops  pa- 
trolled the  area,  this  was  not  a  major  outbreak  like  those 
that  occurred  elsewhere.  Black  people  in  Portland,  he 
says,  were  scared  and  had  no  place  to  go. 

Shamsud-Din  himself  had  been  trained  as  an  artist  at 
Portland  State  University.  In  1965  he  painted  his  first 
mural  as  part  of  a  competition  set  by  the  faculty  who 
hung  eight  works,  but  only  his  still  was  hanging  in  the 
Student  Union  in  1979.  It  is  a  rich  painterly  work  in  the 
freely  brushed  idiom  of  the  time.  It  memorializes  John 
Daniels,  who  in  1956  or  1957  was  the  University's  first 
student-body  president  and  a  Black.  He  was  outstanding 
academically,  entered  the  service,  and  on  discharge  be- 
came a  teacher.  He  was  one  of  those  Blacks,  Shamsud- 
Din  says,  who  do  not  abandon  their  people.  But  he  was 
sent  to  jail  for  molesting  a  child  and  when  he  was  released 
committed  suicide.  Shamsud-Din  thinks  that  it  was  his 
society  that  made  him  another  Black  casualty.  He  shows 
him  twice  in  the  mural,  once  caught  in  midair  by  forces 
beyond  his  control  and  then  in  a  coldly  blue  pieta. 

After  finishing  this  work,  Shamsud-Din  was  in  Arkan- 
sas with  the  Student  Non-Violent  Co-ordinating  Com- 
mittee; in  1966  and  1967  he  directed  Black  Arts  West  in 
San  Francisco,  organized  a  conference  on  Black  Power 
and  Black  Art,  was  active  with  the  Panthers,  and  lec- 
tured in  Black  Studies  at  the  San  Francisco  State  Ex- 
perimental College. 

But  to  return  to  the  Albina  murals.  Other  panels  also 
dealt  with  Portland  history.  Charles  Tatum  assisted  by 
others  carved  three  redwood  reliefs  over  the  entrance 
expressing  caring  relations  among  workers  as  well  as 
parents  and  children.  Henry  Frison  depicted  the  Afro- 
American  contribution  to  the  opening  of  the  West  and 
the  Texas  origins  of  Portland  Blacks,  using  portraits  of 
his  own  family  and  a  Native  American  done  from  life. 
He,  Shamsud-Din,  Chonitia  Henderson,  Larry  Scott, 
and  Jenny  Harata  did  a  montage  honoring  Martin  Luther 


Isaac  Shamsud-Din:  Memorial  to  John  Daniels,  1965, 
Portland  State  University,  Portland. 


King,  Jr.,  who  is  shown  accompanied  by  Ralph  Aber- 
nathy  and  John  Kennedy  on  a  march  along  with  vignettes 
of  the  civil  rights  struggle  and  King's  casket.  Also  less 
directly  connected  with  Portland  is  Jenny  Harata's  im- 
aginative working  together  of  the  well-know  n  engraving 
of  a  slave  ship  surrounded  by  images  of  dignified  Afri- 
cans and  their  descendants  in  the  New  World.  She 
achieved  the  suggestion  of  wood  and  brown  skin  across 
the  surface  by  spray  paint  and  stencils  over  an  acrylic 
base. 

Shamsud-Din  feels  that  compromises  had  to  be  made 
with  regard  to  local  history  and  high  technical  standards, 
but  local  people  would  drop  by  the  studio  while  work 
was  in  progress  and  came  to  regard  the  panels  as  im- 
portant statements  about  their  lives.  Although  they 
sometimes  were  concerned  about  such  matters  as  nudity, 
they  gave  the  artists  confidence,  he  says.  When  money 
ran  out  six  murals  had  been  completed,  if  Tatum's  three 


306  /  COMMUNI  FY  MURALS 


Charles  Tatum  and  assistants:   Wooden  panels,   1978, 
Albino  Mural  Project. 


Henry  Prison:  Panel  depicting  the  Afro-American  opening 
of  the  West,  1978,  Albina  Mural  Project. 


Henry  Prison  and  Isaac  Shamsud-Din  assisted  by  Chonitia 
Henderson,  Larry  Scott,  and  Jenny  Harata:  Martin 
Luther  King,  Jr. ,  panel,  1978,  Albina  Mural  Project. 


Jenny  Harata  with  assistance  of  Chonitia  Henderson: 
Afro- American  history  panel,  1978,  Albina  Mural  Proj- 
ect. 


308  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

panels  are  counted  as  part  of  a  single  composition.  The 
ensemble  was  dedicated  on  July  4,  1978,  as  part  of  a 
kintu,  an  African  ceremony  at  which  the  community 
invests  a  work  of  art  with  life.  Some  2,500  people 
attended. 

Shamsud-Din  says  he  would  still  like  to  see  the  in- 
tended tw enty-one  panels  completed.  But  he  was  putting 
eighteen  hours  a  day  into  the  w  ork  and  had  seven  chil- 
dren (now  eight)  to  support  on  his  $833-a-month  CETA 
salary.  Portland,  he  says,  is  the  hardest  city  for  an  artist 
like  himself  to  work  in,  w  hat  w  ith  having  to  go  through 
the  institutional  hoops  and  having  to  socialize  with  the 
right  people.  He  survives  by  doing  occasional  com- 
missions such  as  those  he  was  working  on  in  1979  for  the 
Salvation  Army  and  a  restaurant.  He  also  did  sign 
painting,  construction  work,  and  odd  jobs.  He  hopes  to 
leave  and  settle  in  Nigeria  or  Ghana,  but  the  likelihood  of 
his  raising  the  money  to  move  his  large  family  is  dim,  he 
adds. 

Ihere  were  precious  few  other  community  murals  that 
had  been  done  in  Portland  during  the  flourishing  of 
community  work  elsewhere.  However,  there  was  an 
abundance  of  school  murals  done  by  children  in  the 
mid-seventies  which  Eileen  Kressel  was  responsible  for 
getting  going  on  the  inspiration  of  similar  work  in  San 


Manuel  Martinez:  Universal  Labor,  7977,  State  Em- 
ployment Division,  Denver.  (Photo  Arch  Williams) 


Francisco.  In  1979  Ackerly  Communications,  which  was 
facing  an  antibillboard  ordinance,  had  sponsored  the 
First  Annual  "Larger  Than  Life"  art  contest  among 
elementary  school  children  with  the  result  that  a  young- 
ster's camping  scene  had  been  reproduced  to  fill  a  space 
perhaps  previously  occupied  by  Black  Velvet.  His  and 
his  teacher's  name  were  there  as  big  as  an  ad  caption. 

Denver 

.Manuel  .Martinez,  who  had  done  the  first  murals  of  the 
new  movement  in  Denver  and  then  painted  in  New 
Mexico,  returned  to  work  full-time  as  a  muralist  for  the 
Colorado  .Migrant  Council  and  in  1977  organized  Incor- 
porated Artists  Monumental  of  Denver  to  promote 
Chicano  art.''  On  a  wall  that  he  did  that  year  in  the 
lobby  of  the  State  Employment  Division,  he  depicted 
farm  and  industrial  workers,  men  and  women,  support- 
ing the  earth  as  they  lean  against  a  wall  they  have  built 
that  has  the  shape  of  the  Mexican  and  U.S.  eagles  as  well 
as  the  thunderbird.  He  called  it  Universal  Labor. 

That  year  also  he  was  commissioned  to  paint  a  four- 
by-eight-foot  portable  canvas  mural  in  opposition  to  a 
local  congregation  that  had  seceded  from  the  Episcopal 
Church  because  of  the  larger  body's  support  of  abortion 
and  the  ordination  of  women  priests.'*  In  it  he  showed 
the   conservative   priest   standing   on   the   back   of  the 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  309 


Manuel  Martinez  and  Carlos  Sandoval:  Urban  Dope 
and  Rural  Hope,  1977,  Denver.  Martinez  in  fore- 
ground. 

crucified  Christ.  The  vertical  composition  is  reminiscent 
of  traditional  Spanish  religious  art  and  particularly  the 
overhead  view  of  the  crucifixion  by  Salvador  Dali. 

A   few   months   later  he  returned   to   more   familiar 
'ihemes  with  a  work  he  did  on  a  very  long  wall  with 


Manuel  Martinez:  The  Staff  of  Life,  1976,  staircase. 
Administration  Building,  Auraria  Higher  Education 
Center  (University  of  Denver) 


Carlos  Sandoval  under  the  auspices  of  the  Denver 
Citywide  Mural  Project.  Titled  Urban  Dope  and  Rural 
Hope,  it  worked  out  the  contrast  by  showing  the  collapse 
of  a  man  in  three  stages  seen  head-on  at  one  side  of  a 
serpent  and  eagle,  and  a  Chicano  family  at  the  other. 
Another  work.  The  Staff  of  Life,  depicted  a  stalk  of  maiz 
growing  out  of  the  body  of  a  ritually  killed  indio  who 
suggests  the  sacrifices  of  Raza  people  throughout  history 
and  the  new  life  that  springs  from  them.  By  the  end  of 
the  decade  .Martinez  could  claim  over  twenty-five 
thousand  square  feet  of  murals. 


310  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Pueblo 

From  the  w  all  of  a  Lower  Last  Side  barrio  grocery 
here,  seven  residents  urge  viewers  to  "support  the  Pueblo 
Neighborhood  Health  Centers."  Point-blank  the  ban- 
daged, those  in  casts,  a  pregnant  woman,  and  a  dog  in 
profile  confront  you.  The  head-on  planes  and  circles, 
the  echoing  curves  and  deep  hues  make  for  an  extra- 
ordinary stvlization,  a  kind  of  personal  Art  Deco.  This  is 
a  1979  work  ot  Pedro  Romero,  who  as  a  CFT'A  em- 
ployee coordinating  public  relations  for  the  centers  has 
done  a  number  of  murals  for  them.  He  says  that  he 
arrived  at  his  style  through  sculpture,  until  recently  his 
main  art  form,  and  by  studying  the  faces  of  funerary 
pottery  of  the  ancient  Mimbres  people  of  Meso-America. 
He  adds  that  he  has  wanted  not  only  to  bring  art  to  the 
barrio  but  also  to  express  the  solemnity  and  nobility  of 
families  there.  In  this  he  has  eminently  succeeded. 

Santa  Fe 

Although  Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan  was  no 
longer  active  during  the  second  half  of  the  seventies,  they 
had  left  an  example  of  communitv-based  murals  in  the 
state.  In  1977  and  1978  an  Art  in  Public  Places  program 
funded  by  (TH  A  was  operated  by  the  New  Mexico  Arts 
Division  and  provided  for  nine  muralists  who  began  with 
the  intention  of  painting  a  single  work  as  a  team  at  the 
Quay  County  Exposition  Center  in  Tucumcari.'"  How- 


ever, only  four  had  done  a  mural  before,  and  the 
diversity  of  their  approaches  made  going  difficult.  The 
result  was  that  the  designer  of  the  mural  did  most  of  the 
painting,  while  a  few  others  hung  around  to  help  with 
busy  work.  The  artists  then  turned  to  individual  projects 
and  in  eleven  months  completed  nineteen  murals  in  spite 
of  continuing  problems  with  the  bureaucracy.  Among 
the  painters  was  a  veteran  of  Los  Artes,  Gilberto 
Guzman,  who  did  a  mural  for  the  State  Library  showing 
an  indio  woman  reaching  forward  with  maiz  like  some  of 
the  Tonantzins  of  their  earlier  work  and  another  panel  on 
the  rebellion  of  Pueblo  Indians  in  1680  that  drove  the 
Spanish  out  for  20  years.  F"rom  San  Francisco  Graciela 
Carrillo  came  to  do  figures  in  brightly  colored  garb 
illustrating  the  culture  of  Native  Peoples  for  the  Institute 
of  American  Indian  Arts.  The  remaining  work  included 
landscape,  abstraction  and  historical  illustration.  The 
results  led  the  directors  of  the  program  to  look  forward  to 
its  expansion  and  to  closer  cooperation  among  muralists. 

Also  in  1977  Guzman  painted  one  of  the  masterpieces 
of  the  mural  movement.  Gold  Star  Mothers,  for  the  Bataan 
Memorial  Building  in  Santa  Fe.  He  shows  the  mourners 
limp  and  swaying  like  the  wilted  flowers  they  hold  for 
their  sons,  soldiers  of  a  New  IVlexican  unit  that  was  lost 
on  the  death  march  in  the  Philippines  at  the  beginning  of 
World  War  IL 

When  Zara  Kriegstein  saw  these  and  his  easel  paint- 
ing, she  gave  Guzman  a  show  in  her  new  October 
Gallery  in  London  in  1979  and  made  possible  his  doing 


Gilberto  Guzman:  The  Pueblo  Revolt,  1978,  Rare 
Book  Room,  New  Mexico  State  Library,  Santa  Fe. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  3 1 1 

an  antiwar  mural  across  the  street.  Then  they  returned  to 
Santa  Fe  and  she  did  the  public  relations  necessary  for 
them  and  other  local  artists  to  undertake  the  enormous 
side  of  the  state  archives  building.  Guzman,  hoping  the 
project  would  open  new  possibilities  for  a  mural  group  in 
Santa  Fe,  sold  his  van  for  paint  and  lived  mostly  on 
strong  coffee.  Titled  The  Multi-Cultural  Mural,  it  cele- 
brates the  contribution  of  the  varied  peoples  who  have 
made  New  Mexico.  Guzman's  swinging  design  is  readily 
recognizable  in  the  big  Spanish  bull  at  the  left  looming 
above  swaying  roses,  a  cow's  skull,  and  conquistadores' 
armor.  His  drawing  is  also  clear  in  the  nearby  workmen 
with  a  sledge  and  drill  and  the  corn  goddess  at  the 
bottom  center,  who  holds  up  the  new  achievements  of 
human  inventiveness.  Above  her  Kriegstein  painted  a 
rather  gypsylike  fiesta.  Disagreements  arose  among  the 
artists  before  work  was  completed,  and  Guzman  did  not 
attend  the  dedication  in  September,  1980.  His  drawings 
for  the  work  show  a  more  consistent  and  bold  composi- 
tion than  the  final  result,  and  the  public  reception  was 
mixed.  Although  the  artists  went  their  separate  ways, 
they  were  determined  to  do  more  murals  in  Santa  Fe. 

Albuquerque 

Community  murals  accelerated  here  in  the  later  sev- 
enties. In  1978  Francisco  LaFebre  directed  a  very  long 
frieze  around  the  new  Albuquerque  High  School's 
lounge  where  brightly  outlined  images  re-create  the  past 
of  indigenous  peoples,  Hispanicos,  Frida  Kahio  along  with 

Graciela  Carrillo  and  Linda  Lomahaftewa:  Spirit  of  the 
Native  Americans,  1977,  Kiva  Theater,  Institute  of 
American  Indian  Arts,  Santa  Fe. 


Gilberto  Guzman  and  Zara  Kriegstein,  designers,  painted 
with  assistance  of  Rosemary  Stearns,  Cassandra  Mains, 
John  Sandford,  David  Bradley,  Frederico  Vigil,  and 
Linda  Lomahoftewa:  Multi-Cultural  Mural,  1980, 
New  Mexico  State  Records  Center,  Santa  Fe. 


312  /  COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 


Francisco  LaFebre:  Untitled,  1978,  Albuquerque  High 
School,  Albuquerque. 


Murals,  left  to  right,  by  Helen  Hardin,  Than  Ts  ay  Ta 
and  J.  D.  Medina,  1978  and  1979,  Pueblo  Cultural 
Center,  Albuquerque. 


young  people  today,  and  a  foetus  for  tomorrow.  During 
1978  and  1979  Indian  artists  embellished  the  big  patio  of 
the  new  Pueblo  Cultural  Center  with  professionally  exe- 
cuted dancers  representing  their  different  communities. 
And  also  in  1979  local  and  visiting  muralists  collaborated 
at  the  South  Valley  MuIti-Purpose  Center.  Manuel 
Unzueta  from  Santa  Barbara  utilized  a  flat,  crisp  style  in 
which  untrained  assistants  could  work  to  show  the 
elderly  and  young  looking  toward  a  better  life,  and 
Fernando  Penaloza  from  Bolivia  envisioned  what  he 
describes  as  the  "spiritual  rebirth  of  humankind"  with 


strong-bodied  indios  recovering  a  fertile  earth  from  des- 
ert. On  another  wall  local  artists  Enrico  Vasquez  and 
Manressa  Crumbel  retold  local  folktales. 

Crystal  City 

It  was  here  that  La  Raza  Unida  Party,  which  spread 
throughout  South  Texas,  was  organized,  and  here  also 
that  since  1963  the  80  percent  Chicano  population  has 
frequently  elected  the  principal  public  officials.  But  in 
1980  economic  power  was  still  controlled  by  Anglos. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  3 13 


Antonio  Flores:  Nacimiento  de  Aztlan,  1976,  Centra 
de  Salud,  Crystal  City,  Texas. 


Nevertheless,  a  public  health  center  had  been  built,  and 
at  its  entrance  in  1976  Antonio  Flores  painted  a  Naci- 
miento de  Aztlan  with  a  recumbent  mother  stretched 
above  a  flaming  sun  and  a  child  and  praying  father,  all 
rendered  in  tendrillike  line.  On  the  school  district  office 
he  showed  a  three-faced  mestizo  trying  to  grasp  needed 
government  funding  with  a  chained  hand.  And  big  bold 
Raza  murals  were  also  done  at  the  Benito  Juarez  School 
by  students,  teachers,  and  a  school  board  member. 


El  Paso 

One  of  the  most  technically  innovative  works  of  the 
mural  movement  is  the  thirty-by-forty-foot  sand-cast 
assemblage  mounted  in  the  Valle  Verde  Community 
College  cafeteria  in  1980.  Mago  Orona  had  worked  with 
students  for  two  years  in  the  desert  implanting  broken 
bottle  glass  in  panels  that  were  then  yoked  by  steel  braces 
to  the  wall,  some  further  out,  some  closer  in.  Titled  Time 
and  Sand,  the  work,  she  says,  is  about  the  spiritual 
evolution  of  humankind  from  the  divisions  of  self  and 
society,  represented  by  split  and  violent  machinelike 
forms  at  the  lower  left,  toward  a  new  compassion  and 
integration  symbolized  by  the  vaulting,  ecstatic  forms  at 
the  upper  right.  Technology,  she  adds,  is  not  bad  in 
itself,  but  has  been  misused.  "My  study  of  machines  and 


humans,"  she  observes,  "has  driven  me  to  this  point.  I 
feel  art  is  becoming  more  encompassing  on  all  levels." 
Her  mural  is  also  an  engineering  feat.  She  was  seeking  a 
grant  to  do  another  sandcast  work  on  one  of  the  inter- 
national bridges,  using  young  apprentices  she  would 
train  in  her  studio  in  Ciudad  Juarez. 

San  Antonio 

Isolated  street  murals  had  been  undertaken  here  in  the 
barrios  during  the  decade,  but  in  1978  Anastasio  Torres, 
formerly  a  social  worker,  formed  the  Community  Cul- 
tural Arts  Organization  to  encourage  youth  to  return  to 
high  school  and  enter  an  excellent  commercial  art  pro- 
gram. With  city  and  foundation  funding  he  had  created 
mural  crews  that  by  1980  had  completed  twenty -eight 
end  walls  on  the  public  housing  at  Cassiano  Homes. 
Some  of  the  teenagers  had  stayed  with  the  group  from 
the  beginning.  They  do  research  in  the  library  for  the 
murals  and  make  presentations  to  the  residents'  associa- 
tion for  approval;  increasingly  the  tenants  were  making 
suggestions.  At  first  they  would  not  have  permitted  the 
walls  on  Zapata  and  Villa,  Torres  says.  The  murals  that 
extend  along  both  sides  of  Hamilton  Avenue  offer  a 
panorama  of  Raza  history,  romantic  indio  princes  and 
damsels,  religious  imagery,  and  support  for  the  UFW  in 
a  state  where  the  union  has  had  an  unusually  difficult 
time.  Particularly  impressive  are  the  skill  of  the  teenagers 
in  modeling  in  color  and  the  tight  ship  Torres  runs. 


3 14 /COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Mago  Orona  and  students:  Time  and  Sand,  1980,  Valle 
Verde  Community  College,  El  Paso. 


There  were  four  walls  in  progress  at  the  same  time 
during  the  summer  of  1980,  and  Torres  was  hoping  to 
tackle  at  least  half  of  the  170  walls  available. 

Austin 

In  1976  Raul  Valdez  and  other  local  artists  organized 
here  the  League  of  United  Chicano  Artists  (LUCHA,  or 
Struggle)  in  an  old  school  building.  Besides  developing  a 
Ballet  Kolklorico,  a  literary  )ournal,  a  children  s  writmg 
and  art  festival,  and  a  gallery,  they  built  a  mural  program 
that  was  responsible  for  seven  walls  during  the  rest  of 
the  decade.  Valdez  and  students  painted  the  inside  and 
outside  of  their  center  as  well  as  in  the  barrios,  but  their 
most   impressive  achievement  was  the   Pan-American 


Hillside  Theatre,  an  outdoor  stage  every  surface  of 
which  is  embellished  with  lunging  figures  who  invoke 
Raza  pleasures  and  struggles  as  they  reach  out  to  viewers. 
Valdez,  who  studied  at  the  Siqueiros  school  in  Cuerna- 
vaca,  observes  that  the  composition  owes  much  to  the 
Mexican  masters. 

On  the  other  side  of  town  across  the  street  from  the 
main  campus  of  the  University  of  Texas,  Carlos  Lowry 
and  the  crew  he  directed  were  completing  in  the  summer 
of  1980  a  series  of  blown-up  movie  frames  on  the  big 
side  of  the  Varsity  Theater.  There  were  images  from 
Potemkin,  Citizen  Kane,  The  400  Blows  as  well  as  shots  of 
Bogart,  Chaplin,  Keaton  hanging  from  a  fire  escape,  and 
Jimmy  Cliff.  Lowry,  a  refugee  from  Chile,  designed  the 
wall  believing  that  social  consciousness  could  be  com- 
bined with  commercial  jobs.  The  team  was  part  of 
Interart-Public  Art,  which  had  thirty-two  painters  who 
had  done  murals  at  a  daycare  center,  a  recycling  depot,  a 
bicycle  shop,  a  grocery,  and  a  restaurant. 


Young  people  of  the  Community  Cultural  Arts  Organiza- 
tion, directed  by  Anastasio  Torres,  Farm  workers'  Mural, 
one  of  28  works,  1978-80,  Cassiano  Homes,  San  An- 
tonio. 


Raul  Valdez:  Partial  view  of  murals,  Pan-American 
Hillside  Theatre,  1979,  Austin. 


316/  COMMUNITY  MURAl.S 


Carlos  Lowry:  The  Wall,  1980,  Varsity  Theater,  Au- 
stin. 


New  York 


Here  in  1976  experienced  muralists  working  indepen- 
dently as  well  as  new  and  veteran  groups  contributed  to 
the  growth  of  the  movement.  In  Washington  Heights 
where  she  had  painted  with  students  before,  Lucy 
Mahler  now  at  Junior  High  School  52  worked  with  two 
dozen  teenagers  who  did  portraits  of  their  fellow  students 
from  life  and  joined  them  with  Bolivar,  Lincoln,  and 
King  and  symbols  of  the  heritage  of  local  people  in  the 
auditorium  and  on  two  smaller  buildings.**  In  1978  and 
1979  Mahler  and  Nitza  Tufino  were  doing  sixteen  large 
ceramic  panels  for  the  courtyard  of  the  Third  Street 
Music  Settlement  in  the  East  Village.  Working  with  a 
kiln  at  the  school  and  doing  a  lot  of  learning  as  they 
proceeded,  they  had  almost  completed  during  the  winter 
two  complex  and  handsome  panels  of  musicians. 

Returning  to  1976 — a  $7,500  grant  from  Exxon  made 
it  possible  for  the  Young  Muralists  Workshop  in  the  Fort 
Greene  section  of  Brooklyn  to  hire  three  local  artists  to 
assist  teenagers  in  as  many  paintings.'*  The  group  had 
been  organized  two  years  earlier  by  Wilfred  Thomas 
who  had  worked  with  fifteen  young  people  on  a  mural  on 
the  side  of  a  cleaner's,  which  led  to  the  grant.  Thomas 
tells  of  how  after  a  later  mural  was  defaced,  a  question- 
naire was  distributed  for  more  community  input.  A 
greater  number  of  young  people  were  drawn  into  de- 
signing and  painting  the  new  work,  and  it  remained 
undamaged.^" 

Hank  Prussing,  who  was  extending  his  photographic 
portraits  of  neighbors  on  a  tenement  facade  in  East 
Harlem  during  these  years,  in  1977  was  also  using  local 
faces  in  ten  panels  on  allegorical  themes  like  anxiety  and 


patience  between  the  windows  of  the  Lafayette  Avenue 
Presbyterian  Church  in  Brooklyn.  The  following  year  he 
was  commissioned  to  do  a  work  for  the  old  U.S.  Customs 
House  on  Fort  Greene.^' 

Meanwhile  Cityarts  Workshop  undertook  its  largest 
murals  to  date  on  the  Lower  East  Side  during  1976. '^^ 
Arlan  Huang  organized  a  project  in  which  students, 
teachers,  and  local  residents  painted  an  appeal  for  better 
education  and  a  new  building  in  the  over-one-hundred- 
foot-long  Let  Our  People  Grow  on  Junior  High  School  65. 
On  both  sides  of  the  main  entrance  they  showed  images 
of  budget  cutting,  students  pounding  their  books  in 
desperation,  others  surveying  a  model  of  a  new  school 
and  picketing  for  it,  followed  by  hoped-for  construction 
work,  graduation,  and  promising  careers. 

Par  Los  Ninas  was  another  protest  of  education  budget 
cuts.  Coordinated  by  Alfredo  Hernandez  of  Cityarts,  art 
students  from  a  nearby  junior  high  created  the  five-story 
work  on  the  wall  of  P.S.  97  facing  well-traveled  Houston 
Street  at  East  River  Drive.  In  it  a  huge  pair  of  shears 
carves  into  a  stack  of  books  on  the  top  of  which  are 
symbols  of  learning.  The  books  are  held  up  by  young 
people  who  are  also  pulling  themselves  up  out  of  slum 
life,  while  a  financier  is  walking  off  with  his  pockets 
stuffed  with  bucks.  The  imagery  is  straightforward  and 
clear  in  its  attack  on  the  efforts  of  the  city  to  solve  its 
financial  problems  at  the  expense  of  working-class  chil- 
dren who  were  almost  the  only  ones  in  public  schools. 
This  mural  and  Let  Our  People  Grow  were  both  responses 
to  the  massive  layoffs  of  personnel  in  the  schools  and 
other  social  services  that  New  York  under  its  Emergency 


Lucy  Mahler:  Ceramic  mural  in  progress,  1979, 
Street  Music  Settlement,  East  Village,  New  York. 


Third 


318  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


addiction,  stabbing,  joblessness,  and  a  torched  tenement. 
The  rainbow  banner  becomes  part  of  the  sunlight  at  the 
other  side  that  shines  on  tenants  repairing  their  tenement 
to  which  a  Puerto  Rican  flag  is  attached,  while  others 
enjoy  the  fresh  air  together.  This  mural,  like  the  others 
coordinated  by  Cityarts,  demonstrated  the  ability  of  the 
trained  artists  to  help  local  people  think  through  their 
problems  and  come  up  with  imaginative  compositions 
that  clarify  the  issues  and  suggest  solutions. 

Another  was  the  Douglass  Street  Mural  with  which 
Cityarts  extended  its  activities  to  Brooklyn.  Painted  by 
local  artists  and  residents  led  by  .Mary  Patton  in  the  Park 
Slope  area,  it  fills  a  pair  of  walls  that  open  up  like  pages  of 
a  book.  The  "pages"  contrast  the  problems  of  neglect, 
arson,  and  red-lining  in  low-income  areas  with  the  efforts 
of  people  to  rehab  their  housing  (with  outside  financial 
aid).  All  this  occurs  beneath  a  flash  of  lightning  on  the 
side  depicting  racism,  and  a  rainbow  on  the  wall  showing 


Local  youth  directed  by  Arlan  Huang  (Cityarts):  Let 
Our  People  Grow  (detail),  Junior  High  School  65, 
Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


Financial  Control  Board  was  pursuing  in  order  to  attract 
federal  loans  and  make  its  bonds  salable  as  the  city  faced 
bankruptcy.  From  the  school  walls  themselves  students 
with  ardor  and  artistry  proclaimed  their  protest  in  no 
uncertain  terms  in  public  every  day. 

Further  down  Houston  at  a  busy  mtersection  with 
Second  Avenue,  Tomie  Arai  and  another  Cityarts  team 
produced  Crear  una  Sociedad  Nueva  (Create  a  New  Soci- 
ety). Here  people  of  different  races  join  together  and 
stride  out  of  the  wall  carrying  a  rainbow  banner  as  an 
expression  of  the  need  for  united  action.  Driving  off 
speculators  and  the  military  who  are  crammed  with 
greenbacks,  they  leave  behind  in  the  night  scenes  of 

Junior  high  school  students  directed  by  Alfredo  Hernandez 
(Cityarts):  Por  los  Ninos,  1976,  Lower  East  Side,  New 
York. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  3 19 


Local  youth  directed  by  iomie  Aral  (Cityarts):  Oear  una 
Sociedad  Nueva  (Create  a  New  Society),  1976,  Lower 
East  Side,  New  York. 


the  cooperation  of  the  races.  These  large  strokes  are 
balanced  at  the  bottom  with  arms  and  clenched  fists 
draped  with  flags  and  portraits  of  the  leaders  of  the 
Black,  Puerto  Rican,  and  Haitian  people  of  the 
neighborhood.  It  is  a  dense  mix  but  carried  out  with  a 
spaciousness  that  makes  the  walls  legible  and  impressive. 

In  1977  Cityarts  did  five  major  projects  in  Harlem,  the 
Lower  East  Side,  Chinatown,  and  Brooklyn.  One  was  a 
backdrop  for  La  Plaza  Cultural  in  Loisaida,  which  pro- 
vided space  for  musical  performances,  socializing,  and 
play.  On  a  four-story  wall  at  its  rear  Alfredo  Hernandez 
coordinated  an  ensemble  of  large  African,  Puerto  Rican, 
and  Asian  portraits  with  vignettes  of  their  native  lands, 
while  overhead  a  happy  dragon  contemplates  the  sun. 

Another  mural  of  that  year  was  the  Wall  of  Respect  for 
the  Working  People  of  Chinatown  on  which  Tomie  Arai,  the 
director  of  Cityarts,  worked  with  an  inter-racial  team  of 
young  people.  They  depicted  a  rampant  three-story-high 
dragon  among  whose  folds  are  scenes  of  the  migration  to 
this  country,  work  on  the  railroads,  in  the  fields  and 
sweatshops,  and  the  problems  of  gambling  and  slum  life. 
It  is  not  clear  whether  the  scenes  of  shopkeeping  and 


restaurant  cooking  and  waiting  at  table  are  intended  as 
tributes  or  as  criticism  of  the  confinement  of  the  Chinese 
to  these  roles.  Finally  at  the  top  the  young  and  older 
generations  are  moving  into  the  future  with  their  fire- 
breathing  dragon.  The  mural  is  well  rendered,  but  it 
repeats  some  of  the  issues  of  Chi-Lai — Arriba — Rise  Up! 
which  is  a  few  blocks  away.  While  the  earlier  work  was 
explicit  about  racial  exploitation,  the  nev\  one  is  ambigu- 
ous, especially  about  the  kind  of  work  local  people  do  or 
submit  to.  This  is  understandable,  but  it  is  not  charac- 
teristic of  the  usual  outspokenness  of  Cityarts.  The  con- 
trast of  the  two  works  supports  the  observation  of  a 
number  of  Cityarts  muralists  that  their  work  was  be- 
coming less  political.  In  1979  Alfredo  Hernandez  said 
this  was  due  to  the  pressure  of  sponsors.  At  the  same 
time,  Kathleen  Gupta,  the  new  director,  also  acknowl- 
edging the  change  in  recent  work,  felt  the  neighborhoods 
where  Cityarts  worked  were  less  activist.  There  was  "a 
quiet  desperation,"  she  said. 

In  1977  James  Jannuzzi,  who. had  been  \Xith  Cityarts 
since  1968  when  he  was  fourteen,  coordinated  five  works 
in  the  Bronx  painted  by  local  artists  and  young  people. ^^ 

Cityarts  worked  on  six  sites  in  1978  that  were  outside 
its  accustomed  area  in  Lower  Manhattan.  Three  were  in 
Brooklyn,  and  at  one  of  these  Eddie  Aliseo  and  local 


320  /  COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 


Local  youth  directed  by  Alfredo  Hernandez  (City  arts):  La 
Plaza  Cultural  Mural,  1977,  Lower  East  Side,  New 
York. 


people  did  Espiritu  Latino,  a  tribute  to  Afro-Latin  music 
in  which  a  few  well-drawn,  grooving  performers  convey 
its  origins  and  present-day  vitality.  Back  in  Loisaida  the 
walls  of  a  nursing-home  garden  on  Avenue  B  were 
decorated  by  Shulamith  Firestone,  who  in  a  pastel  fan- 
tasy she  called  Yucatan  showed  tourists  relaxing  on  the 
edge  of  a  lagoon,  while  Art  Guerra  in  Celebration  in 
Central  Park  depicted  just  that. 

During  1978  and  1979  Cityarts  teams  were  engaged  in 
two  different  mural  projects  in  the  New  York  subway. 
One  under  the  direction  of  Jannuzzi  with  the  assistance 
of  ten  young  people  being  trained  by  Steve  Miotto,  was 
preparing  mosaic  murals  for  the  Delancey  Street  IND 
station,  which  was  part  of  an  effort  to  revitalize  the 
nearby  commerical  area.  The  muralists  were  meeting 
with  East  Side  merchant  groups  and  local  people  as  well 
as  a  committee  of  artists  and  architects  to  work  out 
designs.  The  other  project  was  a  ceramic  mural  to  be 
installed  in  the  Union  Square  station  and  was  to  be 
executed  off  site  by  Jannuzzi,  Eva  Cockcroft,  Pedro 
Silva,  and  others. 

A  significant  step  was  taken  by  Cityarts  in  1978  when 
it  cosponsored  with  the  12th  Street  Movement,  a  tenants' 
group,  a  very  simple  work  directed  by  Alfredo  Hernan- 


dez that  showed  rows  of  cabbages,  corn,  and  melons 
converging  toward  a  beaming  sun.  But  this  was  the 
backdrop  for  a  garden  of  small  boarded  plots  where 
local  residents  were  growing  their  food,  even  maintaining 
a  few  winter  frames.  In  its  midst  there  was  also  a 
postage-stamp-sized  plaza  with  benches.  There  were 
enough  gaps  between  the  seven-story  rotting  brick  tene- 
ments for  the  sun  to  bathe  the  plots  where  the  soil  had  to 
be  tested  for  lead  from  the  paint  of  demolished  buildings. 
Manure  was  brought  from  the  police  stables,  and  resi- 
dents who  formerly  were  anxious  to  venture  out  on  the 
streets  of  Loisaida  were  being  taught  the  French  inten- 
sive method  of  cultivating  by  Linda  Cohen  from  God- 
dard  College  in  Vermont. ^^  The  urban  farmers  called 
their  garden  "El  Sol  Brillante,"  and  as  the  sign  at  the 
front  indicated,  they  had  been  assisted  by  the  11th 
Street  Movement,  which  was  identifiable  behind  the 
mural  by  its  solar  collectors  and  windmill  generator 
mounted  on  a  tenement  roof.  Standing  in  the  garden, 
you  could  also  see  the  eyeless  top  floors  of  other  tene- 
ments on  Eleventh  Street  where  neighborhood  construe- 


tion  workers  and  trainees  were  putting  in  new  w  indows 
and  roofing. 

It  all  began  in  1974  when  Puerto  Rican  residents  with 
the  help  of  professionals  began  rehabilitating  number  519 
on  Eleventh  Street.  This  was  a  section  of  Loisaida  which 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  32 1 
during  winter  looked  like  a  bombed-out  city  of  World 
War  II.  The  streets  were  deserted;  windows  were 
boarded  up;  the  red  brick  had  been  blackened  by  fires; 
hanging  tin  flashing  from  cornices  rapped  against  walls. 
When  the  warm  days  came,  the  streets  teemed  with  kids 


Local  youth  directed  by  Tomie  Arai  (Cityarts):  Wall  of 
Respect  for  the  Working  People  of  Chinatown, 
1977,  New  York. 


322  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Alfredo  Hernandez  (City arts): 
Lower  East  Side,  New  York. 


El  Sol  Brillante,  1978, 


and  unemployed  men.  Many  of  the  buildings  had  been 
neglected,  then  abandoned  by  landlords;  some  were 
torched  to  collect  insurance;  some  by  the  carelessness  of 
addicts  or  the  homeless  who  came  and  went.  Roberto 
(Rabbit)  Nazario,  who  directed  the  Adopt-a-Building 
homesteading  program,  and  .Michael  Freedberg,  a  Yale 
graduate  who  was  to  head  the  11th  Street  Movement, 
persuaded  unemployed  residents  along  the  street  to  go  to 
work  on  519  and  the  city  to  lend  them  the  funds  to  buy, 
mortgage  and  renovate  the  structure. ^^  Collateral  for  the 
down  payment  was  provided  by  sweat  equity,  the  rehab 
labor  of  the  workers,  who  in  two  years  were  able  to  move 
in  with  their  families.  To  have  employed  a  contractor 
and  his  crews  would  have  cost  three  tirnes  as  much.  With 
the  help  of  the  Energy  Task  Force,  a  private  firm,  the 
tenants  cooperative  installed  heavy  insulation,  a  solar  hot 
water  system  and  a  windmill  generator  atop  a  thirty- 
four-foot  tower  on  the  roof  which  the  local  kids  dubbed 


the  "helicopter."^*  The  windmill  produced  enough  elec- 
tricity to  provide  not  only  many  of  the  needs  of  519  but 
also  a  surplus  that  the  Public  Service  Commission  com- 
pelled Con  Edison  to  purchase.^'  By  1977  the  1 1th  Street 
.Movement  had  given  work  and  training  to  forty-five 
jobless  neighbors,  rehabbed  six  buildings  along  the 
street,  and  sponsored  the  intensive  vegetable  garden. 
There  were  plans  for  a  neighborhood  recycling  center,  a 
roof  greenhouse,  hydroponic  farming,  a  small  cannery, 
and  a  neighborhood  cabinetmaking  and  furniture  indus- 
try. A  tank  for  fish  farming  was  installed  in  the  basement 
of  5 1 8  two  years  later. 

Early  in  1979  Alfredo  Hernandez  was  talking  with  the 
people  of  the  1 1th  Street  Movement  about  doing  a  mural 
for  the  facade  of  5 19.  What  was  important  about  this  and 
his  already  completed  garden  mural  was  that  they  made 
explicit  the  connection  of  muralists  with  others  who  were 
also  concerned  with  empowering  people  who  had  been 
led  to  believe  they  were  powerless.  These  were  efforts  of 
local  people  to  use  their  skills  and  learn  new  ones  so  that 
they  could  provide  increasingly  for  their  needs  in  a 
manner  that  they  chose  and  could  control.  By  refurbish- 
ing their  own  housing,  producing  some  of  their  food  and 
initiating  local  industry,  they  were  being  at  least  as 
creative  as  they  were  when  making  an  image  to  express 
what  was  happening  in  their  neighborhood.  They  were 
reshaping  their  mode  of  living  and  their  consciousness  of 
what  they  could  achieve  together.  They  were  creating  a 
community  of  labor  and  residence  where  before  there 
had  been  alienation.  While  people  of  the  11th  Street 
.Movement  spoke  of  their  self-reliant  work  and  its  ap- 
paratus as  "appropriate  technology,"^*  their  experience 
demonstrated  that  the  term  was  also  applicable  to  com- 
munity murals,  for  both  depended'  on  labor-intensive 
methods  that  allowed  for  the  creativity  and  control  of  the 
workers  themselves.  While  murals  before  had  frequently 
spoken  to  the  issues  of  labor,  here  in  Loisaida  they  were 
being  painted  in  connection  with  a  technology  that 
shared  their  purposes  and  methods.  Art  was  making 
contact  with  ordinary  production,  and  work  was  taking 
on  the  character  and  satisfactions  of  art.  This  was  occur- 
ring not  because  of  any  theoretical  preconceptions  of  the 
participants,  but  because  the  untrained  with  the  help  of  a 
few  professionals  had  decided  to  grapple  with  the  needs 
that  society  had  failed  to  meet.  Public  funding  still  was 
necessary,  but  people  were  directing  and  carrying  out 
their  own  development.  Doing  this  collectively,  they 
were  beginning  to  recreate  a  society  and  culture.  This 
was  the  direction  that  had  been  implicit  in  the  mural 
movement  from  the  beginning. 

Baltimore 

From  1976  into  1979  the  "Beautiful  Walls  for  Balti- 
more" program  steered  away  from  the  little  social  content 
with  which  it  began  in  1975  and  more  toward  decorative, 
semiabstract  murals,   works  that  however  made  some 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  323 


reference  to  local  life.  Pontella  Mason  did  a  sweetened 
Wall  of  Respect  with  portraits  of  Black  leaders  and 
celebrities  rising  above  the  clouds  in  a  playground  in 
1976,  but  this  was  not  up  to  his  earlier  work  with  James 
Vosheil.  In  1977  Neal  Gallico  painted  a  waiting  room  of 
a  social-service  office  with  anxious  clients  and  a  YMCA 
lobby  with  handsome  vignettes  of  "Y"  people.  That  year, 
too,  Rodney  Cook  appropriately  showed  riders  boarding 
a  bus  on  a  wall  of  a  Department  of  Motor  Vehicles  office, 
and  Avon  Martin  painted  an  energetic  bright 
semiabstraction  of  a  woman  reaching  forward  in  a  senior 
citizens'  residence.  In  1978  in  the  lobby  of  another 
seniors'  residence  Gerardo  Gomez  depicted  a  gnarled 
tree  in  the  center  of  which  elderly  people  nestled  glowing 
grain,  the  fruits  of  their  labor.  .Most  of  this  work  was  of 
professional  fine-arts  quality,  but  it  did  not  come  to  grips 


bert  Hieronimus:  All  American  City,  1977,  Balti- 
')re.  (Photo  Hieronimus) 


with  the  problems  that  neighborhood  people  in  Balti- 
more were  organizing  around  at  the  time,  particularly  to 
save  their  areas  from  gentrification.  None  had  the  rough 
vigor  of  community-based  work  in  which  untrained  local 
people  collaborated  with  artists.  Between  1975  and  1979 
Bob  Hieronimus  did  about  a  dozen  murals,  a  number  for 
Beautiful  Walls,  and  continued  to  turn  his  esoteric, 
visionary  approach  to  local  and  national  history.  He  took 
particular  pride  in  a  technique  of  transparent  color  in- 
cluding silver  paint  he  developed  to  suggest  motion  in  an 
outdoor  work  depicting  Baltimore  and  its  harbor,  past 
and  present.  Painted  in  1977,  All  American  City  is  on  the 
approach  to  Fort  McHenry. 

Philadelphia 

Between  1976  and  1979  the  Philadelphia  .Museum  of 
Art  continued  to  assist  community  murals,  and  Don 
Kaiser  and  Clarence  Wood  remained  as  coordinators  of 
work  in  the  field.  The  Department  of  Urban  Outreach 
had  changed  its  name  to  Department  of  Community 
Programs,  which  Penny  Bach  headed.  In  1979  Kaiser 
and  Wood  said  that  protraits  of  ethnic  leaders  in  the 
manner  of  the  Wall  of  Respect  were  still  being  requested 
and  had  been  done  in  Italian  and  Eastern  European 
neighborhoods.  Wood  had  just  completed  a  mural  proj- 
ect at  the  Center  for  Older  People  where  he  helped  those 
who  went  there  for  daily  hot  lunches  create  a  French-cafe 
atmosphere.  About  a  third  of  the  murals  Kaiser  and 
Wood  had  helped  with  were  in  middle-class  and  affluent 
areas  of  the  city.  All  in  all,  they  had  organized  about  one 
hundred  murals  and  advised  on  three  times  as  many  since 
they  had  joined  the  museum  in  1971.  The  continuation 
of  the  program  and  their  employment  by  an  establish- 
ment institution  was  unusual  for  artists  who  worked 
regularly  on  community  murals.  The  explanation  must 
lie  partly  in  their  professional  skills  and  the  museum's 
ability  to  raise  funds.  Also  Wood  and  Kaiser's  determi- 
nation to  respond  to  what  was  asked  of  them  by 
neighborhood  people  and  their  not  regarding  murals 
primarily  as  instruments  of  political  consciousness  rais- 
ing minimized  the  controversy  their  work  might  stir.  In 
April,  1979,  DCP  sponsored  a  Wall  Art  Seminar  for 
artists,  architects,  teachers,  administrators,  business 
people,  and  civic  leaders.  Beginning  with  talks  on  the 
history  of  wall  art  since  the  caves  followed  by  workshops 
on  the  technical,  funding  and  legal  issues,  the  conference 
seemed  oriented  toward  persuading  the  establishment 
that  wall  art  could  serve  its  priorities. 

Washington 

In  1967  Adams-Morgan  was  a  run-down  area  with 
once  fine  houses  near  the  more  "desirable"  areas  of  the 
Northwest  section  of  the  city.  Since  the  fifties  there  had 
been  about  three  thousand  people  of  Latin  American 
origin  living  there.   But  between   1967  and   1979  their 


324  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

number  had  grow  n  to  eighty  thousand,  w  ith  a  quarter  of 
a  million  in  greater  Washington.  They  had  come  from  El 
Salvador,  the  Dominican  Republic,  Nicaragua,  Ecuador, 
Puerto  Rico,  Cuba,  Mexico,  and  Bolivia.  Many  of  them 
were  "illegals,"  and  lived  in  fear  of  deportation.  It  was 
estimated  that  as  many  as  thirty-six  thousand  worked  at 
night  cleaning  up  the  offices  of  the  Federal  bureaucracy. 
The  Immigration  Service  arrested  thirteen  in  its  own 
agency.  An  even  greater  threat  were  the  real  estate 
speculators  who  in  the  late  seventies  were  buying  up  the 
aging  houses  and  renovating  them  for  a  more  prosperous 
clientele.  While  Adams-Morgan  was  a  lively  area. 
Latinos  also  felt  persecuted.  But  they  created  their  own 
institutions  and  among  them  the  Centro  de  Arte  that 
operated  workshops  in  graphics  and  music  and  also  did 
murals.  One  of  these  was  a  large  three-story  work  done 
in  1978  on  the  side  of  a  bank  that  looked  across  a  parking 
area  towards  a  busy  intersection.  At  the  upper  right 
skull-faced  gamblers  are  playing  with  bucks  and 
Monopoly-sized  houses  while  kids  scramble  among  gar- 
bage cans,  other  folks  stare  out  windows  or  are  locked  to 
a  fanged  TV.  Meanwhile  one-eyed  spirits  haunt  the 
mural  suggesting  the  dream  world  of  locals,  Pancho 
Otero,  one  of  the  painters,  says:  the  puzzle  of  their  life  in 


the  United  States  full  of  anticipation  and  disappointment 
and  memories  of  a  home  they  had  left  for  a  better  life 
here.  But  the  painters  also  wanted  to  show  how  people 
came  together  through  art,  music,  dancing,  and 
friendship.  At  the  left  the  artists  added  the  caption  "A 
People  Without  Murals  Are  a  De-Muralized  People," 
which  in  Spanish  sounds  even  more  like  "demoralized." 
The  humorously  drawn  squat  figures  that  are  a  cross 
between  cartoons,  Picasso  and  the  illustrations  of  an 
Aztec  codex,  were  designed  by  Carlos  "Caco"  Salazar 
and  painted  with  the  help  of  his  brother  Renato,  Otero, 
Jim  Richter,  May  Foster,  "Galo,"  and  others.  On 
weekends  the  painters  invited  passersby  to  join  them  on 
the  scaffolding.  The  group  had  done  additional  murals,  a 
portable  work  in  Rock  Creek  Park,  another  at  a  legal  aid 
office  and  a  large  indoor  wall  at  the  Centro  Wilson  where 
Latinos  went  for  social  services  and  recreation.  Funds 
had  to  be  scraped  up,  and  they  did  not  expect  to  do 
murals  in  1979  but  hoped  to  begin  again  the  following 
year.  They  had  received  some  assistance  from  the  D.C. 
Commission  on  the  Arts,  which  had  operated  a  Wall 
Mural  Program  in  the  early  seventies,  and  in  1979  was 
funding  eight  other  muralists  and  twice  as  many  assist- 
ants. 


Carlos  Salazar,  designer,  painted  with  Renato  Salazar, 
Pancho  Otero,  Jim  Richter,  May  Foster,  ''Gato,''  and 
others;  caption  by  Carlos  Baron:  A  people  without  murals 
are  a  de-muralized people, "  1978,  Adams-Morgan  section, 
Washington,  D.  C. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  325 


|^|H^^»^                 — i^^Mw 

— 

iifi^M. 

^fl//)/&  Waldrop  and  crew:  Forward  Together  (right), 

1977,  and  Growing  Together  (left,  partial  view), 

1978,  Lancaster,  South  Carolina. 


South  Carolina 

By  the  mid-seventies  community  murals  had  begun  to 
be  created  outside  the  big  cities  where  they  had  initially 
taken  root.  During  the  second  half  of  the  decade  murals 
were  done  in  outlying  areas  like  Lancaster  County, 
South  Carolina,  where  Ralph  Waldrop  served  as 
muralist-in-residence  during  1976  and  1977,  and  directed 
students  murals  in  every  public  school  in  the  county.  He 
also  completed  Forward  Together,    a   ninety-seven-foot 


Ralph  Waldrop  and  crew:  Growing  Together  (partial 
view),  1978,  Lancaster. 


work  in  downtown  Lancaster  that  offered  monumental 
figures  based  on  random  photographs  of  local  residents. 
Its  theme,  he  said,  was  a  united  community  opposed  to 
racism.^'  In  1978  he  directed  a  crew  that  painted  the 
backs  of  thirteen  shops  on  the  main  street  with  the  images 
of  Lancaster  residents,  which  were  reproduced  from 
slides  projected  at  night.  Looking  out  on  parking  lots  are 
oversized  portraits  of  local  kids  and  adults  going  about 
daily  life.  Blacks  mix  with  Whites  on  the  walls  while  in 
fact  they  live  on  opposite  sides  of  town.  On  one  wall  a 
Black  dentist  bends  over  a  patient  and  a  Black  police 
officer  patrols  while  a  White  resident  lounges  absorbed 
in  his  newspaper.  One  wall  is  filled  with  blowups  of 
children's  drawings  of  themselves.  Waldrop  moved  to 
Columbia  in  1979  to  continue  his  work.  Describing  him- 


326  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

self  as  a  "hustler,"  he  has  been  able  to  support  his  family 
doing  socially  concerned  murals  and  involving  people  in 
embellishing  their  own  spaces.  He  takes  their  pictures, 
holds  photo  contests  through  the  press,  publicizes  pro- 
jects on  local  rV,  and  uses  teenage  paint  crews.  Working 
with  a  team  of  nine,  he  did  twenty-six  monumental  faces 
for  the  International  Year  of  the  Child,  taking  three 
hours  to  prepare  the  long  wall,  three  more  for  trans- 
ferring the  images  by  slide  projector  at  night,  and  three 
for  painting  the  professional-looking  two-tone,  high- 
contrast  faces.  Between  1975  and  1980  he  completed 
109  murals. 

Memphis 

The  first  community  mural  to  be  done  here  is  also  one 
of  the  most  impressive  of  the  national  movement.  A 
Tribute  to  Beak  Street  was  completed  in  1980  by  a  team  of 
forty  art  students  under  the  direction  of  Charles  Davis 
and  George  Hunt  as  a  project  of  Shelby  State  Commu- 
nity College.  It  was  painted  on  the  side  of  a  clothing  store 
within  sight  of  the  downtown  pedestrian  mall.  The  big, 
colorful  wall  traces  the  history  of  Black  music  from  a 
stream  of  rainbow  melody  that  issues  from  the  horn  of  an 
African  tribesman  and  turns  into  railroad  ties,  a  piano 
keyboard,  guitar  strings,  river  waves  churned  up  by  a 
sternwheeler,  and  finally  the  folds  in  the  gown  of  a  blues 
singer.  Along  the  way  there  are  vignettes  of  Black  slaves 
and  cotton  hands,  gambling,  W.  C.  Handy  or  Satchmo, 
Boss  Crump,  and  Elvis,  who  got  his  start  in  blues. 
Davis  says  he  did  his  first  mural,  Afro-Occidental  Projec- 
tions in  Miami  in  1974  as  part  of  an  Art  in  Public  Build- 
ings program,  which  he  followed  with  other  walls  at  the 
University  of  .Miami  and  the  .Model  City  Cultural  Arts 
Center,  where  murals  are  still  being  done. 


Atlanta 

Downtown  Atlanta  abounded  with  supergraphics  in 
1976  when  the  first  community  mural  penetrated  to  the 
edge  of  the  area.  Here  Amos  Johnson,  Vera  Parks,  and 
Nathan  Hoskins  painted  a  Wall  of  Respect,  a  sequence  of 
professionally  executed  Photo-Realist  portraits  of  Col- 
trane,  King,  Douglass,  Malcolm,  Du  Bois,  Tut  and 
African  masks,  Joe  Frazier,  Angela  Davis,  and  Duke 
Ellington.  The  following  year  the  facade  of  the  Neigh- 
borhood Arts  Center  in  one  of  the  city's  ghettos  was 
embellished  by  a  big  panel  with  figures  symbolic  of 
different  Black  cultures  done  by  a  group  of  White  and 
Black  artists — Steven  Seaberg,  Amos  and  Truman  John- 
son, and  David  Hammons.  The  murals  continue  on  the 
inside  where  youngsters  shared  the  work.  John  Riddle, 
the  center's  director,  painted  in  1975  and  1976  six  large 
silhouette  panels  in  the  auditorium  of  the  Shrine  of  the 
Black  Madonna,  the  local  religious  and  social  service 
center  of  Black  Christian  Nationalism.  In  1978  local 
Black  muralists  were  to  be  paid  for  the  first  time  with 
city  funds. ^°  The  following  year  Lev  .Mills  saw  mounted 
in  a  new  MARTA  subway  station  in  a  Black  neighbor- 
hood a  pair  of  handsome  Mexican  mosaic  murals  he 
had  designed. 


Tuskegee 

Nelson  Stevens  came  to  Tuskegee  in  1979.  It  was  he 
who  had  done  the  faces  that  seemed  to  be  alive  with  an 


Amos  Johnson,  Vera  Parks,  and  Nathan  Hoskins:  Wall  of 
Respect,  7976,  Atlanta 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  Ul 

Steven  Seaberg,  Amos  and  Truman  Johnson,  and  David 
Mammons:  Untitled,  1977,  Neighborhood  Arts  Center, 
Atlanta. 


Nelson  Stevens:  Centennial   Vision,    1980,   Tuskeifee 
Institute,  Tuskegee,  Alabama. 


inner  fireworks  on  the  mural  for  the  Black  construction 
workers'  hall  in  Boston's  Roxbury  in  1968.  Between  1974 
and  1977,  while  teaching  at  the  University  of  Massachu- 
setts, he  directed  thirty  walls  in  Springfield  done  by  his 
students  with  titles  like  /  Am  a  Black  Woman,  Black  Music, 
and  The  Old,  the  Young,  and  the  Beautiful.  He  then  went  on 
to  Howard  University  and  was  invited  to  the  Tuskegee 
Institute  to  teach  mural  courses  and  do  a  major  work  for 
its  centennial  in  the  inner  court  of  the  new  administration 
building.  Painting  on  the  two-story-high  panel  at  night 
during  the  spring  of  1980,  he  did  portraits  of  Booker  T. 
Washington,  George  Washington  Carver,  and  Black 
leaders  from  Sojourner  Truth  to  King  against  rhythmic 
maps  of  Africa,  the  United  States,  and  Alabama  as  well 
as  horticultural  imagery.  They  are  rendered  in  Stevens's 
accomplished  style  of  weblike  color  but  are  tighter  and 
more  photographic  than  his  earlier  work. 

New  Orleans 

Perhaps   the   only    socially   concerned    mural   to   be 
painted  here  during  the  mid-seventies  was  The  Contribu- 


tion of  Blacks  to  Louisiana  History,  a  large  compendium  of 
portraits  and  vignettes  executed  in  1975  at  Southern 
Louisiana  University  by  Jack  Jordan,  chairman  of  the 
Art  Department,  and  Jean  Paul  Hubbard,  a  faculty 
member  from  the  Baton  Rouge  campus.  A  compensation 
the  city  offered  Treme  after  it  wiped  out  a  substantial 
part  of  the  Black  neighborhood  for  Louis  Armstrong 
Park  and  a  performing  arts  auditorium  was  a  recreation 
center.  There  Richard  Thomas  was  commissioned  in 


328  /  COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 


1979  to  do  a  mural,  which  he  designed  as  a  sequence 
of  panels  commemorating  Satchmo.  There  are  adept 
simulations  of  an  early  poster  and  photos  and  a  funeral 
for  him  in  the  clouds,  much  of  this  airbrushed.  On  a  low 
wall  inside  Thomas  worked  with  young  people  whom  he 
asked  to  paint  what  would  pass  before  it,  which  resulted 
in  a  witty  frieze  of  legs  and  hands.  Thomas,  who  has 
done  accomplished  socially  concerned  easel  work,  has 
also  completed  murals  for  another  rec  center  and  a 
library.  He  was  trying  to  make  up  his  mind  about  a 
career  as  community  muralist  but  felt  out  of  touch  with 
such  artists  around  the  country  and  isolated  in  New 
Orleans  where,  it  seemed,  he  alone  was  doing  social 
walls  at  the  end  of  the  decade. 


Other  Murals  in  the  East 

Phillip  Danzig,  who  had  worked  on  the  Grant's  Tomb 
mosaic  benches  in  Manhattan  in  1973,  served  as 
architect-in-residence  in  New  Jersey  during  the  second 
half  of  the  seventies  funded  by  the  state  Council  on  the 
Arts.  Together  with  CETA  youth  he  did  a  panel  mural 
on  the  social  struggles  and  strikes  of  1911  and  1913, 
calling  kPaterson,  Past  and  Future,  in  Newark  in  1977  he 
began  a  tile  mural  project  with  tenants  of  Columbus 
Homes  public  housing,  who  designed  two-and-a-half- 
by-six-foot  panels  for  the  lobbies  of  six  buildings.^' 

A  number  of  Nelson  Stevens's  students  went  on  to 
direct  their  own  projects — Clement  Roach  and  Clyde 
Santana  for  the  New  Jersey  Arts  Commission'^  and 
Arturp  Lindsay  in  Hartford,  Connecticut.  Among  the 
murals  Lindsay  did  there  was  In  Homage  to  Puerto  Rican 
Historical  Figures,  which  was  painted  with  CETA  assist- 
tants,  and  its  progress  was  followed  by  the  state's  public 


Richard  Thomas:  Louis  Ouis  Lou,  1979,  Treme  Com- 
munity Center,  New  Orleans. 


TV.''  Meanwhile  in  New  Haven  Ruth  Resnick  and 
Terry  Lennox  were  doing  community  murals  with 
CETA  youth,  and  in  Norwich  local  muraiists  worked 
on  the  City  Hall  and  the  Public  Works  building  with  the 
help  of  Eva  Cockcroft. 

The  Popular  Arts  Workshop  organized  in  1976  in 
Lansing,  Michigan,  did  murals  for  a  minipark  depicting 
historical  buildings  of  the  community  that  had  disap- 
peared, and  went  on  to  do  another  wall  painting  for  the 
Lansing  Center  for  the  Arts  and  an  underpass  work 
inspired  by  the  city's  annual  ethnic  festival.^'* 

In  Cleveland  that  year  Gloria  Mark,  working  with 
local  young  people  in  a  multiethnic  neighborhood, 
undertook  a  mural  on  an  abutment  with  two  monumental 
Black  hands  clasping  across  maps  of  Africa  and  the 
United  States.  They  called  it  Afro-American  Unity.  Two 
months  after  completion  red  paint  was  splashed  over  it, 
but  the  artists  decided  to  let  this  remain  as  a  symbol  of 
the  struggles  of  Black  people.  Several  months  later  one  of 
the  black  hands  was  painted  white,  and  this  was  allowed 
to  stay  as  an  appeal  for  cooperation.  But  when  a  swastika 
was  added,  Mark  called  neighborhood  people  together  to 
discuss  the  defacement  with  the  result  that  forty-five  of 
them  repainted  the  mural.  In  July  1977  the  work  was 
extended  to  192  feet  by  adding  symbols  of  the  different 
cultures  of  local  residents — Black,  Hispanic,  Native 
American,  Asian,  Eastern  European,  and  Appalachian. 
Looking  at  them  in  opposite  directions  are  a  series  of 
Janus-faces  painted  in  colors  representing  the  races.  The 
artists  now  retitled  their  work  Culture  Rhythm,  and  it  was 
not  again  defaced.'* 

Between  1972  and  1977  Cleveland  was  the  scene  of 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  329 


Local  youth  directed  by  Gloria  Mark:  Culture  Rhythm, 
1977,  Cleveland.  (Photo  Gloria  Mark) 

dozens  of  murals  with  varied  purposes  and  styles  both 
downtown  and  in  the  neighborhoods.  They  were  spon- 
sored by  the  Cleveland  Area  Arts  Council  under  the 
directorship  of  Helen  Haynes,  and  funding  had  come 
from  the  NEA,  CETA,  the  local  housing  authority,  and 
business.  But  muralists  like  Gloria  Mark  were  dropped 
by  the  CAAC  when  it  shifted  in  the  direction  of 
establishment  art.  In  1978  Mark  met  muralists  from 
London  and  spent  part  of  the  following  year  painting 
with  them  in  racially  mixed  areas  of  the  English  capital. 

Chicago 

During  the  second  half  of  the  seventies  there  was  a 
new  wave  of  mural  activity  in  the  Pilsen  Barrio.  A  fire  at 
Casa  Aztlan  in  1974  had  destroyed  some  of  Ray  Patlan's 
work  in  the  auditorium,  and  he  departed  for  Berkeley  the 
following  year.  Some  of  his  murals  were  touched  up  and 
some  replaced  by  Marcos  Raya  and  others  between  1975 
and  1978.  Behind  the  stage  Raya  painted  in  a  Photo- 
Realist,  high-contrast  style  a  march  of  local  people  com- 
ing forward,  and  next  to  it  a  draftsmanlike  view  of 
Mexican  pyramids.  In  the  stairwell  Aurelio  Diaz,  bor- 
rowing from  Siqueiros,  did  an  impressive  image  of  a 
worker  whose  massive  fists  are  like  the  machinery  he 
masters  in  contrast  to  a  laborer  on  an  adjoining  wall  who 
is  chewed  up  and  spat  out  on  a  conveyor  belt.  The 
pre-Columbian  designs  on  the  exterior  of  the  building 
were  renewed  and  portraits  of  leaders  from  Hidalgo  to 
Che  added. 

Between  1975  and  1978  more  murals  were  painted 
throughout  the  neighborhood,  particularly  by  Diaz  and 
Salvador  Vega,  both  of  whom  were  members  of 
MARCH  (Movimiento  Artistico  Chicano).  At  Dvorak 
Park  in  1976  a  new  very  large  work  replaced  the  guerrilla 


mural  indicting  the  police  that  Patlan  and  a  gang  had 
done  years  before.  Now  Vega,  Diaz,  Raya,  and  Juanita 
Jaramillo  took  on  much  more.  The  mural  begins  at  the 
left  with  a  midnight  attack  on  Chicanos  by  hoods,  politi- 
cians, businessmen,  the  Klan,  police,  and  the  military. 
An  "illegal"  is  felled  at  the  border,  a  worker  is  chained  to 
a  machine  and  a  prostitute  is  sprawled  on  the  ground.  In 
the  center  beneath  the  .Mexican  eagle  struggling  with  the 
snake,  a  husband  at  the  head  of  a  throng  vehemently 
bursts  from  the  wall  drawing  his  wife  and  daughter  after 
him.  And  at  the  far  right  a  mother  is  giving  birth. 

The  children's  paintings  on  the  retaining  wall  of  the 
railroad  embankment  on  Sixteenth  Street  were  extended 
during  1977  and  1978  and  older  artists  created  a  frieze 
that  stretches  for  blocks.  There  is  a  monumental  Olmec 
head  and  other  sculptural  pre-Columbian  faces,  the  vis- 
age of  Che,  heraldic  assertions  of  Chicano  power,  and  a 
young  woman  raising  her  hand  and  calling  out  Yo  soy 
Chicana.  (I  am  Chicana).  The  work  of  Aurelio  Diaz 
appears  a  number  of  times.  Here  and  elsewhere  in  Pilsen 
he  painted  with  young  people,  gangs  and  derelicts,  be- 
lieving that  although  barrio  people  grew  up  without  a 
sense  of  history,  they  had  the  heart  to  paint  about  their 
lives  and  through  this  learn  about  their  past.  Local  people 
came  to  him  not  only  to  do  art  but  to  ask  him  his  advice 
on  what  to  read.  Diaz  was  from  Michoacan  and  spoke 
only  Tarasco  until  he  learned  Spanish  at  fifteen  and  later 
came  to  this  country  to  "learn  about  the  U.S.  system." 
By  1979  he  had  returned  to  .Mexico,  but  Casa  Aztlan 
was  hoping  he  would  come  back  to  work  with  Pilsen 
artists  that  summer  on  the  mural  at  the  new  Benito 
Juarez  High  School  that  was  finally  to  be  funded  after 
years  of  delay. 

Meanwhile  in  the  Austin  area  of  the  West  Side  in 
1976,  the  Public  Art  Workshop  continued  its  work.  Mark 
Rogovin  coordinated  three  murals  in  underpasses,  giving 
experience    to    thirty    CETA    summer    youth    and 


Marcos  Ray  a:  Untitled,  1975-76,  Casa  Aztldn,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


Aurelio  Diaz:  Untitled,  1975-78,  Casa  Aztldn,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


^H 

hS^^K^B           Jr^^^^Y 

mc 

M^^ 

B^ 

IL^/ 

^■^nc 

jft           ^^^^^^w    ^»^ 

k^^  i^H 

Aurelio  Diaz:  Untitled,  1975-78,  Casa  Aztldn,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


Salvador  Vega,  Aurelio  Diaz,  Marcos  Raya,  undjuanita 
Jaramillo:  Untitled,  1976,  Dvorak  Park,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


Dvorak  Park  Mural  (partial  view). 


332  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Aurelio  Diaz,  Oscar  Moya,  Mardoqueo  Raygoza,  Jorge 
Bdrcenas,  and  others:  Yo  Soy  Chicana;  Olmeca;  and 
other  titles,  1977,  Sixteenth  Street  railroad  embankment, 
Pilsen,  Chicago. 


Caryl  Yasko  and  Lucyna  Radycki  in  cooperation  with 
residents  and  construction  workers  (CMC):  Roots  and 
Wings,  1976,  Southwest  Side,  Chicago. 


neighborhood  volunteers.  Themes  related  to  a  nearby 
library,  the  "Y,"  and  the  need  for  a  day-care  center. 
Support  came  from  the  Austin  assembly  and  develop- 
ment corporation,  a  local  church,  and  public  agencies. 
Kathleen  Farrell  painted  at  an  Amalgamated  Clothing 
Workers  day-care  center;  and  PAW  did  mural  workshops 
in  Chicago  elementary  schools  and  advised  inmates  at  the 
state  prison  at  Michigan  City,  Indiana,  on  how  to  do 
portable  murals  that  were  to  travel  around  the  state. ^^ 

Caryl  Yasko  and  Lucyna  Radycki  of  the  Chicago 
Mural  Group  opened  new  possibilities  for  murals  in  1976 
on  the  Southwest  Side  with  a  work  that  combined  a 
painted  upper  section  with  a  lower  part  in  cast  concrete, 
for  which  local  teenagers  and  adults  carved  forms  out  of 
styrofoam.  These  include  a  locomotive,  a  Polish  eagle,  a 
Sacred  Heart,  a  Star  of  David,  a  mother  and  child,  and 
musical  motifs.  From  this  soil  a  massive  painted  tree  with 
faces  representing  different  ethnic  groups  lifts  itself. 
Further  along  the  roots  burgeon  into  trunks  and  branches 


that  intertwine  like  two  human  figures  joining  arms.  The 
main  trunk  embraces  a  mound  that  bears  the  inscription 
"There  are  two  lasting  bequests  we  can  give  our  children. 
One  is  roots  the  other  wings."  And  leaping  up  in  the 
background  amidst  golden  leaves  is  a  winged  horse.  The 
mural  was  titled  Roots  and  Wings.  Cement  was  provided 
by  a  local  contractor,  and  neighborhood  concrete  work- 
ers volunteered  their  skills.  What  was  important  about 
the  technical  innovation  was  that  it  provided  the  attrac- 
tion and  means  for  many  nonartists  to  participate  in 
creating  a  local  monument. 

The  imagery  of  roots  had  a  hold  on  popular  conscious- 
ness at  this  time.  It  had  been  stimulated  first  by  the 
ethnic  rediscovery  of  heritage  in  the  sixties  that  spread  to 
Eastern  European  and  other  groups.  There  was  the 
publication  of^Alex  Haley's  book  in  1976  and  finally  the 
Bicentennial.  Clearly  what  lay  behind  much  of  this  was 
the  rootlessness  of  people  in  modern  society.  This  imag- 
ery was  handled  in  a  different  way  by  another  CMG 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  3  3  3 


Roots  and  Wings  (detail) 


Jose  Guerrero,  Celia  Radek,  and  Cynthia  Weiss  (CMG): 
Fruits  of  Our  Labor,  1976,  Northwest  Side,  Chicago. 


334  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

mural  that  year  that  shows  people  of  different  races  and 
ages  working  at  the  roots  of  modern  society,  which  are 
also  its  productive  apparatus — its  ropes,  pipes,  gears, 
springs,  nuts,  and  bolts  that  leaf  out  and  blossom  into  a 
lush  tree  beneath  which  children  are  playing.  The  im- 
aginatively worked  out  details  correspond  to  the  two 
stories  of  the  building  it  is  painted  on  which  has  a  shop 
downstairs  and  an  apartment  above.  Artists  Celia  Radek, 
Cynthia  Weiss,  and  Jose  Guerrero  called  it  Fruits  of  Our 
Labor. 

Also  on  the  Northwest  side  that  year,  John  Weber 
directed  a  youth  team  in  a  racially  mixed  neighborhood 
that  painted  monumental  residents  embracing  their 
homes  against  a  background  of  old-fashioned  wallpaper. 
As  smaller  figures  repaint  walls  and  enjoy  their  leisure, 
others  fend  off  the  threats  of  speculators,  arson,  free- 
ways, and  unemployment.  A  vignette  of  a  pinball 
machine  gave  the  mural  its  popular  title:  Tilt,  but  its 
official  name  is  Together  Protect  the  Community.  When  the 
painters  found  they  had  a  few  feet  left  over  at  one  end, 
they  added  hanging  mufflers  to  acknowledge  the  shop 
whose  wall  they  were  working  on. 

Meanwhile  Esther  Charbit  and  local  assistants  painted 
Central  Lakeview  Tapestry  on  the  side  of  a  Woolworth's 
that  wove  together  the  over-life-size  faces  of  residents  in  a 
high-contrast  graphic  style.  The  varied  races  and  cul- 
tures of  the  neighbors  enrich  the  composition,  which  was 
clearly  the  social  as  well  as  aesthetic  point  of  the  painters. 
Such  neighborhood  or  school  self-portraits  were  an  early 
and  have  remained  a  continuing  form  of  community 
murals.  It  has  been  a  natural  way  for  groups  of  people  to 
affirm  their  bonds  and  provided  an  alternative  to 
portraits  of  ethnic  leaders  and  celebrities. 

One  of  the  most  beautiful  and  stylistically  ingenious 
murals  was  A  Time  to  Unite  which  Mitchell  Caton,  Calvin 


Jones,  Justine  DeVan,  and  assistants  did  on  an  old 
retaining  wall  in  a  Black  neighborhood  on  the  South 
Side.  The  time  the  clock  at  the  center  tells  is  the  Bicen- 
tennial, and  the  mural  combines  motifs  and  styles  of 
African  and  Black  American  culture  with  scenes  of 
human  solidarity.  A  colorful  watchworks  overlays  Afri- 
can textile  patterns  and  masks.  African  wall  painting  is 
juxtaposed  to  the  patterns  of  the  back  porches  and  brick 
fronts  of  local  apartment  houses.  Native  dancers  are  done 
in  hard-edge,  high-contrast,  while  the  tenement,  har- 
monica and  guitar  duo  and  family  at  opposite  ends  are 
presented  in  a  soft-focus,  Photo-Realist  manner.  Al- 
though the  family  is  in  a  painterly  style,  the  little  girl  on 
her  father's  lap  has  a  patterned  dress  that  is  flatly  ren- 
dered to  suggest  African  designs.  Culture  and  heritage 
are  the  basis  of  the  unity  appealed  for.  The  sensitivity  of 
the  craftsmanship  is  risked,  however,  by  the  block  capi- 
tals of  the  caption,  which  are  reminiscent  of  a  movie 
poster.  The  muralists  obviously  sought  to  attract  people 
passing  on  the  boulevard,  but  to  take  the  mural  in 
requires  that  you  stop  and  spend  some  time  with  it.  It  is 
then  that  the  block  caps  become  overbearing.  It  might  be 
said,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  subtle  painterly  passages 
do  not  belong  in  outdoor  work.  But  in  fact  this  is  a  place 
where  people  stroll  and  wait  for  the  bus,  a  good  site  for 
up-close  viewing.  The  work  demonstrates  the  aesthetic 
opportunities  that  community  murals  offer. 

On  another  retaining  wall  in  the  same  neighborhood 
William  Walker  did  a  very  simple  but  monumental  work 
in  1976  and  1977  that  he  titled  St.  Martin  Luther  King.  At 
first  it  appears  to  be  a  crucifixion  of  the  Black  leader,  but 
as  you  look  closer,  you  see  that  he  is  standing  in  a  niche 


Local  youth  directed  by  John  Weber  (CMG):  Together 
Protect  the  Community,  1976,  Northwest  Side, 
Chicago. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  335 


Local  people  directed  by  Esther  Charbit  (CMG):  Central 
Lakeview  Tapestry,  1976,  North  Side,  Chicago. 


Mitchell  Caton,  Calvin  Jones,  and  Justine  DeVan 
(CMG):  A  Time  to  Unite  (partial  view),  1976,  South 
Side,  Chicago. 


336  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


and  stretching  out  his  arms  as  if  to  expose  the  wrong  he 
sees  and  to  embrace  it  all.  Much  larger  than  life,  this  is  a 
massive  King,  which,  like  his  stare,  conveys  intense 
power.  King,  Sr.,  was  on  hand  for  the  dedication. 

In  1977  Walker  took  on  the  court  case  of  Delbert 
Tibbs,  a  Black  man  who  had  been  convicted  of  murder  in 
Florida  in  what  many  regarded  as  a  frame-up.  The 
conviction  was  appealed,  and  in  an  Illinois  Central 
underpass  in  Hyde  Park  where  middle  class  commuters 
walked  by  daily.  Walker  depicted  Tibbs'  attorney  and 
supporters  demanding  a  fair  trial  or  release.  In  the  center 
on  a  chessboard,  a  motif  Walker  frequently  used,  Tibbs 
is  placed  bound  up  in  the  black  and  white,  rather  than 
red,  tape  of  legal  argumetits.  The  chessboard  is  extended 
into  the  actual  pavement,  involving  viewers.  At  the  left 
are  Tibbs'  own  words.  Titling  his  work  Justice  Speaks, 
Walker  contrasts  the  small  figure  of  Tibbs  with  the  sheer 
weight  and  entanglement  of  the  legal  establishment  while 
the  tunnel's  concrete  ceiling  bears  down.  Tibbs  was 
eventually  released  by  the  Florida  Court  of  Appeals. 

In  1976,  at  the  other  end  of  the  same  viaduct  at 
Fifty-seventh  Street,  Astrid  Fuller,  who  had  done  murals 
at  nearby  underpasses  in  previous  years,  was  seeking 
permission  to  do  a  sequence  of  panels  on  a  subject  she 
knew  well — social  work.  Holding  an  M.A.  in  the  field 
and  having  practiced  for  years,  she  wanted  to  depict  the 
early  achievements  of  the  profession.  But  nearby  con- 
dominium dwellers  protested  that  they  did  not  want 
"slum  art"  where  they  passed  every  day.''  The  con- 


William   Walker:   St.   Martin  Luther  King,   1977, 
South  Side,  Chicago,  with  the  artist. 


troversy  was  aired  in  the  press,  and  support  for  the 
mural,  which  was  being  sponsored  by  the  National 
Association  of  Social  Workers,  came  from  International 
House,  the  Chicago  Artists'  Coalition,  the  Independent 
Voters  of  Illinois,  and  the  Lawyers  for  the  Creative  Arts. 
Finally  the  way  was  cleared,  and  Pioneer  Social  Work  was 
completed  in  1977.  In  a  series  of  scenes  that  combine 
realism  and  symbol,  social  workers  are  shown  helping 
the  poor  struggle  against  slum  life  and  the  treadmill  of 
industrial  work.  The  campaign  to  separate  the  detention 
of  juvenile  and  adult  offenders  is  illustrated.  Also  de- 
tailed are  the  accomplishments  of  settlement  houses:  their 
teaching  of  English  to  immigrants  and  employable  skills 
to  women,  their  providing  for  community  arts  and  rec- 
reation. Social  workers  are  shown  defending  the  civil 
rights  of  anarchists  and  campaigning,  as  Jane  Addams 
did,  against  World  War  I.  The  work  was  carried  out  with 
the  clarity  and  wit  characteristic  of  Fuller. 

In  1978  working  independently  of  the  CMG,  she  did 
yet  another  underpass  mural,  this  one  at  Sixtieth  Street 
opposite  her  Rebirth  of  four  years  earlier.  Her  spirit  of 
fantasy  now  turned  the  problems  of  unemployment  into 
a  pantomime  and  ballet  in  which  a  trellis  of  dollar  signs 
separate  the  cultured  haves  and  the  desperate  have-nots. 

In  1977  CMG  artists  could  not  qualify  for  CETA 
positions,  and  NEA  funding  was  cut  off.  The  group  had 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  /  337 


William  Walker:  Justice  Speaks,  1977,  Hyde  Park, 
Chicago. 


Astrid  Fuller  (CMC):  Pioneer  Social  Work  (partial 
view),  1977,  Hyde  Park,  Chicago. 


338  /  COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 


to  depend  on  other  support,  and  Weber  returned  to  the 
Express  Car  Wash  billboard  where  the  CMG  had  done 
its  ACLU  mural,  which  had  now  peeled  and  rotted. 
Rebuilding  the  surface,  he  undertook  a  new  set  of 
images — clashing  eagles,  a  tangle  of  pipelines,  firing- 
squad  victims,  and  a  sunlike  African  mask.  It  is  a  cryptic 
set  of  symbols  that  require  some  puzzling  out,  but  they 
seem  to  add  up  to  the  struggle  over  the  earth's  resources, 
the  repression  of  liberation  movements,  and  the  rise  of 
the  Third  World.'*  He  called  xt  Prophecy . 

Also  that  year,  Justine  DeVan  with  the  help  of  local 
artists  painted  an  energetic  Black  Women  Emerging  on  a 
retaining  wall  on  the  South  Side  across  the  street  from 


Pioneer  Social  Work,  (partial  view). 


Caton's  Nation  Time.  At  the  left  African  dancers  carrying 
symbols  of  their  culture  and  the  liberation  flag  burst  from 
the  wall  along  with  a  rifle-bearing  woman.  In  the  center  a 
woman  with  a  diploma  and  another  with  a  gavel  look  out 
hopefully,  as  symbols  of  the  other  professions  women 
sought  to  enter  hover  close  at  hand.  And  at  the  right 
women  break  out  of  the  ring  of  menial  chores  so  that  a 


John  Weber  (CMG):  Prophecy,  7977,  Northwest  Side, 
Chicago. 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  339 


Justine  DeVan   with   local  assistants   (CMG):    Black 
Women  Emerging,  1977,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


mother  has  time  to  care  for  her  children.  Each  of  the 
well-drawn  figures  reaches  by  her  gesture  or  gaze  out  of 
the  wall. 

In  Defense  of  Ignorance  was  the  ironic  title  Mitchell 
Caton  and  Calvin  Jones  gave  to  a  mural  they  did  on  the 
South  Side  in  1977  contrasting  the  pursuit  of  empty 
affluence  with  a  meaningful  life  of  service,  which  re- 
quired education.  They  attached  the  contemplative  face 
of  a  modern  Black  man  to  the  body  of  a  Sphinx  and 
added  other  symbols  of  African  civilization  to  suggest  the 
importance  of  knowledge  of  the  past  and  the  potential  of 
Black  people.  While  students  are  bending  intently  over 
their  desks,  an  ostentatiously  dressed  Black  businessman 
and  his  wife  in  white  furs  look  about  unsure  of  them- 
selves, implying  the  folly  of  running  after  nouveau  riche 
trappings.  At  the  far  right  the  shadowy  silhouette  of  a 
tearful  Black  profile  is  the  scene  of  a  conflict  of  arrows  as  a 
pencil  is  trying  to  open  it  up.  This  explicit  criticism  of 
the  Black  establishment  by  Black  artists  was  new  ground 
for  murals. 

Holly  Highfill,  who  had  been  painting  independently 
for  years  among  Appalachian  migrants  in  Uptown,  did 
Stop  Arson  for  Profit  in  1977  as  part  of  a  campaign  to  halt 
hired  torches  working  for  landlords  who  want  to  collect 
insurance  on  unprofitable  apartment  buildings.  Here  on 


a  wall  along  a  main  shopping  street  racially  mixed  resi- 
dents are  restraining  an  arsonist  dressed  in  all-white  garb 
with  a  torch  in  one  hand  and  dollar  bills  in  the  other. 

In  1978  John  Weber  and  Barry  Bruner  worked  in  a 
Puerto  Rican  barrio  on  the  Northwest  Side  with  eight 
CETA  youths.  They  decided  to  paint  directly  on  the 
large  areas  of  plaster  and  brick  of  a  three-story  common 
wall  that  had  been  shared  by  a  still  intact  building  and 
rooms  that  had  been  demolished.  Imaginatively  treating 
these  surfaces  as  just  what  they  were,  they  painted  a 
blown-up  wedding  photo  hanging  on  a  wall,  a  figure 
climbing  steps  and  (against  the  brick)  outdoor  scenes  of 
picketers  for  jobs,  pedestrians  at  the  actual  corner  bus 
stop,  and  the  local  piraguero  with  his  snowcone  cart. 
There  were  also  protests  against  insurance  red-lining,  a 
scene  of  island  music  and  a  memorial  to  Roberto 
Clemente.  They  called  their  work  Nuestras  Vidas — Our 
Lives.  At  the  lower  left  corner  the  painters  added  a  small 
version  of  a  mural  Weber  had  directed  in  1971  in  another 
Puerto  Rican  neighborhood — Rompiendo  las  Cadenas 
(Break  the  Chains).  The  apartment  house  the  work  had 
been  painted  on  was  to  be  demolished  and  the  mural 
became  a  symbol  of  the  effort  to  save  low-rent  housing. 
Eventually  demolition  was  blocked  and  local  ownership 
became  possible. 

A  few  blocks  away  from  Nuestras  Vidas  other  CMG 
artists,   Jose    Guerrero,    Oscar    Martinez    and   Judith 


34()/(:()MMUNI  TY  MURALS 


Mitchel  Caton  and  Calvin  Jones  (CMC):  In  Defense  of 
Ignorance,  1977,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


Holly  Highfill  with  local  assistants:  Stop  Arson  for 
Profit,  1977,  Northside,  Chicago. 


Motyka,  painted  Smash  Plan  21,  a  protest  of  Chicago's 
project  to  redevelop  the  barrio  and  much  of  the  inner  city 
by  the  year  2,000,  which  would  mean  the  eviction  of 
present  low  income  residents.  Beneath  the  repeated 
monumental  face  of  a  young  woman  raising  her  chin  in 
resistance,  local  people  carrying  a  banner  reading  "Save 
Our  Homes"  go  on  to  topple  city  hall. 

Rounding  out  Chicago  murals  for  this  period,  Eugene 
Eda  was  at  work  in  1978  and  1979  on  a  free-standing 
porcelain  enamel  mural  near  the  site  where  the  Wall  of 
Respect  had  been  created.  It  was  to  be  a  four-winged  set 
of  walls  six  feet  high  and  accommodating  therefore  eight 
sides  of  images,  which  included  portraits  of  Black  leaders 
and  symbols  of  their  achievements.  Although  Eda  said  he 
was  less  sympathetic  to  the  Panthers  than  he  had  been 
ten  years  earlier,  the  model  showed  a  black  cat  springing 
out  of  a  "NOW."  The  anticipated  cost  was  sixteen 
thousand  dollars,  which  was  being  provided  by  the 
NEA,  the  Chicago  Council  on  the  Arts  and  various  city 
departments.  Eda  himself  was  employed  as  a  CETA 
artist-in-residence.  He  hoped  to  see  the  work  completed 
in  the  fall  of  1979  and  intended  to  call  it  the  Martin  Luther 
King,  Jr. ,  Memorial  Wall. 

Other  Midwest  Sites 

Kathleen  Farrell,  who  was  associated  with  the  Public 
Art  Workshop  in  Chicago  and  had  helped  do  the  first 
community  mural  in  Joliet  in  the  mid-seventies,  by  1978 
had  directed  or  instigated  fifteen  murals  there.  That  year 
on  the  side  of  a  two-story  building  she  led  a  team  that 
included  the  local  Teamster  president,  union  members, 
and  college  students;  Mark  Rogovin  and  Barbara  Russum 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  341 

helped.  The  wall,  sponsored  by  the  Will  County  Feder- 
ation of  Labor  and  its  Machinists  Union,  was  a  montage 
of  men  and  women  workers  at  their  machinery  and 
putting  forward  a  union  contract  at  the  bargaining  table. 
They  called  \t  Justice  on  the  Job. 

Rogovin  had  been  carrying  PAW  activities  yet  further 
afield  over  the  past  two  years  by  directing  murals  in 
Nebraska.  In  1977  he  did  workshops  at  the  state  univer- 
sity in  Omaha  and  the  following  year  he  was  in  Lincoln 
directing  a  mural  with  the  inmates  of  a  federal  correc- 
tions facility,  another  at  a  Chicano  community  center 
and  a  third  at  the  university. '' 

Meanwhile  Caryl  Yasko  of  the  CMG  was  now  in 
Wisconsin  where  with  Niki  Glen  and  John  McNeilles 
she  worked  on  a  wall  two  blocks  from  the  state  capitol  in 
Madison  in  1977.  The  four-story  surface  was  without 
windows  but  had  three  irregularly  placed  doors  at  upper 
levels  that  ojsened  out  into  midair.  But  the  artists  incor- 
porated them  into  their  design,  taking  them  for  what 
they  were — doors  that  could  be  opened.  The  composi- 
tion turns  them  into  the  heads  of  comets  that  spring  from 
a  human  brow  like  ideas,  while  the  monumental  face  of  a 

Eugene  Eda  with  model  (j/"  Martin  Luther  King,  Jr., 
Memorial  Wall,  1979,  Chicago. 


Kathleen  Farrell,  director,  with  trade  unionists,  college 
students,  and  Public  Art  Workshop:  Justice  on  the  Job, 
1978,Joliet. 


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342  /COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 

golden  woman  looks  up  in  anticipation,  and  the  earth 
shrouded  in  a  swirling  cloud  cover  hurtles  through  space. 
All  of  this  is  rendered  in  beautifully  transparent  color 
that  transforms  the  wall.  The  artists  titled  their  work  Our 
Search  for  Knowledge  in  an  Everchanging  Universe.  It  was  an 
ingenious  solution  to  the  physical  site  and  appropriate  to 
the  nearby  university  and  capitol. 

Yasko  used  similar  sweeping  forms  and  transparent 
color  in  another  large  wall  in  a  gym  in  Racine  that  she 
completed  in  the  spring  of  1979. 

Summary  of  the  Fourth  Period 

Murals  between  1976  and  1979  began  with  a  great 
number  of  works  that  were  either  officially  sponsored  by 
Bicentennial  committees  or  that  independently  took  up 
themes  related  to  the  anniversary.  None  of  these  done  by 
veteran  community  muralists  were  jingoist.  These  paint- 
ers used  the  occasion  to  commemorate  the  contribution 
of  working  people  and  ethnic  groups  to  the  building  of 
the  nation  and  local  life.  Where  before  heritage  murals 
were  addressed  mainly  to  a  neighborhood,  now  they  also 
turned  outward  toward  the  public  at  large,  as  in  the  case 
of  the  Tujunga  Wash  Mural  and  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery. 
While  the  occasion  was  taken  advantage  of  to  call  for 
interracial  cooperation  of  all  those  who  had  been  dis- 
criminated against  because  of  their  race,  sex,  or  income, 
it  was  also  used  to  appeal  for  ethnic  solidarity,  as  in  the 
case  of  A  Time  to  Unite.  Rios,  Machado,  Maciel,  and  the 
Haight  Ashbury  Muralists  took  up  the  theme  of  "A 
Bicentennial  without  Colonies"  and  protested  the  misuse 
of  U.S.  economic  and  political  power  abroad,  particu- 
larly in  Puerto  Rico,  Mexico,  and  Nicaragua.  In  Berkeley. 
A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  memorialized  the 
progressive  struggles  of  the  sixties.  Other  works  Vike  Roots 
and  Wings,  though  not  explicitly  Bicentennial,  arose  out 
of  the  general  interest  in  the  heritage  of  local  people  and 
the  resources  it  provided. 

Murals  celebrating  specific  ethnic  cultures  continued 
to  be  painted  during  the  latter  half  of  the  decade.  There 
were  the  facade  Monroe  directed  for  the  Afro-American 
Historical  Society  in  San  Francisco,  Gaton's  Blacks  from 
Egypt  to  Now,  Crumpler's  Fire  Next  Time,  Aliseo's  Espiritu 
Latino,  and  the  D.C.  Latino  work  with  the  caption  "A 
People  Without  Murals  Is  A  De-Muralized  People."  But 
there  were  also  mixed  ethnic  works  affirming  the  varied 
cultures  of  people  as  a  means  of  bringing  them  together 
like  Commonarts'  Song  of  Unity  and  the  wall  Hernandez 
did  for  the  Plaza  Cultural  in  Loisaida.  The  satisfactions 
and  cooperation  of  racially  diverse  neighbors  was  the 
import  of  the  widespread  use  of  local  portraits.  In  San 
Francisco  Cervantes,  Jamerson,  and  later  the  Precita 
Eyes  Muralists  also  emphasized  the  bonds  of  community 
people  to  which  their  diverse  backgrounds  contributed. 

As  earlier  works,  these  ethnic  and  interracial  murals 
had  in  common  the  defense  and  development  of  their 
working-class  neighborhoods  in  line  with  their  residents' 


priorities,  which  continued  to  be  the  main  thrust  of 
community  murals  in  general.  A  Chicano  Park  pylon 
protested  the  inundation  of  junkyards.  The  Dvorak  Park 
mural  in  Chicago's  Pilsen  showed  the  barrio  under  siege 
by  the  city  power  structure  and  fighting  back.  Re- 
peatedly murals  demanded  decent  jobs  and  affordable 
housing.  Wall  art  continued  to  be  done  to  protest  the 
destruction  of  moderate  and  low-income  residences  by 
renewal  authorities,  landlords'  neglect,  banks'  red-lining 
and  arson  for  hire.  Weber's  Tilt  and  City  arts'  Crear  una 
Sociedad  Nueva  depicted  neighbors'  efforts  to  fend  off 
freeways  and  real  estate  speculators.  Works  like  Brad- 
ford's WAPAC  mural  called  for  the  diversion  of  public 
funds  from  big  investors  to  local  construction  firms  and 
tenants  using  their  own  skills  as  equity  to  rehab  their 
housing. 

Related  to  these  community  themes  were  those  murals 
that  embellished  neighborhood  institutions  and  defended 
public  services  on  which  people  of  modest  incomes  de- 
pended. City  arts  coordinated  two  murals  protesting 
budget  cuts  for  public  education.  In  Chicago  Caton  and 
Jones  distinguished  between  education  that  could  pro- 
duce a  civilization  and  the  empty  pursuit  of  private 
affluence.  The  walls  of  neighborhood  health  services, 
public  and  private,  were  painted  by  Carrillo,  Rios,  Her- 
ron,  and  the  Nevels  to  persuade  people  to  take  advantage 
of  them.  On  one,  Thermann  presented  sexual  freedom  as 
a  form  of  nurturing.  Rios  did  a  simple  but  impressive 
mural  for  a  community  law  office  and  Fuller  told  the 
history  of  social  work.  The  Commonarts  muralists  illus- 
trated the  results  of  training  at  a  skills  center,  and  Breeze 
painted  a  celebration  of  sports  for  a  San  Francisco  play- 
ground. 

Murals  not  only  attacked  the  establishment  because  of 
chronic  unemployment;  works  like  Our  History  Is  No 
Mystery  and  Black  Women  Emerging  continued  the  call  for 
the  access  "of  women  to  all  vocations  including  home- 
making  for  those  who  choose  it.  Our  History,  Farrell's 
Justice  on  the  Job,  and  Schnorr  and  Yamagata's  pylon 
on  the  lettuce  pickers'  strike  reaffirmed  the  importance  of 
labor  organizing. 

An  increasing  number  of  prisoners'  murals  were  as- 
sisted by  professional  artists  such  as  Rogovin  in  Indiana 
and  Nebraska,  the  Nevels  and  Patlan  in  Oakland, 
Gayton,  Bergman  and  Williams  in  San  Francisco,  and 
de  Vargas  in  San  Diego;  in  the  San  Fernando  Valley, 
SPARC  worked  with  juvenile  offenders  at  Tujunga 
Wash. 

The  concern  of  muralists  for  human  well-being  led  to 
works  dealing  with  their  wider  environment.  The  Berke- 
ley Co-op  Winds  of  Change  not  only  extended  the  audi- 
ence of  murals  to  a  broad  middle  and  working  class 
clientele  but  presented  their  efforts  as  consumers  as  part 
of  a  larger  struggle  of  nature  itself  against  the  squander- 
ing of  life.  Works  around  the  country  warned  against 
pollution  and  the  ravaging  of  the  whole  ecosystem,  in- 
cluding whales.  The  turning  of  science  and  research 


toward  the  health  of  humankind  was  contrasted  by  Her- 
ron  with  the  doubtful  value  of  the  tangle  of  freeways, 
space  travel,  and  the  bomb  while  poverty  prevailed  in  the 
barrios.  In  Los  Angeles  Bravo  was  concerned  with  the 
humanizing  of  technology,  and  Hernandez  on  the  Lower 
East  Side  connected  murals  with  inner-city  farming, 
local  solar  and  wind  energy,  and  the  cooperative  rehab- 
bing  of  tenements  by  tenant  owners.  And  the  China 
Books  mural  in  San  Francisco  suggested  related  forms  of 
cooperative  labor.  Judy  Baca  and  the  SPARC  artists  who 
created  the  Survival  Sunday  mural  made  explicit  that  the 
quality  of  life  and  work  that  the  people  who  produce 
society's  wealth  get,  the  character  of  their  housing  and 
whether  they  have  jobs  at  all,  are  political  decisions  that 
they  would  have  to  control  before  their  needs  were  met. 
Exhibiting  the  mural  at  the  antinuclear  rally  made  clear 
also  that  these  questions  were  closely  connected  with  the 
kind  of  energy  and  technology  society  depended  on  and 
who  decided.  Murals  were  thus  making  contact  with 
forms  of  production  that  could  be  operated  and  con- 
trolled by  neighborhood  people,  kinds  of  work,  and 
technology  that  responded  to  real  human  needs,  includ- 
ing those  of  expression.  Wall  art  was  providing  an 
example  itself  of  collective  work  in  the  community. 

During  this  period  in  some  cities  murals  had  become 
mainly  decorative,  and  in  other  places  there  was  danger 
that  they  would  become  knee-jerk  responses  to  patriotic 
or  even  ethnic  pieties.  The  Bicentennial  encouraged  this, 
but  it  was  a  passing  event  and  would  have  no  long-term 
effect  on  murals.  A  more  serious  concern  was  expressed 
during  a  discussion  in  1978  of  local  artists  and  labor 
organizers  at  the  Logan  Barrio's  Hermandad  Mexicana. 
Al  Johnson,  a  Chicano  and  member  of  the  barrio's  plan- 
ning association,  conceded  that  the  indio  imagery  of  the 
murals  was  important  in  reestablishing  roots.  But  he 
wanted  to  see  murals  explicitly  address  current  issues. 
And  his  listeners  agreed  that  they  would  like  to  see  more 
like  the  portable  labor  mural  of  Salvador  Torres  that 
hung  nearby  and  had  been  carried  in  demonstrations  and 
served  as  a  backdrop  at  rallies. 

Ethnic  symbols,  as  well  as  fists,  chains,  and  doves,  had 
lost  their  ability  to  promote  reasoned  action  when  not 
focused  on  specific  issues.  Supporters  of  murals  jwinted 
out  that  ethnic  heritage  was  sometimes  treated  uncriti- 
cally and  involved  bad  history.  There  was  the  risk  that 
the  past  and  its  symbols  would  become  merely  orna- 
mental and  picturesque,  and  that  the  establishment  was 
pressing  muralists  into  that  position.  This  is  what  had 
befallen  the  Mexican  mural  movement  since  the  sixties. 
These  questions  will  be  examined  in  more  detail  later, 
but  they  arose  in  the  mid-seventies  and  contributed  to 
disagreements  among  muralists.  As  we  saw,  the  Galeria 
de  la  Raza  in  San  Francisco  withdrew  from  sponsoring 
murals  in  1976  because  of  the  judgment  of  the  staff  that 
they  were  no  longer  coming  to  grips  with  the  tough 
problems  that  confronted  local  people.  The  Galeria 
turned   instead   to   posters   and   billboards   because   it 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  343 

thought  they  could  be  more  topical  and  relevant  due  to 
the  simplicity  and  cheapness  of  producing  them; 
moreover,  the  approval  of  the  authorities  was  not  re- 
quired. 

There  was  increasing  criticism  by  veteran  muralists  of 
the  self-absorption  of  some  newcomers  who  used  paint- 
ing in  public  as  a  way  of  doing  something  "trendy"  and 
only  advancing  their  private  careers.  Victor  Ochoa,  di- 
rector of  Chicano  Park  painting,  said  in  1978  that  some 
pylons  in  recent  years  had  been  done  without  sufficient 
sensitivity  to  the  barrio's  feelings.  Both  Salvador  Torres 
there  that  year  and  Rene  Yaiiez  in  San  Francisco  already 
in  1976  were  concerned  that  CETA,  while  providing 
needed  funds,  also  had  made  it  possible  for  some 
muralists  only  to  go  through  the  motions  of  responding 
to  the  communities  they  worked  in.  Real  responsiveness 
was  extremely  demanding,  especially  for  artists  trained 
to  individualist  habits  of  work.  Some  softening  of  com- 
mitment was  likely  when  painters  became  itinerant  pub- 
lic employees,  as  frequently  happened  under  CETA, 
without  personal  attachment  to  local  people  or  a 
muralists'  group  that  had  frequently  worked  in  a  par- 
ticular area  and  felt  a  responsibility  to  it.  Still  there  was 
widespread  conscientiousness  among  the  muralists,  and 
new  socially  concerned  groups  like  Commonarts, 
SPARC,  and  Precita  Eyes  Muralists  had  come  into  exis- 
tence during  this  period. 

Community  muralists  disagreed  concerning  whether  it 
was  necessary  to  take  an  explicit  social  or  political  point 
of  view  in  their  painting,  and  further  whether  a  mural 
should  express  the  local  consensus  or  what  they  regarded 
as  the  most  progressive  ideas  in  the  community  to  edu- 
cate or  even  challenge  local  opinion.  But  many  of  those 
who  continued  to  paint  in  the  neighborhoods  did  so  out 
of  social  conviction  and  regarded  murals  as  instruments 
of  raising  consciousness  and  urging  activism.  They  saw 
themselves  as  artists  using  their  craft  in  a  long-term 
political  struggle  to  help  workers  and  community  people 
gain  control  over  their  lives. 

During  the  winter  of  1978-79  a  number  of  muralists, 
among  them  Lucy  Mahler  and  Eva  Cockcroft  and  the 
new  director  of  Cityarts,  Kathleen  Gupta,  observed  that 
neighborhood  people  now  wanted  affirmative  works  and 
proposals  for  change  rather  than  political  protest.  Weber 
agreed  that  there  were  "fewer  fists."  This  desire  for  more 
positive  statements  was  reflected  in  new  work  connected 
with  community  vegetable  gardens,  sweat  equity  hous- 
ing, appropriate  technology,  and  health  care.  The  group 
portraits  of  neighbors  might  be  short  on  concrete  pro- 
posals but  they  celebrated  their  bonds  and  encouraged 
their  working  together. 

Among  muralists  generally  there  was  increased  inter- 
est in  technique.  At  the  Second  National  Mural  Confer- 
ence in  Chicago  in  1978,  presentations  were  made  on  the 
use  of  porcelain  enamel,  cast  concrete,  and  mosaics.*" 
Luis  Arenal,  director  of  the  Taller  Siqueiros  in  Cuer- 
nevaca,  Mexico,  described  the  methods  of  e/  Maestro,  and 


344  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

they  were  demonstrated  by  his  coHeagues  who  held  a 
week-long  workshop  after  the  conference.  One  person 
suggested  that  first-rate  technique  might  quiet  censor- 
ship. This  current  of  interest  gave  rise  to  the  concern  of 
some  that  a  preoccupation  with  formal  matters  over  the 
content  of  murals  might  be  on  the  rise,  which  was  seen  as 
running  counter  to  the  spirit  of  the  movement. 

While  there  may  be  some  cause  for  concern  here,  most 
of  these  technical  experiments  in  materials  and  design 
were  being  made  in  fact  by  politically  committed 
muralists,  such  as  Caryl  Yasko,  who  had  worked  with 
cast  concrete,  and  the  Commonarts  painters  who  were 
shortly  afterwards  to  work  in  high  relief  with  papier- 
mache.  Although  technical  matters  always  present  the 
possibility  of  distracting  artists  from  the  social  function 
of  murals,  so  far  most  experiments  with  materials  and 
design  were  undertaken  as  a  means  of  improving  the 
social  effectiveness  of  art.  The  most  important  technical 
questions  were  concerned  not  only  with  a  more  expres- 
sive image  but  also  with  how  to  develop  the  process  of 
working  with  the  community.  For  instance,  Cityarts' 
early  use  of  the  Polaroid  camera  and  silhouette  pro- 
jections as  a  means  of  helping  untrained  young  people 
produce  effective  images  was  an  important  technical 
achievement.  John  Weber  in  the  fall  of  1978  spoke  with 
enthusiasm  of  the  mural  he  had  worked  on  with  Barry 
Bruner  and  a  youth  team  during  the  summer  in  which 
they  used  the  old  plaster  and  brick  together  with  painted 
elements.  He  said  he  felt  a  "tremendous  need  to  experi- 
ment." That  he  was  able  to  satisfy  this  in  a  mural  in 
which  nonprofessionals  participated  points  to  the  merg- 
ing of  aims  that  is  characteristic  of  the  mural  movement. 
For  it  has  sought  to  meet  demands  for  artistic  as  well  as 
social  development,  which  has  included  the  community 
being  involved  in  making  art.  The  fundamental 
technological  challenge  remains  how  murals  can  help 
change  the  everyday  work  and  life  of  a  community  not 
only  by  their  messages  but  also  by  their  example  as  a 
collective  and  responsible  mode  of  production. 

But  there  was  more  to  the  problem  of  technique. 
Weber  in  1979  raised  an  issue  that  has  increasingly 
absorbed  many  of  the  veterans:  "It  is  impossible  for  me  to 
go  much  further  investing  myself  in  non-permanent 
work,"  he  said.  "Consider  that  by  the  end  of  the  century 
all  but  three  or  four  of  my  major  works  for  a  period  of  40 
years  will  be  gone.  .  .  .  We  haven't  solved  that  yet." 
This  concern  was  given  point  by  the  disintegration  or 
destruction  of  some  of  the  best  work  of  the 
movement — the  first  Wall  of  Respect,  Walker's  Black  Love 
and  Packinghouse  Worker,  Caton's  Nation  Time,  Rogovin's 
Protect  the  People's  Homes,  Okada's  Chinatown  Today,  and 
many  more  works.  There  had  been  a  continuing  search 
for  more  durable  materials,  but  already  at  the  1978 
muralists'  conference  the  question  was  asked  as  to 
whether  it  was  important  for  murals  to  survive  as  long  as 
museum  pieces,  whether  their  function  was  not  to  serve 
the  immediate  needs  they  were  designed  for — it  might  be 


for  only  a  few  years — and  then  to  be  replaced.  Such  a 
possibility  seemed  to  be  a  blow  to  an  artist  who  devoted 
most  of  his  efforts  to  murals,  a  blow  which  photographs 
could  hardly  assuage.  There  was  also  the  loss  of  some 
great  art  that  could  continue  to  move  and  instruct  view- 
ers. At  the  same  time  the  absorption  with  finding  "per- 
manent materials,"  it  was  realized,  could  interfere  with 
murals  getting  done  and  speaking  out  quickly  on  the 
urgent  issues  that  needed  to  be  addressed.  The  only 
long-lasting  murals  were  those  done  indoors  or  with 
monumental  material — concrete,  mosaic,  tile,  and  baked 
enamel.  These,  like  the  more  permanent  paints,  were 
expensive  and  therefore  not  readily  available  to  meet  the 
immediate  needs  of  communities.  Until  reasonably 
priced  media  were  developed,  muralists  would  have  to 
choose  between  priorities  or  do  both  ephemeral  and 
longer-lasting  works. 

By  1980  the  community  mural  movement  had  been 
building  for  thirteen  years.  There  had  been  the  initial 
improvisations,  many  of  them  militant,  during  the  first 
years  of  ethnic  and  cultural  nationalism.  Then  followed 
the  consolidations  of  the  veterans  of  these  early  struggles 
into  organizations  for  a  second  and  much  broader  surge 
of  activity,  which  was  the  result  of  inner-city  groups 
discovering  the  utility  of  murals  for  building  community 
consciousness  on  a  widening  range  of  issues.  They  cul- 
minated in  a  third  stage  characterized  not  only  by  the 
spread  of  mural  activity  but  especially  by  large  ensemble 
undertakings  or  the  multiplying  of  works  in  particular 
areas.  What  marked  a  fourth  stage  was  not  only  a  con- 
tinued broadening  of  subjects  and  at  least  a  shift  away 
from  protest  in  some  areas  in  the  last  few  years,  but  also 
the  reaching  of  new  groups  of  people  by  murals.  Bicen- 
tennial and  CETA  funding  made  it  possible  for  socially 
conscious  muralists  to  do  public  art  where  it  had  not  been 
done  before.  By  1978,  although  the  dramatic  expansion 
of  the  early  and  mid-seventies  in  concentrated  areas  had 
settled  down,  there  was  a  more  general  spreading  of 
mural  activity  within  cities  and  around  the  country.  But 
this  was  partly  due  to  the  drying  up  of  opportunities  in 
old  areas  and  the  painters'  search  for  new  ones.  New 
problems  and  uncertainties  that  had  been  building  since 
1974  began  to  be  felt  with  special  depth  two  years  later. 
The  easiest  to  identify  were  the  threats  to  funding.  These 
came  first  with  the  tapering  off  of  NEA  support,  which 
was  initially  made  up  by  Bicentennial  funds  and  CETA. 
But  the  allocations  for  the  nation's  anniversary  were 
quickly  exhausted,  and  then  the  CETA  money  faltered 
as  its  requirements  severely  restricted  who  could  be 
hired,  or  it  became  vulnerable  to  the  manipulation  of 
local  politics  and  the  arts  establishment.  This  will  be 
explored  later.  Meanwhile  as  early  as  1976  muralists 
were  among  the  first  to  experience  the  fiscal  crisis  of  the 
cities  as  local  funding  was  threatened.  In  1978  a  tax- 
payers' revolt  in  California  brought  an  end  to  the  funding 
of  City  wide  Murals  by  the  city  of  Los  Angeles.  The 
following  year  all  the  CETA  murals  in  San  Francisco 
were  to  be  terminated. 


Cityarts  in  New  York  by  1978  was  obliged  to  depend 
on  the  organizations  that  it  co-sponsored  murals  with  to 
bear  half  the  costs — more  than  ever  before.  It  was  unable 
to  secure  sufficient  funding  to  support  a  number  of  its 
veteran  artists  and  was  compelled  to  take  on  new  painters 
who  had  CETA  appointments,  while  it  also  had  to  seek 
out  muralists'  assistants  who  were  willing  to  work  un- 
paid. It  was  able  to  maintain  the  continuity  of  the  group 
by  asking  old  timers  to  serve  on  its  board  of  directors.  A 
great  deal  of  time  was  taken  up  by  pursuing  grants. 
Alfredo  Hernandez  observed  that  one  of  the  reasons  that 
Cityarts  was  doing  work  outside  the  Lower  East  Side, 
which  had  been  its  turf,  was  the  need  to  seek  out  new 
sjX)nsors.  This  of  course  risked  the  thinning  of  Cityarts 
involvement  in  its  community,  although  projects  did 
continue  there  in  1978.  Kathleen  Gupta  said  in  1979  that 
Cityarts  still  was  committed  to  its  immediate  neighbor- 
hoods and  their  economic  development  and  that  the 
group  was  trying  to  work  through  the  contradiction 
between  the  breadth  and  depth  of  its  involvements. 

Veteran  muralists  were  being  lost  to  the  movement  at 
least  temporarily.  Tomie  Arai,  until  1978  director  of 
Cityarts,  retired  from  full-time  involvement  because  she 
said  she  needed  to  work  on  her  own  development  as  an 
artist.  Alan  Okada,  a  codirector  before  her,  said  that  he 
had  not  done  a  mural  since  1975  because  of  the  drifting 
away  of  other  veteran  artists  and  he  did  not  want  to  work 
with  the  untrained,  which  he  believed  would  have  inter- 
fered with  his  own  growth.  Strongly  committed  to 
political  art,  Okada  felt  that  that  thrust  had  faded  in 
murals  and  that  more  was  being  done  in  graphics. 
Moreover,  murals,  he  said,  were  getting  too  expensive 
and  a  single  work  often  took  eight  months  of  arrange- 
ments before  you  even  got  to  the  wall.  Other  mural 
veterans  who  were  still  working  at  wall  art,  Lucy 
Mahler,  Eva  Cockcroft,  and  John  Weber  also  spoke  of  the 
need  to  do  more  personal  art.  Cockcroft's  easel  art  was 
concerned  with  women's  role  in  the  Iranian  Revolution 
of  1979,  and  Weber's  dealt  with  the  Thai  rising  of  two 
years  earlier  in  which  one  of  CMG's  earlier  members, 
Santi  Isrowuthakul,  was  involved. 

In  early  1979  Weber  said  that  it  was  "a  miracle  that  the 
CMC  lasted  as  a  large  co-op,"  with  most  of  its  members 
staying  with  it  for  years;  however,  he  suspected  that  "we 
only  have  a  few  more  seasons  left  in  us  as  a  group."  "But 
who  knows?"  he  added.  He  believed  that  if  the  organiza- 
tion could  no  longer  provide  work  for  its  regular  artists,  it 
would  not  perpetuate  itself  administratively,  for  in- 
stance, by  taking  on  new  CETA  artists,  for  it  was  at 
heart  a  collective.  Weber  said  that  he  thought  community 
murals  were  after  all  perhaps  a  young  artist's  field  be- 
cause of  the  difficulty  of  supporting  a  family  by  them.  It 
was  his  impression  that  few  new  Black  artists  had  gotten 
involved  with  murals  since  1972  with  the  exception  of 
those  stimulated  by  Nelson  Stevens  in  Massachusetts. 
Five  years,  it  seemed  to  him,  was  the  limit  of  the 
involvement  of  most  muralists.  (In  fact,  most  of  the  more 
accomplished  muralists  have  stayed  with  it  longer.) 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  345 
Monique  Goss,  who  had  to  leave  "Beautiful  Walls  for 
Baltimore"  in  1978  after  three  years  with  it  as  a  muralist, 
two  as  director,  because  her  CETA  salary  expired,  de- 
scribed the  federal  program  as  a  "dead  end"  that  "gives 
artists  a  temporary  sort  of  false  security."  The  fifty 
muralists  who  had  been  through  Beautiful  Walls  were 
now  stepping  over  each  other,  she  said,  trying  to  find 
jobs  in  the  private  or  public  sectors.  She  had  turned  to 
seeking  mural  work  from  business,  trying  to  persuade 
restaurants,  shopping  malls,  and  retail  shops  to  substi- 
tute quality  art  for  the  large  commercial  signs  that  iden- 
tify their  premises.  As  early  as  1976  Wayne  Cambern, 
who  had  done  the  humorous  mural  of  an  Italian/erfa,  was 
painting  portraits  of  the  independent  merchants  who 
purvey  vegetables,  meat,  and  fish  at  the  Lexington 
Market,  a  large,  old-fashioned  food  emporium.  The 
aproned  tradesmen  stood  out  on  the  big  inside  walls  against 
vignettes  of  schooners,  local  landmarks,  a  monumental 
strawberry  shortcake,  and  other  edibles.  Hieronimus 
decorated  the  meeting  room  of  the  other  building  of  the 
market  with  two  centuries  of  the  city's  notables  enjoying 
local  produce.  Elsewhere  he  was  doing  decorative  work 
that  identified  a  haberdashery  without  lettering.  Simi- 
larly the  Galena  de  la  Raza  was  helping  Mission  District 
artists  find  small  commissions  to  do  Raza  decorations  on 
nearby  shops.  While  some  of  these  projects  supported 
local  identity,  their  contribution  to  social  awareness 
risked  passing  into  picturesque  decoration.  Back  in  Bal- 
timore, Monique  Goss,  who  was  having  to  paint  authen- 
tic ducks  around  the  rotunda  of  a  suburban  mall,  said 
that  she  felt  trapjjed  between  her  desire  to  do  socially 
responsible  and  quality  art  on  the  one  hand  and  survival 
on  the  other. 

John  Weber  reported  that  much  of  the  trade-union 
support  for  murals  in  Chicago  was  fading  in  1978;  at  best 
it  had  depended  on  a  few  progressives  in  the  Amalga- 
mated Meatcutters  and  United  Electrical  Workers  un- 
ions. However,  he  was  planning  to  do  a  mural  for  the 
Illinois  Labor  History  Society  in  1979.  While  unions  had 
assisted  murals  in  Chicago  and  Joliet,  nationwide  or- 
ganized labor  had  not  provided  the  support  it  could  be 
exjiected  to  give.  But  as  the  seventies  came  to  a  close 
there  was  increasing  interest  in  working  class  culture  by 
unions,  the  film  industry,  and  researchers.  Charles 
White,  the  Black  muralist  and  graphic  artist  of  the  previ- 
ous generation,  was  to  receive  a  retrospective  exhibit  that 
unfortunately  became  a  posthumous  one  presented  by 
District  1199  Hospital  and  Health  Care  Employees  as 
part  of  a  two  year  "Bread  and  Roses"  program  it  was 
launching  concerned  with  working-class  art,  drama,  and 
films. 

Censorship,  overt  and  implicit,  during  this  period  was 
increasing,  as  murals  became  more  common  and  city 
halls  became  the  principal  conduits  of  their  public  fund- 
ing. Early  in  1979  Weber  in  Chicago  and  Gupta  in  New 
York  both  were  saying  that  what  they  perceived  as  a 
decline  in  community  activism  was  having  an  effect  on 
murals.    Weber    observed    that    it    was    quiet    in    the 


346  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Wayne  Cambem:  Lexington  Market  Murals  (partial 
view),  1976,  Baltimore. 

neighborhoods  that  the  CMG  had  painted  in  and  that 
there  was  little  leadership  to  organize  residents.  He 
added  that  while  muralists  could  take  satisfaction  in 
having  contributed  to  ethnic  and  working-class  people 
coming  to  regard  community  art  as  a  right,  the  local 
power  structure  had  succeeded  in  integrating  this  expec- 
tation into  programs  it  could  dominate,  like  the  1  percent 
of  the  expenditure  on  public  buildings  set  aside  for  art, 
which  Chicago  adopted  the  previous  year.  He  believed 
that  the  grass  roots  were  losing  the  initiative  in  the 
making  of  its  art.  The  city's  community  arts  program, 
which  received  half  of  its  funding  from  the  federal  gov- 
ernment, was,  like  CE  FA,  manipulated  by  bureaucrats 
and  would  become,  he  feared,  part  of  the  patronage 
system  of  the  political  machine.  Weber  said  that  he  felt 
that  the  sense  of  community  relationship  was  growing 
weaker  overall,  though  not  uniformly.  "Still,"  he  ob- 
served, "the  popular  base  is  there  and  mural  work  of 
some  kind  is  bemg  done  virtually  everywhere." 

Fhere  had  been  reverses  during  the  mid-seventies  in 
the  response  to  the  pressure  of  minority  people  for  jobs 
and  education,  and  they  continued  to  provide  the  low- 
income  labor  pool  that  industry  could  draw  on  according 
to  its  needs.  Racial  segregation  in  the  neighborhoods  and 
local  schools  of  the  North  was  greater  than  twenty-five 


years  earlier  w  hen  the  Supreme  Court  ordered  schools  to 
desegregate  "with  all  deliberate  speed. "^*  But  the  appar- 
ent exhaustion  of  activism  in  some  arteas  where  muralists 
had  painted  did  not  extend  to  other  neighborhoods, 
unions,  and  groups  where  energies  were  replenished  and 
murals  were  sought  after.  Hispanics  in  particular  across 
the  country  strengthened  their  organizing  not  only  in 
politics  but  also  to  secure  public  funding  for  community 
art.  After  the  waning  of  the  peace  and  civil-rights 
movements  in  the  mid-seventies,  progressive  grass-roots 
organizing  and  community  self-help  projects  were  on  the 
rise  towards  the  end  of  the  decade.  Moderate-income 
residents  were  now  fighting  gentrification  as  low-income 
people  had  before  to  prevent  their  displacement  by  urban 
renewal.  Working-class  people  and  the  poor  were  or- 
ganizing to  renovate  housing,  install  appropriate  technol- 
ogy, and  experiment  with  urban  farming.  Working  and 
middle-class  people  resisted  the  raising  of  rents  and  with 
increasing  frequency  waged  successful  campaigns  to 
create  citywide  rent  control.  There  were  growing  de- 
mands for  the  restoration  or  improvement  of  public 
services,  particularly  in  education,  health,  and  commu- 
nity arts.  While  one-fifth  of  U.S.  electric  utilities  were 
publicly  owned,  pressure  mounted  to  convert  more,  and 
important  victories  were  won  in  securing  lifeline  rates  for 
seniors.  Election  reforms  after  Watergate  included  grass- 


roots  efforts  to  replace  downtown  supported  at-large  elec- 
tions of  city  councils  with  neighborhood  representatives.  Al- 
though gay  people  around  the  country  lost  some  elections 
to  protect  their  rights,  they  nevertheless  felt  freer  than 
ever  before  to  speak  out  openly,  and  they  became  a 
political  force  to  reckon  with.  The  proportion  of  or- 
ganized workers  in  the  national  workforce  was  declining, 
but  this  was  countered  by  the  growth  of  unions  among 
farm,  clerical,  and  public  service  workers  and  teachers 
from  elementary  to  university  levels.  Stronger,  too,  was 
the  rank-and-file  movement  that  had  begun  in  the  sixties 
to  democratize  unions  by  making  leadership  accountable 
and  requiring  membership  approval  of  contracts.  In- 
creasing wildcat  strikes  were  an  expression  of  local  au- 
tonomy especially  in  the  face  of  efforts  by  management, 
government,  and  some  labor  officials  to  write  no-strike 
contracts.  And  the  new  White  middle-class  activism  that 
was  quickening  around  the  issue  of  nuclear  energy  was 
being  connected  by  murals  with  the  problems  of  the 
ethnic  working  class.  As  the  elections  of  1980  approached 
and  many  who  had  voted  before  for  the  ostensibly  liberal 
party  became  increasingly  disenchanted,  new  coalitions 
were  forming  among  labor,  the  minorities,  consumer 
groups,  and  socially  concerned  professionals.  A  widen- 
ing range  of  people,  among  them  those  who  waited  in 
lines  at  filling  stations,  became  aware  that  they  were 
being  exploited  by  the  corporate  power  structure.  There 
was  also  a  revival  of  the  conviction  that  had  survived 
from  the  sixties  that  if  politics  were  to  serve  local  needs, 
it  had  to  be  locally  based,  and  that  for  democracy  to 
function,  it  had  to  be  a  full-time  concern  of  people  at 
work  and  in  their  neighborhoods.  The  upshot  of  all  this 
for  murals  was  that  the  issues  of  the  late  seventies  that 
were  becoming  the  issues  of  the  eighties  required  a 
medium  of  local  expression  and  offered  broadened  op- 
portunities for  wall  art. 

The  Second  National  Mural  Network  Conference  in 
1978  demonstrated  the  continuing  vitality  of  the  move- 
ment by  its  drawing  people  from  all  over  the  country. ^^ 
Presentations  were  made  by  muralists  from  areas  which 
had  not  been  represented  before — Saint  Louis,  Cleve- 
land, Brooklyn  and  South  Carolina.  And  artists  came  not 
only  from  Mexico  but  also  from  Britain,  where  commu- 
nity murals  had  sprung  up  during  the  seventies  in  part 
from  the  example  of  the  United  States.  The  conference 
gave  further  proof  of  the  interest  of  artists  who  were 
deeply  involved  in  their  localities  at  the  same  time  to 
learn  from  others  working  elsewhere.  The  muralists 
could  look  back  on  a  dozen  years  of  remarkable  achieve- 
ment. There  were  also  serious  problems  that  confronted 
them,  but  as  in  the  past  there  were  the  artists'  imagina- 
tion and  energy. 

The  path  towards  a  solution  of  these  difficulties  would 
have  to  begin  with  strengthening  the  relations  between 
muralists  and  the  communities  they  work  in.  The  mutual 
support  that  artists  and  communities  could  provide  each 
other  had  only  been  partially  explored.  Whether  skilled 


Problems  and  Promise  (1976-80)  I  347 

craftspeople  could  find  in  the  neighborhoods  and  local 
institutions  the  opportunities  for  a  new  kind  of  personal 
growth  and  whether  communities  could  find  in  murals 
a  significant  part  of  their  communications  and  educa- 
tional media  was  still  being  tested.  These  questions  also 
turned  on  whether  communities  could  gain  adequate 
economic  and  political  control  over  their  own  existence. 
The  muralists  were  contributing  to  this  autonomy  in 
ways  that  went  beyond  the  impact  of  their  images.  Some 
of  the  painters,  although  they  moved  from  area  to  area, 
were  in  fact  doing  community  organizing  in  the  course  of 
working  with  residents  to  produce  a  mural,  while  others 
who  did  most  of  their  painting  in  one  community  fre- 
quently took  an  active  part  in  its  politics.  The  long-term 
involvement  of  the  muralist  in  a  particular  area,  using  his 
organizational  abilities  to  help  build  local  institutions  and 
independence,  was  also  a  means  of  mobilizing  support 
for  the  public  funding  of  murals  and  against  censorship. 

This  direction  seemed  to  offer  promise,  particularly 
since  neighborhoods  were  beginning  to  demand  public 
appropriations  for  the  community  arts.  In  general  artists 
in  the  past  had  had  to  bear  the  main  burden  of  finding 
funds  for  murals  that  were  intended  to  benefit  the  whole 
community.  But  the  time  was  arriving  when  local  people 
would  share  that  responsibility.  As  early  as  1968  the 
Alvarado  School  parents  secured  art  instruction  for  their 
children  which  eventuated  in  school  murals,  and  since 
then  community  people  in  San  Francisco  had  pressed 
also  for  neighborhood  art  centers.  In  Los  Angeles  letters 
to  city  hall  from  the  neighborhoods  made  possible  the 
funding  of  Citywide  Murals  for  two  additional  years.  In 
1978  the  chairman  of  the  California  Arts  Countil  said 
that  its  meetings  were  being  lobbied  by  neighborhood 
people.  But  even  if  they  were  successful,  they  would 
have  to  make  certain  that  they  retained  control  of  the  art 
in  their  areas  and  that  it  did  not  become  manipulated  by 
city  hall  and  big  business.  A  new  arts  constituency  was 
taking  shape,  and  the  muralists  could  provide  leadership. 

The  muralists  were  also  experimenting  with  the  model 
of  the  professional  as  a  facilitator  of  community-based 
production  and  technology,  helping  local  laypeople  de- 
velop abilities  to  take  large  roles  in  providing  services  for 
themselves  and  their  neighbors.  Similar  efforts  to  em- 
power people  and  make  them  less  .dependent  on  experts 
and  administrators  were  occurring  in  education,  health, 
and  the  law,  and  the  muralists  were  working  with  them. 
With  their  roots  in  the  community  and  connections  to 
related  art  and  social  action  close  at  hand  and  in  distant 
places,  the  muralists  were  seeking  to  carry  forward  a 
cultural  revolution  that  they  had  helped  begin. 


NOTES 

1.   Helaine  Seletsky,  "Brown  and  the  Arts,"  Bicentennial  Arts 
Biweekly,  June  27,  1975,  p.  1. 


348  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

2.  From ''Aims,"  N.MN  (National  Murals  Newsletter),  no.  1, 
1977,  p.  1. 

3.  McBride,  p.  17. 

4.  Postscript  to  .Michael  Rossman,  "Testimonial  to  a 
Dream,"  California  Living  section,  San  Francisco  Sunday  Exam- 
iner and  Chronicle,  October  24,  1976,  p.  8. 

5.  Peter  Kyehl,  "Big  Blue  Whale  Spared  by  S.F.  Fire 
Commission,"  5'a«  Francisco  Chronicle,  January  27,  1977,  p.  13. 

6.  "Walls  of  Fire,"  Arts  Biweekly  (San  Francisco),  June  15, 
1977,  p.  1  ff. 

7.  Ibid.,  p.  6. 

8.  Reported  Ann  Thielen,  CETA  Artists  &  Gardeners 
Coordinator,  San  Francisco  Art  Commission. 

9.  George  Benet,  "A  Citizen  of  Art,"  The  Express  (Berkeley), 
December  8,  1978,  p.  3. 

10.  "La  .Vlexicana:  site  for  new  Chicano  mural,"  La  Cronica 
Latina  (Berkeley),  August  18,  1978. 

1 1 .  Emmanuel  .Montoya,  "San  Mateo  County,"  NMN,  no 
3,  1978,  p.  15. 

12.  Reported  by  Rafael  Sanchez,  "Crusade  Leader  Says: 
'We  Can  Save  Ourselves!'  "  Chicano  Federation  of  San  Diego 
County,  June  1978,  p.  3. 

13.  Ibid. 

14.  Some  of  this  information  is  drawn  from  "Seattle  Stu- 
dents Reclaim  Mural,"  Common  Sense,  San  Francisco,  June 
1975,  p.  13. 

15.  Glenn  Troelstrup,  "Former  Delinquent  Paints  His  Way 
Out  of  A  Corner ,"  Denver  Post ,  April  23,  1977,  p.  2. 

16.  Virginia  Culver,  "Church's  Secession  Depicted  on 
Canvas,"  Religion  News  Weekly,  p.  1,  Denver  Post,  June  24, 
1977,  p.  1. 

17.  Art  in  Public  Places  (catalog).  New  Mexico  Arts  Divi- 
sion, 1978. 

18.  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  4. 


19.  Ibid. 

20.  Notes  on  2d  National  Muralists'  Network  Confer- 
ence, 1978,  p.  6. 

21.  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  4;  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  4. 

22.  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  4. 

23.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  4. 

24.  Stewart  Dill  McBride,  "Tenants  tilting  at  windmills — 
and  winning,"  Christian  Science  Monitor,  September  23,  1977, 
p.  16. 

25.  Ibid.,  p.  14  ff. 

26.  Robert  Nazario,  Foreward,  "Windmill  Power  for  City 
People,"  New  York:  Energy  Task  Force,  1977. 

27.  McBride,  p.  14.  \ 

28.  Ibid.,  p.  15.  I 

29.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  4.  | 

30.  Ibid. 

31.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  11. 

32.  John  Weber,  "Community  Murals:  An  Update,"  New 
Art  Examiner  (Chicago),  May  1978,  p.  7. 

33.  NMN,  no.  2,  1977,  p.  2. 

34.  Ibid.  1 

35.  Ibid. 

36.  Rogovin  and  Russum,  Report  to  NEA,  November  15, 
1976. 

37.  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  6  and  no.  2,  1978,  p.  6. 

38.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  7. 

39.  Rogovin  and  Russum,  Report  to  NEA,  November  15, 
1977  and  1978. 

40.  Notes  on  2nd  National  Community  Muralists'  Network  Con- 
ference, 1978. 

41.  David  Chambers  (University  of  Michigan  professor  of 
law  and  president  of  the  Society  of  American  Law  Teachers) 
"Troubling  School  Integration  Case"  World  Section,  San 
Francisco  Sunday  Examiner  &  Chronicle,  August  5,  1979,  p.  46. 


PART  II 
MEANS 


William  Walker's  sunshaded  scaffolding  for  History  of 
the  Packinghouse  Worker,  Chicago,  1974. 


PROCESS 


Professional  Murals 

William  Walker  was  sketching  in  the  first  lines  on  the 
priming  of  what  was  to  become  The  History  of  the  Packing- 
house Worker  on  the  wall  of  the  Amalgamated  Meatcut- 
ters'  local  in  a  Black  neighborhood  on  Chicago's  South 
Side.  A  young  man  rode  up  on  a  bicycle  and  asked  if  he 
could  help.  They  chatted  and  Walker  suggested  that  he 
go  home  and  bring  back  some  examples  of  his  art;  if  they 
were  promising,  the  painter  would  help  him  get  started 
on  another  wall.  Here  he  wanted  to  work  out  some 
problems  by  himself.  In  general  this  is  how  Walker  has 
worked,  and  he  has  been  generous  with  his  advice  and 
help  to  others.  There  have  been  a  few  collaborations  with 
other  artists — The  Wall  of  Respect,  the  Detroit  murals  and 
the  later  Daydreaming — but  his  work  typically  has  been 
on  his  own. 

Shortly  after  the  offer  of  assistance,  five  young  men 
came  by  with  both  suspicion  and  curiosity  in  their  eyes. 
What  was  he  doing,  they  asked.  Walker,  who  was  in  his 
late  forties  and  beginning  to  gray,  was,  as  others  have 
described  him,  above  all  a  gentleman  with  a  strong  sense 
of  propriety  and  serious  respect  for  people.  In  a  slow, 
measured  way  he  thanked  them  for  coming  up  and  asking 
about  his  work.  He  explained  that  he  was  doing  a  mural 
for  the  meatcutters'  union.  It  was  about  the  union's 
history  and  struggle  for  dignity,  a  struggle  by  people  of 
many  races  including  Blacks.  He  wanted  them  to  ap- 
preciate the  importance  of  the  struggle,  he  said,  and  the 
importance  of  the  mural,  which  would  become  part  of 
the  neighborhood.  It  was  important,  he  went  on  slowly, 
for  them  to  respect  the  mural  and  take  care  of  it.  His 
listeners  were  clearly  being  won  over.  One  of  them  said 


that  he  was  a  sign  painter.  He  looked  at  Walker's  brushes 
and  they  began  talking  shop.  Finally,  Walker  again  laid 
on  them  their  responsibility  to  take  care  of  the  mural  and 
asked  them  to  come  by  again  to  talk. 

Community  murals  are  not  only  of  and  for  ordinary 
people,  they  are  also  by  them.  But  the  neighborhood  or 
the  members  of  sponsoring  groups  participate  in  a  variety 
of  ways.  Often  the  artist  is  a  resident,  or  lives  close 
enough  to  understand  the  area  well,  and  he  comes  to  be 
known  and  trusted,  as  in  the  case  of  Walker.  Frequently 
the  painter  is  commissioned  by  a  community  group,  as 
Walker  was  by  the  union.  The  artist  consults  perhaps 
only  with  its  officers  who  indicate  what  they  would  like 
and  require  the  approval  of  his  design  before  he  moves  to 
the  wall.  In  other  cases  the  artist  makes  a  presentation  at 
a  membership  or  community  meeting.  Fie  may  show 
slides  of  his  work  and  the  murals  of  others.  He  may 
request  members  to  suggest  themes  and  ideas  for  the 
design.  He  will  return  to  check  his  proposal  with  the 
officers  or  membership  and  then  do  the  wall  entirely  by 
himself,  perhaps  with  one  or  two  assistants.  Some  of  the 
most  sophisticated  and  moving  murals  have  been  done  in 
this  manner.  In  these  instances  the  artist  is  often  highly 
experienced  and  wants  to  achieve  the  best  he  can  in  terms 
of  his  personal  expression  of  local  concerns. 

In  San  Francisco's  Mission  District  murals  during 
their  first  years  were  done  almost  exclusively  by  young 
professional  painters  who  worked  either  separately  or  as 
teams.  They  did  not  seek  extended  discussion  with  the 
members  of  their  sponsoring  group  and  did  not  invite 
nonartists  to  participate  as  assistants.  They  lived  in  the 
.Mission,  knew  it  well  and  felt  that  they  could  speak  for 
local  people.  When  their  commissions  came  from  a 
Neighborhood  Legal  Aid  office,  a  Model  Cities  center,  a 


351 


352  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


m.u 


Consuelo  Mendez  transferring  the  design  of  Para  EI 
Mercado  to  the  wall,  San  Francisco,  1974. 


youth  employment  and  job  training  office,  a  recreation 
center,  a  taco  short-order  restaurant,  a  bank,  or  a  clinic, 
the  artists  sought  little  more  than  the  approval  of  their 
designs  by  officials  or  managers  rather  than  a  sustained 
involvement  with  the  people  who  worked  in  these  places 
or  lived  nearby.  Most  of  the  artists  were  associated  with 
the  storefront  Galeria  de  la  Raza  and  talked  over  their 
designs  with  one  of  its  directors,  Rene  Yaiiez,  who 
served  until  1976  as  coordinator  of  most  of  the  local 
murals.  He  handled  the  funding  and  tried  to  get  feedback 
from  neighborhood  people,  sometimes  by  means  of 
questionnaires,  the  results  of  which  he  passed  on  to  the 
artists.  But  in  general  they  operated  largely  on  their  own 
in  designing  and  executing  each  work.  Yanez  explained 
his  encouraging  of  the  young  artists  to  work  without  the 
active  participation  of  neighborhood  people  as  a  concern 
for  quality.  The  artists  themselves  had  to  learn  more 
about  their  craft,  he  said,  rather  than  work  with  young 
assistants.  At  the  same  time  Yaiiez  spent  a  great  deal  of 
time  in  workshops  with  young  people  and  helping  them 
when  they  brought  their  work  to  the  Galeria  for  his 


comments.  He  said  that  the  people  of  the  Mission  de- 
served professional  quality  in  their  murals  and  that  the 
young  could  only  come  to  recognize  excellence  by  being 
exposed  to  it.  It  was  also  clearly  a  matter  of  pride  to  him 
that  the  Galeria  only  sponsored  quality  work.  As  Yanez 
hoped,  the  murals  of  the  professionals  did  stimulate 
young  people,  and  in  1975  a  new  group,  Los  Decolores, 
who  ranged  in  age  from  sixteen  to  nineteen,  began  to  do 
work  commissioned  by  Mission  High  School  and 
neighborhood  organizations.  That  year  also  Las  .Mujeres 
Muralistas,  also  associated  with  the  Galeria,  began  to 
draw  youngsters  into  working  with  them  by  giving  them 
a  small  area  on  Para  al  Mercado  and  then  by  completely 
involving  them  and  adults  in  all  phases  of  a  series  of 
murals  they  undertook  at  Bernal  Heights  public  housing. 

Participatory  Team  Murals 

The  process  that  most  involves  a  community  in  doing  a 
mural  brings  a  trained  artist  together  in  sustained 
dialogue  and  work  with  residents  and  young  people  who 
together  select  the  theme  and  design  and  then  carry  them 
out  on  the  wall.  The  process  begins  in  varied  ways.  In 
New  York  the  artists  associated  with  Cityarts  Workshop 
have  the  responsibility  to  seek  out  sponsoring  groups  and 
the  teenagers  who  will  participate.  A  team  may  begin 
with  three  to  five  local  young  people,  and  if  they  are 
turned  on,  they  bring  their  friends.  As  many  as  sixty 
teenagers  have  worked  on  a  wall,  and  literally  hundreds 
have  participated  in  single  Cityarts  mosaic  projects  like 
the  benches  at  Grant's  Tomb.'  The  mural  assistants  are 
usually  paid  for  their  work  through  public  funding. 
Susan  Caruso-Green,  former  codirector  of  Cityarts,  has 
said  that  a  month  is  usually  necessary  for  a  project 
director  to  find  a  group  of  teenage  assistants  and  a 
sponsor  that  will  provide  the  wall  and  two  months  to 
develop  the  theme  and  do  a  mockup.  Four  or  five  "con- 
cept meetings"  are  what  it  takes  to  develop  a  theme.  At 
these  the  young  people  are  shown  slides  of  other 
neighborhood  murals  and  the  history  of  mural  painting 
to  give  them  a  sense  of  how  art  has  served  people  and  to 
stimualte  their  ideas  of  design.  Finally,  two  more  months 
are  necessary  to  execute  the  smaller  paintings,  but  as 
many  as  nine  were  required  from  start  to  finish  to  do 
Arise  from  Oppression. 

In  Boston,  artists  and  high  school  students  interested 
in  working  on  murals  volunteered  and  were  connected 
through  Summerthing,  an  office  in  city  hall,  which 
brought  them  together  with  neighborhood  organizations 
that  had  requested  murals.  Gary  Rickson,  who  worked 
with  the  program,  says  that  he  saw  that  the  team  as- 
signed to  him  came  to  understand  and  respect  the  point 
of  view  of  the  community  they  were  working  in  where 
their  designs  had  to  be  officially  approved  by  a  sponsor- 
ing group. 

The  painters  of  the  Public  Art  Workshop  and  the 
Chicago  Mural  Group  tell  how  after  years  of  work  they 


Process  I  353 


'■y  Rickson  with  young  muralists,  South  End,  Boston, 


began  to  be  approached  by  sponsors — a  tenants  or 
homeowners'  organization,  a  church,  a  school,  a  labor 
union,  or  a  social  service  agency.  Once  a  mural  has  been 
done  in  a  neighborhood,  other  local  groups  become 
interested.  Writing  in  1975,  John  Weber  said  that  of  the 
more  than  150  murals  done  in  Chicago  since  1967  at  least 
80  involved  the  consultation  of  the  community  and  re- 
quired the  public  presentation  of  designs.  Nonprofes- 
sional residents,  he  added,  participated  in  the  painting  of 
at  least  75.^ 

Mutual  involvement  between  a  CMG  artist  and  com- 
munity usually  begins  with  a  meeting  of  the.membership 
of  the  sponsoring  group.  Ten  or  a  hundred  people  may 
attend.  The  artists  shows  slides  of  murals  he  has  done 
and  some  painted  by  others  to  give  people  an  idea  of  the 
possibilities  of  the  medium.  He  also  explains  the  respon- 
sibilities of  the  sponsors.  Weber  says  the  CMG  asks  them 
to  secure  the  wall  and  collect  funds  particularly  from  its 
membership  and  local  merchants  to  pay  for  the  paints 


and  scaffolding.  CMG  artists  and  teenage  assistants  are 
paid  through  public  funding.  Weber  has  resorted  to 
asking  neighborhood  people  to  buy  a  share  in  a  planned 
mural  at  fifty  cents  a  brick.  Caryl  Yasko  and  Niki  Glen 
undertook  a  "Buy  a  Brick"  campaign  in  Madison,  Wis- 
consin, to  raise  funds  for  a  mural  two  blocks  from  the 
state  capitol.  Thirty  local  small  businesses,  five  organi- 
zations, and  two  hundred  individuals  contributed 
$11,766  in  cash  and  materials  for  the  work — Our  Search 
for  Knowledge  in  an  Everchanging  Universe.  Yasko  says, 
"the  small  businesses  on  whose  walls  we  paint  are  the 
traditional  allies  of  the  muralist."^  What  is  important  is 
not  only  covering  expenses  but  that  local  residents  come 
to  feel  that  the  mural  is  theirs. 

Judy  Baca,  as  director  of  Citywide  .Murals  in  Los 
Angeles,  which  was  financed  by  city  funds  between  1974 
and  1978,  says  that  the  process  she  supervised  began 
when  her  office  got  a  call  from  a  schoolteacher,  local 
artist,  or  gang  leader  who  indicated  that  he  or  she  and 
perhaps  a  group  already  assembled  wanted  to  do  a  mural 
or  that  he  wanted  to  organize  a  team.  Sometimes  profes- 
sional or  semiprofessional  painters  and  their  teams  were 
recruited  by  local  service  organizations,  recreation  cen- 
ters, or  probation  departments.  A  meeting  with  residents 
where  the  mural  was  contemplated  was  called,  and  the 
artist  presented  some  examples  of  his  work.  If  there 
were  other  artists  who  also  wished  to  direct  a  project  in 
the  neighborhood,  they  were  also  invited,  and  the  resi- 
dents selected  one.  Residents  usually  made  suggestions 
concerning  the  theme,  and  the  artist  was  asked  to  return 
with  five  sketches  of  possible  murals  in  four  weeks.  The 
minimum  size  of  the  mural  to  be  designed  was  four 
hundred  square  feet.  If  the  artist  was  working  with  a 
team  of  teenagers,  the  sketches  were  to  be  done  with 
their  assistance.  Citywide  maintained  a  collection  of 
slides  on  the  history  of  murals  that  were  available  to  the 
teams.  Those  teenagers  who  were  hesitant  about  drawing 
were  asked  at  least  to  contribute  ideas.  Later  they  would 
have  a  chance  to  participate  in  the  painting.  When  the 
artist  and  his  assistants  returned  with  their  design  pro- 
posal to  the  second  neighborhood  meeting  and  he  was 
interested  in  making  a  well-organized  presentation,  the 
response  of  the  perhaps  sixty  people  who  came  was 
remarkable,  Judy  Baca  says.  Copies  of  the  design  were 
posted  in  public  places  in  advance  to  give  people  a  chance 
to  think  about  them.  At  the  meeting  there  would  be 
serious  discussion  in  which  adults  and  young  people 
shared;  children  sometimes  argued  with  their  parents; 
and  out  of  this  real  rapport  often  evolved.  On  one 
occasion  community  people  who  had  been  vandalized  by 
the  teenagers  of  the  White  Fence  Gang  sat  down  with 
some  of  them  who  were  on  a  mural  crew  to  discuss  a 
design.  If  the  drawings  were  not  satisfactory,  the  artist 
was  asked  to  do  more,  and  if  they  did  not  receive 
approval,  he  was  released  and  another  artist  was  chosen. 
The  artist  was  also  required  to  collect  at  least  two 
hundred  signatures  from  local  people  approving  the  de- 


354  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Judy  Baca  before  a  panel  ofThe  Rising  of  the  Mujeres 
in  ber  Topanga  Canyon  studio,  1979. 


sign.  This  was  not  only  proof  to  Citywide  that  there  was 
substantial  backing  for  the  work;  it  was  also  insurance, 
Baca  says,  against  censorship  by  public  officials.  There 
were  variations  on  this  procedure  over  the  years.  Some- 
times the  artist  preferred  to  concentrate  on  collecting 
signatures  by  going  door  to  door  rather  than  going 
through  public  meetings.  He  was  also  responsible  to  get 
permission  for  a  wall  from  its  owner  and  Citywide. 
When  he  had  all  the  approvals,  he  was  paid  $50,  and 
materials,  including  paint,  brushes  and  scaffolding,  were 
provided.  The  young  people  who  worked  with  him  were 
paid  by  the  city  $2.22  an  hour  in  1974  and  he  received 
$345  on  the  completion  of  the  mural. 

Citywide  .Murals  also  sponsored  wall  paintings  by 
elementary  school  children  and  senior  citizens,  who 
worked  as  unpaid  volunteers.  The  children's  murals  were 
regarded  as  extensions  of  their  regular  curriculum  and 
were  done  either  at  their  school  and  play  yard  or  at  the 
zoo  or  comparable  sites.  Senior  citizens  were  looked  on 


by  the  project  as  people  of  often  neglected  talent  who  had 
time  to  devote  to  painting  and  who  could  make  a  creative 
contribution  either  to  a  senior  center  or  the  neighborhood 
in  general.  There  were  often  retired  professional  artists 
or  talented  amateurs  among  them  who  could  direct  a 
mural.  ^ 

Whatever  the  method  of  assembling  the  working  group 
from  city  to  city,  the  artist  frequently  undertakes  an 
intensive  discussion  with  it  about  the  public  concerns, 
the  issues  and  problems  that  are  important  to  its  mem- 
bers and  the  community.  When  a  likely  subject  is  arrived 
at,  the  dialogue  turns  to  their  understanding  of  it.  Mark 
Rogovin  prefers  to  work  with  small  groups,  usually 
teenagers  who  emerge  from  the  first  meeting  with  the 
sponsoring  organization  and  are  interested  in  the  long 
process  of  selecting  a  theme,  developing  a  composition, 
and  doing  the  painting.  He  remembers  the  thread  of 
possible  themes  the  Black  teenagers  discussed  with  him 
when  they  were  working  on  the  mural  that  was  to 
become  Unity  of  the  People  in  1970,  a  time  when  there  was 
high  racial  tension  and  violence  and  Blacks  were  divided 
on  how  to  respond.  His  assistants  were  from  a  church 
group  in  Chicago's  West  Side  and  at  first  suggested  a 


Process  I  355 


religious  theme,  tiien  the  history  of  their  religious  or- 
ganization, a  depiction  of  its  recent  activities,  then  drugs, 
and  finally  the  subject  of  Black  solidarity  that  they  agreed 
was  of  widest  importance  in  the  neighborhood. 

While  Rogovin  and  his  community  assistants  were 
discussing  the  design  of  another  mural.  Break  the  Grip  of 
the  Absentee  Landlord,  the  question  of  what  color  to  paint 
the  slumlords  arose.  Initially  the  Black  teenagers  had 
thought  that  white  would  be  right,  but  then  had  to  agree 
that  there  were  both  Black  and  White  owners  who  were 
exploiting  tenants.  Further  discussion  arrived  at  a  con- 
sensus that  what  was  to  blame  was  not  so  much  the 
landlord's  race  as  the  whole  system  of  ghetto-gouging 
and,  more  generally,  social  arrangements  preoccupied 
with  maximizing  profits.  By  keeping  the  discussion  open 
and  not  being  satisfied  with  quick  conclusions,  Rogovin 
had  turned  the  question  about  the  color  of  paint  to  be 
used  into  a  chance  for  his  young  associates  to  think 
through  a  more  fundamental  problem.  They  decided  to 
paint  the  landlords  gray.  Rogovin  comments  that  it  was 
insufficient  merely  to  do  a  painting  on  racism  in  a  Black 
neighborhood.  Blacks  already  knew  all  about  that.  What 
they  needed  to  know  about  was  the  landlord,  the  investor 
who,  probably  White  though  possibly  Black,  took  ad- 
vantage of  them.  .Moreover,  he  says  Blacks  and  Whites 
should  not  be  turned  against  each  other  when  both  are 
exploited;  they  should  be  shown  what  exploits  them — 
the  system  itself.  What  is  important,  he  concludes,  is  to 
work  together  towards  changing  it.  And  the  mural  shows 
just  that  interracial  cooperation. 

John  Weber  at  dedication  o/"  People  of  Lakeview  Unite 
that  he  worked  on  with  local  youth,  Chicago,  1972.  (© 
Rosenthal  Art  Slides) 


While  Rogovin  moves  from  the  first  meeting  of  the 
sponsoring  group  to  team  sessions,  Weber  seeks  to  bring 
a  large  number  of  his  first  audience  back  with  their 
friends  for  subsequent  discussions  about  the  theme  of  the 
mural.  It  took  more  than  two  dozen  such  community 
meetings  stretched  over  a  year  to  win  agreement  on  the 
theme  and  design  of  a  mural  sponsored  by  nine  organiza- 
tions in  an  interracial  neighborhood.  The  result  was 
People  of  Lakeview  Unite,  which  shows  a  block  party 
with  participants  waving  at  passersby.*  These  meetings 
are  occasions  for  residents  to  think  through  their  con- 
cerns and  possible  solutions.  Weber's  meetings  with 
working-class  White  residents  in  Chicago  in  1970  pro- 
vided the  chance  for  their  fears  of  Black  people  moving 
into  the  neighborhood  to  surface  and  be  discussed.  The 
result  was  The  Wall  of  Choices  that  clarified  the  alternative 
ways  of  dealing  with  the  situation  and  made  a  plea  for 
cooperation.  Usually  people  are  at  first  divided  on  what 
is  to  be  done  and  these  meetings  may  help  them  resolve 
differences.  While  the  artists  hope  to  bring  people  to- 
gether, they  have  not  regarded  murals  as  simple  mirrors 
of  neighborhood  views.  Weber  has  said,  "Community  art 
must  be  controversial.  Art  need  not  leave  everyone 
comfortably  pleased.  Art  can  also  challenge  us,  stretch  us 
and  expand  us."^  Similarly,  Rogovin  and  others  see  the 
function  of  murals  as  not  merely  echoing  the  common 
denominator  of  local  opinion  but  raising  consciousness. 
They  believe  their  work  should  articulate  the  most  pro- 
gressive ideas  and  aspirations  of  the  community.  What 
these  are  of  course  has  to  be  decided  by  the  muralist  and 
the  members  of  the  nieghborhood  he  is  working  with. 
The  muralists  also  talk  about  a  dialogue  of  local  murals  to 
air  a  variety  of  views  on  controversial  concerns. 


356  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Weber  acknowledges  his  debt  to  Paolo  Freire,  the 
Brazilian  educator  who  brought  together  a  variety  of 
ideas  about  consciousness-raising  that  had  been  in  the  air 
for  decades.  Freire  worked  out  a  method  of  teaching 
literacy  to  the  inner-city  poor  and  peasantry  that  demon- 
strated that  people's  capacity  to  learn  grew  as  they 
became  aware  of  their  ability  to  gain  control  over  their 
lives.  He  discovered  that  their  skills  developed  as  they 
became  politically  aware,  and  Weber  similarly  came  to 
believe  that  the  deprived  could  empower  themselves  and 
create  their  own  public  media  as  they  came  to  understand 
the  cause  of  their  deprivation  and  their  capacity  to  do 
something  about  it.^ 

Rogovin  and  Weber  are  ready  to  admit  that  they  have 
their  own  analysis  of  the  problems  that  afflict 
neighborhoods — a  class  analysis,  but  they  are  also  careful 
to  point  out,  as  other  muralists  do,  that  w  hile  guiding  the 
dialogue  of  a  local  meeting  or  mural  team,  they  cannot 
impose  their  views  on  the  community.  Judy  Baca  ob- 
serves that  it  is  nearly  impossible  for  the  artist-director  of 
a  project  to  force  his  or  her  conceptions  on  the  teenagers 
of  a  painting  crew.  They  have  their  own  ideas,  she  insists 
and  adds,  "the  collective  spirit  is  the  essence  of 
muralism."  .Most  muralists  are  aware  that  they  cannot  be 
doctrinaire  with  a  neighborhood.  They  must  arrive  at  an 
interpretation  of  local  concerns  and  find  images  that  are 
comprehensible  and  acceptable  to  a  substantial  number 
of  people.  If  not,  their  work  will  surely  be  defaced  wher 
it  is  completed.  Weber  points  out  that  the  CMG  has  been 
willing  to  paint  in  neighborhoods  where  there  are  strong 
conservative  or  reactionary  groups  as  long  as  the 
muralists  could  find  progressive  people  to  work  with.  He 
says  that  the  CMG  does  not  have  to  start  with  the 
majority,  but  it  aims  at  building  one. 

Clarence  Wood  and  Don  Kaiser,  who  paint  for  the 
Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art's  Urban  Outreach,  back 


away  from  what  they  consider  the  political  art  of  the 
Chicago  painters.  Wood  thinks  they  are  foisting  their 
ideas  on  neighborhood  people.  Kaiser  says  that  society 
has  been  indoctrinated  enough;  people  can  find  political 
art  elsewhere.  They  regard  their  program  as  "environ- 
mental art"  and  are  willing  to  help  a  neighborhood  do 
any  kind  of  mural  it  wants.  As  they  see  it,  the  function  of 
murals  is  to  enhance  the  local  milieu.  However,  many  of 
the  murals  that  neighborhood  teams  have  asked  Wood  to 
help  them  do  involve  over-life-size  portraits  of  Black 
leaders  in  the  civil-rights  movement  and  the  arts,  cer- 
tainly a  kind  of  political  painting,  though  not  so  pointed 
as  murals  elsewhere.  Kaiser  says  that  his  assistance  to  the 
Chinese  Youth  Coalition  in  its  protest  of  the  bridge  ramp 
that  would  wipe  out  part  of  Chinatown  was  only  tech- 
nical; the  design  was  the  young  people's. 

Additional  artists  play  a  less  active  role  than  Rogovin 
and  Weber  in  the  dialogue  that  selects  and  interprets  a 
mural's  theme.  Gary  Rickson  and  Ray  Patlan  prefer  to 
leave  these  matters  almost  completely  in  the  hands  of  the 
teenagers  and  do  their  own  murals  elsewhere.  They  see 
themselves  as  facilitators  who  set  up  the  dialogue  among 
the  young  people  and  offer  technical  advice  on  painting. 
The  young  are  sometimes  strongly  affected  by  the  imag- 
ery of  the  artist,  as  a  group  working  during  the  summer 
of  1974  with  Rickson  were  when  they  decided  they 
wanted  a  huge  eye  with  a  falling  tear  to  be  the  central 
image  in  their  mural  lamenting  violence.  This  had  been 
the  main  image  of  Rickson's  Segregation  B.  C. ,  which  had 
been  destroyed,  and  the  teenagers  wanted  to  revive  it. 
Patlan  says  that  he  may  start  off  discussions  with  his 
team  with  a  visual  idea  of  his  and  then  encourage  the 
teenagers  to  add  theirs.  While  the  mural  is  being  painted, 


Ray  Patldn,  center,  with  Pilsen  barrio  painters,  Chicago, 
1974. 


Process  I  ISl 


he  will  suggest  compositional  modifications  like  carrying 
a  color  through  the  painting,  but  he  rarely  picks  up  a 
brush  except  to  demonstrate  his  point.  Clarence  Wood 
tells  of  how  the  children  doing  the  neighborhood 
portraits  on  Sickles  Street  in  Philadelphia  asked  a  ten- 
year-old  girl  to  quit  because  her  work  was  too  much  like 
grown-ups'.  This  was  a  kids'  mural,  they  insisted. 

Such  matters  of  design  are  the  next  step  after  the 
theme  is  decided  on.  To  assist  the  untrained  members  of 
the  team,  the  artists  frequently  show  slides  drawn  from 
the  mural  tradition  stretching  from  the  Lascaux  caves  of 
15,000  B.C.  through  Roman  and  Byzantine  frescoes, 
Giotto,  and  the  Renaissance  to  those  of  the  .Mexican 
Revolution  and  the  New  Deal.  Or  there  may  be  a  trip  to 
a  museum.  Rogovin  and  Rickson  ask  each  of  their  teen- 
agers to  draw  up  a  trial  composition  at  home.  One  of 
their  designs  or  a  combination  serves  as  the  basis  of  the 
final  cartoon  that  they  work  out  together.  In  cases  where 
the  assistants  have  little  confidence  in  their  drawing, 
artists  use  alternative  methods.  Cityarts  in  1970  de- 
veloped methods  whereby  they  got  young  people  to  act 
out  what  they  thought  they  would  like  to  depict,  and 
then  made  images  either  by  a  Polaroid  camera  and 
opaque  projector  or  by  training  the  white  light  of  an 
empty  slide  projector  on  them  and  tracing  their 
silhouettes  on  butcher  paper.  Another  method  was  for 
the  group  to  select  photos  from  books  and  magazines, 
show  them  from  an  opaque  projector  and  trace  them  on  a 
mock-up. 

Haigbt  Ashbury  Muralists  posing  for  Two  Hundred 
Years  of  Resistance.  Left  to  right:  Jane  Norling,  Arch 
Williams,  Miranda  Bergman,  Miles  Styker,  and  Vicky 
Hamlin. 


Lucy  .Mahler,  who  directed  a  project  with  the  students 
of  the  Wright  Brothers  High  School  in  Uptown  .Man- 
hattan did  the  design  and  drawing  herself,  which  in- 
cluded highly  skilled  portraits  of  local  students  and  their 
elders.  The  young  people  then  shared  in  the  painting. 
Similarly  Clarence  Wood  did  most  of  the  drawing  of  the 
portraits  of  Black  heroes  for  the  teenagers  he  has  worked 
with,  then  sectioned  off  the  color  areas  and  let  them  paint 
them  in  "by  the  numbers."  Some  artists  regard  this  as  an 
imposition  on  the  imagination  of  the  young  for  the  sake 
of  appearance,  but  Wood  claims  that  the  first  priority  is 
for  the  young  to  have  a  sense  of  having  participated  in 
creating  images  that  look  good  to  them. 

John  Weber  says  that  he  does  not  believe  in  letting 
young  f>eople,  including  children  of  the  lower  elemen- 
tary grades,  paint  spontaneously  without  guidance. 
"This  does  not  sufficiently  respect  the  young,"  he  says. 
"We  want  to  develop  respect  for  the  self,  for  art,  and  for 
other  people.  Children  must  be  moved  to  do  their  best,  to 
grow  and  reach  beyond  the  abilities  and  consciousness 
they  began  with." 

After  the  artist  and  his  assistants  arrive  at  a  design  that 
is  satisfactory  to  them,  they  usually  check  it  with  the 
sponsoring  group — its  officials  or  a  meeting  of  the  mem- 
bership. Cityarts  in  New  York  like  Citywide  in  Los 
Angeles  often  posted  a  colored  sketch  or  blueprint  of  the 
proposed  design  in  prominent  neighborhood  spots. 
Alongside  paper  was  provided  for  passersby  to  make 
their  comments. 

When  the  design  is  approved  by  the  local  group,  the 
artist  and  his  assistants  are  ready  to  go  to  their  wall,  erect 
their  usually  rented  scaffolding,  wire  brush  the  surface 


358  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


to  remove  loose  and  rough  material,  and  seal  it  against 
draining  rain  water.  They  usually  prime  it  in  white  to 
maximize  the  brightness  of  their  colors,  but  black  has 
been  used  to  make  them  somber.  They  transfer  their 
design  usually  by  gridding  both  sketch  and  wall.  If  they 
are  working  indoors,  they  can  darken  the  room  and  train 
the  image  of  their  cartoon  from  an  opaque  projector  on 
the  wall  or  panels  they  will  paint.  This  method  can  also 
be  used  at  night  outdoors.  Alan  Okada  says  that  each 
member  of  the  Cityarts  team  working  on  Chi  Lai — 
Arriba — Rise  Up,  a  very  large  mural  of  seven  levels  of 
scaffolding,  painted  a  separate  area  of  the  composition 
that  they  had  designed  together.  As  they  neared  the  end 
of  the  painting,  each  worked  over  the  whole  to  insure  a 
homogeneous  style.  It  is  also  a  common  practice  in  group 
projects  for  the  painters  to  move  from  area  to  area  from 
the  beginning. 

Working  outdoors  in  public  offers  more  opportunity 
for  neighborhood  participation.  Passersby  often  offer 
criticism  and  fresh  ideas  that  the  painters  learn  to  re- 
spond to.  New  dialogues  on  the  subject  and  its  interpre- 
tation ensue.  Sometimes  the  composition  is  altered  as  a 

Cityarts  muralists  on  the  scaffolding  of  Chi  Lai — 
Arriba — Rise  Up!  New  York,  1974. 


Muralists'  view  from  the  scaffolding  of  cartoon  for  Chi 
Lai. 


Process/  } 59 


result.  While  Barry  Bruner  was  doing  a  mural  in  Chicago 
showing  construction  workers  on  the  job,  a  Black  woman 
teacher  who  was  watching  during  her  lunch  break 
suggested  including  workers  of  her  sex.  A  day  later  when 
she  came  by  she  found  that  Bruner  had  drawn  in  a  female 
foreman.  She  complained  that  this  was  unrealistic; 
Bruner  made  additional  changes,  and  his  critic  joined 
him  to  do  some  painting.  Alan  Okada  recalls  that  when 
he  was  directing  the  Cityarts  mural  in  the  heart  of 
Manhattan's  Chinatown  on  the  subject  of  the  Chinese 
immigration  to  this  country,  the  artists  posted  a  sign  in 
Chinese  and  English  inviting  passersby  to  join  them  on 
the  scaffolding  to  help  them  with  painting. 

While  a  mural  is  taking  shape,  some  people  in  the 
neighborhood  frequently  offer  to  help  with  storing  the 
paints  at  night,  others  with  moving  the  scaffolding. 
Doing  a  mural  becomes  a  community  event.  Mitchell 
Caton  describes  how,  when  working  on  Universal  Alley, 
the  inexperienced  assistants  who  had  been  helping  him 
with  the  layouts  and  painting  gradually  dropped  out.  It 
had  been  hard  for  them  not  to  do  their  own  thing,  he 
says.  But  two  house  painters,  old  timers  in  the  commu- 
nity, volunteered  and  took  on  the  laborious  task  of  wire 
brushing  the  walls  through  the  hot  summer  days.  There 
were  always  people  in  the  alley  ready  to  help,  to  set  up 
and  dismantle  the  scaffolding  every  day,  and  to  feed  him. 
As  Caton  puts  it. 


Alan  Okada  on  the  scaffolding  of  Chi  Lai. 


Bystanders  watch  the  painting  of  Wall  of  Respect  for 
Women,  Lower  East  Side,  1974. 


360  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Mural  team,  Wall  of  Respect  for  Women:  top  to 
bottom:  Cami  Homann,  Tomie  Aral,  Phyllis  Seebol,  and 
Harriet  Davis. 


Michael  Schnorr  and  Susan  Yamagata  working  on  Coatli- 
que,  Diosa  De  La  Tierra,  Chtcano  Park,  San  Diego, 
1978. 


In  the  inner  city  ghetto,  most  neighborhoods  have 
their  wine  drinkers  and  dope  pushers.  Failure  type 
personaHties.  A  mural  project  reflects  a  positive 
structure  and  off-sets  much  of  the  negativity  in  the 
community.  The  artist's  working  every  day,  painting 
beautiful  colors  and  Ideas,  talking  to  folks  checking  out 
what's  happening  (all  good).  But  most  of  all  the  feeling 
of  succeedmg  in  the  air — the  mere  fact  of  having  an 
important  goal  and  aggressive  behavior  speaks  for  itself 
and  only  by  trusting  and  acting  do  we  receive  signs 
and  wonders,  art  power.* 

His  greatest  allies,  Caton  says,  were  the  children^  who 
made  and  selected  sketches,  for  one  part  of  the  mural  was 
to  be  theirs.  In  August  there  was  a  watermelon  party  in 


the  alley  for  the  kids.  On  Sundays  there  was  jazz, 
occasionally  a  live  set.  A  cigar  box  was  put  out  for  nickels 
and  quarters  toward  the  mural.  The  rest  of  the  cost  of 
materials  was  borne  by  the  contributions  of  local  mer- 
chants. Finally  at  the  end  ot  August  the  mural  was 
finished,  and  at  the  dedication  Jimmy  Ellis  and  his  jazz 
group  performed.  It  was  the  first  time,  Caton  says,  some 
of  the  children  had  ever  tasted  apple  cider.  Grown-ups 
had  punch. 

The  public  dedication  is  often  the  responsibility  of  the 
sponsoring  group  to  organize.  The  whole  neighborhood 
and  sometimes  public  officials  are  invited.  Held  usually 
on  a  weekend,  there  are  speeches,  and  the  artist  or  one  of 
his  assistants  may  point  out  the  mural's  significance  for 


Process  I  361 


xrniela  Carrillo  on  the  scaffolding  at  Mission  Neighbor- 
Health  Center,  San  Francisco,  1976. 


^ 


Osha  Neumann  (in  front)  and  0^ Brian  Thiele  at  work  on 
Song  of  Unity,  Berkeley,  1978. 


the  community.  There  often  is  a  musical  group  as  well  as 
food  and  drink.  There  may  be  a  dramatic  skit  or  the 
reading  of  poetry.  When  it  is  all  over,  the  painting  has 
already  begun  to  be  a  part  of  the  community's  everyday 
life,  and  its  message  and  beauty  begin  to  be  assimilated. 
The  mural  is  not  a  finished  artifact;  it  is  a  process  which 
continues  as  long  as  it  is  legible.  Many  muralists  remark 
on  the  long-term  effects  of  having  certain  kinds  of  imag- 
ery around  people,  images  that  they  observe  every  day, 
that  get  sifted  through  residents'  experience  and  come  to 
acquire  increasing  meaning  for  them.  The  more  complex 
murals  require  repeated  viewing  to  be  taken  in,  but 
viewed  day  after  day  and  talked  about,  they  come  to 
speak  to  people.  The  mural  process  continues  as  well  in 
the  energy  for  action  that  it  generates. 


Forms  of  Collective  Art 

The  initial  impulse  of  the  new  mural  movement  was 
collective — to  make  art  about  the  needs  of  the  commu- 
nity and  to  strengthen  the  cooperation  of  people.  It  was 
natural  therefore  that  most  of  this  art  has  been  done  by 
groups  of  painters  rather  than  by  single  artists,  although 
some  individual  painters  have  become  spokespeople  for 
neighborhoods  and  unions.  This  method  of  collective 
work  was  contrary  not  only  to  the  training  of  artists  but 
also  to  the  whole  conception  of  self-expression  associated 
in  popular  consciousness  with  art,  which  survived  as 
almost  the  last  vestige  of  individualism  in  modern  pro- 
duction. There  was  thus  much  to  overcome  as  profes- 


362  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


A  note  of  appreciation. 


sional  artists  and  the  inexperienced  tried  to  create  an  art 
that  corresponded  to  their  hopes  for  community.  From 
the  beginning  they  experimented  with  different  proc- 
esses of  working  together,  which  were  reflected  in  differ- 
ent visual  forms. 

Some  twenty  artists  worked  on  the  Wall  of  Respect. 
Their  aim  was  to  provide  a  visual  equivalent  of  pride  in 
their  race  and  their  unity;  thus  there  was  special  reason  to 
prevent  the  wall  from  breaking  up  into  the  separate 
sections  of  each  painter.  Concentrating  on  the  achieve- 
ments of  Black  people,  they  chose  to  fill  the  wall  with 
portraits.  They  located  them  in  sections  devoted  to  lead- 
ers, athletes,  musicians,  and  literary  figures,  and  by 
distributing  them  throughout  the  surface  they  were  also 
able  to  accommodate  some  narrative  scenes  while  still 
preserving  a  sense  of  coherence.  Sorne  artists  worked  on 
a  section  alone,  some  collaborated.  The  unity  of  the  work 
was  also  strengthened  by  a  red,  black,  blue,  and  white 
color  scheme  carried  out  across  the  wall. 

The  Wall  of  Dignity  in  Detroit  was  painted  in  a  similar 


manner,  but  there  were  fewer  portraits  and  more  narra- 
tive scenes  that  depicted  Black  heritage.  There  was  a 
clearer  division  of  areas,  each  of  which  was  painted  by 
different  artists.  Across  the  street  at  Saint  Bernard's 
Church  Eda  and  Walker  were  able  to  work  out  an  even 
tighter  unity  by  taking  advantage  of  their  different  styles 
to  dramatize  the  earlier  exodus  and  march  to  a  new 
promised  land.  Here  as  in  the  previous  walls,  careful 
thought  was  given  by  the  painters  working  together  to 
unify  their  common  material  at  the  same  time  as  each 
painted  his  own  section.  Meanwhile  in  Boston  Rickson 
did  Segregation  B.C.  and  Chandler  Stokely  and  Rap:  Free- 
dom and  Self-Defense  as  two  large  panels  with  related 
themes  on  the  same  wall. 

Only  after  considerable  experience  at  community 
murals  were  professional  artists  able  to  work  out  ways  of 
thoroughly  melding  their  work  so  that  it  was  seamless. 
The  Chicago  Mural  Group  began  such  collaborations  in 
1974  when  Oscar  Martinez  and  Jim  Yanagisawa  painted 
in  each  other's  sections  of  Latino  and  Asian  American 
History.  The  delay  for  the  CMG  in  doing  these  coopera- 
tive projects  arose  partly  from  its  inability  to  secure 
funding  for  more  than  one  professional  per  mural,  but  it 
may  in  addition  have  been  the  artists'  unreadiness  for  such 


Dedication  of  Precita  Eyes  mural,   China  Books,  San 
Francisco,  with  music  by  Steve  Cervantes,  1978. 


Dedication  of  A  People's  History  of  Telegraph  Av- 
enue, Berkeley,  1976. 


364  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Judy  Baca  wearing  protection  against  acrylic  airbrush 
fumes,  1979.  (Photo  SPARC) 


Robert  Hieronimus  painting  Apocalypse  Mural,  Stu- 
dent Center  chapel,  Johns  Hopkins  University,  1974. 


collective  work.  Caryl  Yasko  describes  how  she,  Mitchell 
Caton,  Justine  DeVan,  and  Celia  Radek  virtually  locked 
themselves  in  a  room  for  a  week  in  1975  brainstorming 
together  for  what  became  Prescription  for  Good  Health  Care. 
There  followed  a  series  of  collaborations  of  two,  three, 
and  four  veteran  Chicago  muralists  who  worked  out 
sophisticated  fusions  of  their  styles.  One  of  the  most 
impressive  was  The  Wall  of  Daydreaming  and  Man's  Inhu- 
manity to  Men  that  Caton,  Bill  Walker,  and  Santi  Is- 
rowuthakul  did  in  1975  also.  (How  they  combined  their 
imagery  will  be  described  in  chapter  7.)  One  of  the  first 
groups  of  trained  artists  in  the  West  to  cooperate  on 
particular  works  was  Las  Mujeres  Muralistas,  who  or- 
ganized in  San  Francisco  in  1973.  And  later  Osha 
Neumann  and  O'Brian  Thiele,  sometimes  with  Daniel 
Galvez,  sometimes  with  Ray  Patlan,  painted  together  in 
Berkeley. 

On  the  other  hand,  team  murals  in  which  nonprofes- 
sionals played  a  large  role,  came  to  unified  collective 
work  earlier,  in  part  because  they  had  no  previous  expe- 
rience and   had  only  to  learn,   not  unlearn   habits  of 


Process  I  365 


painting.  Cityarts  as  early  as  1970  and  1971  arrived  at 
simple  unified  silhouette  murals  and  then  did  increas- 
ingly more  complex  work  like  Arise  from  Oppression  in 
1972.  Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan,  who  were 
mainly  untrained  artists,  likewise  achieved  a  coherent 
common  style  by  then.  Other  participatory  murals  such 
as  those  directed  by  Ray  Patlan  and  gang  murals  in  Los 
Angeles  were  also  relatively  unified.  Where  professionals 
took  considerable  responsibility  for  draftsmanship  but 
otherwise  involved  assistants,  as  in  the  works  directed  by 
Weber,  Rogovin,  Mahler,  and  Wood,  unity  was  less  a 
problem. 

By  1973  a  different  approach  to  collective  work  was 
undertaken  by  Judy  Baca  and  the  local  trained  and 
untrained  painters  who  worked  at  the  Venice  Pavilion. 
She  says  that  it  took  four  weeks  of  discussion  for  fifteen 
to  twenty  principal  artists  to  relate  and  build  confidence 
in  one  another  before  they  could  come  up  with  a  central 
theme,  the  history  of  the  community.  They  decided  to 
do  this  by  a  sequence  of  panels,  each  representing  a 
different  era.  The  core  group  of  artists  was  joined  by 
nearly  two  hundred  local  assistants,  and  they  worked  for 
over  a  year.  Local  people  were  not  paid,  but  they  raised 
the  money  for  paints  and  supplies.  A  holiday  atmosphere 
of  mutual  admiration,  help  and  discussion  prevailed 
during  the  work.  Although  the  panels  are  added  on  to 
each  other,  they  envelop  their  space  and  produce  a 
concentrated  effect. 

The  following  year  Baca  could  bring  her  experience 
from  the  Venice  Pavilion  back  to  East  Los  where  she 
guided  barrio  teenagers  in  doing  a  series  of  panels  on  two 
sides  of  the  wall  surrounding  the  Little  Sisters  of  the 
Poor  Convalescent  Home.  ITie  panels  were  linked  by 
themes  of  ethnic  heritage,  mostly  Chicano,  some 
Japanese,  and  small  groups  of  teenagers  worked  on  each 
panel.  The  same  year  Alonso  Davis  organized  a  similar 
project.  The  Wall  of  Visions,  for  residents  of  the  Crenshaw 
Boulevard  area  who  decided  on  a  sequence  of  panels 
because  it  was  impossible  for  them  to  find  a  common 
time  to  work  together.  These  varied  personal  statements 
had  in  common  primarily  their  Black  subject  matter. 
That  year  in  Philadelphia  students  and  teachers  at  a 
Quaker  school  did  the  Friendly  Talking  Wall  on  a  con- 
struction site  fence  which  was  also  made  up  of  a  series  of 
separate  panels,  each  probably  done  by  a  different 
painter  and  linked  by  a  feeling  of  good  will  for  all  earth's 
creatures.  This  type  of  mural  sequence  became  popular 
elsewhere  around  the  country  on  temporary  walls.  The 
shortness  of  life  of  these  fences  probably  had  much  to  do 
with  the  kind  of  murals  done  on  them,  since  it  did  not 
make  sense  to  invest  the  long  work  necessary  for  a  single 
integrated  image  on  a  wall  that  was  due  to  come  down 
soon.  These  sequences  of  panels  were  painted  on 
schoolyards  and  in  corridors  as  well.  Usually  one  person 
painted  a  panel,  and  as  a  result  much  of  the  experience  of 
working  through  decisions  together  was  lost.  Moreover, 
strung  out  next  to  each  other  and  usually  no  higher  than 


the  reach  of  your  hand,  the  panels  could  not  readily 
achieve  the  monumentality  and  unity  of  a  single,  higher 
work.  There  was  always  the  risk  that  these  panels  would 
be  episodic  and  not  build  to  any  climax  or  overall  mean- 
ing. 

The  Tujunga  Wash  Mural,  also  done  under  Baca's 
direction,  is  an  even  longer  sequence  of  panels  which 
were  done  along  the  cement  channel,  but  here  there  is  a 
coherent  development  from  one  to  the  other  since  they 
trace  a  working  people's  history  of  California.  This  re- 
quired cooperative  research  and  planning  by  all  the 
eighty  painters  who  were  engaged  on  the  project  the  first 
year,  and  separate  teams  were  responsible  for  each  of  the 
large  panels.  A  comparable  interpretation  was  made  of 
San  Francisco's  past  in  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery,  painted 
by  the  Haight  Ashbury  Muralists,  a  small  group  of 
professionals  with  common  social  views  who,  working 
with  some  untrained  local  people,  could  maintain  relative 
unity  throughout  the  sequence  of  panels. 

The  visual  form  of  a  mural  reflects  the  social  process  that 
produced  it,  and  hence  the  experience  of  community  that 
had  been  achieved  among  the  painters.  In  the  first  dozen 
years  of  the  mural  movement  there  was  extensive  de- 
velopment in  the  skills  of  working  together  reflected  in 
increasingly  more  unified  forms  and  imagery.  It  was 
natural  for  professionals  and  lay  people  who  were  trying 
to  work  their  way  out  of  isolating  forms  of  private 
expression  to  begin  with  ensembles  of  panel  murals. 
From  these,  collaborating  painters  moved  either  to  single 
complex  works  or  to  sequences  of  panels  unified  by 
common  themes.  These  last  were  particularly  useful  for 
presentations  of  history,  and  here,  too,  muralists  tried  to 
clarify  what  linked  the  episodes  and  what  viewers  could 
learn  from  them. 


Problems 

The  problems  that  muralists  confront  occur  at  every 
stage  of  the  process.  The  most  pervasive  is  funding,  for 
community  murals  are  expensive,  running  from  three 
hundred  to  over  fifteen  thousand  dollars.  There  is  also 
the  danger  of  censorship  and  co-optation  by  the  estab- 
lishment. These  matters  will  be  dealt  with  in  a  later 
chapter.  Here  the  variety  of  problems  that  relate  directly 
to  the  making  of  murals  will  be  examined. 

As  we  have  seen,  their  defacement  is  relatively  rare 
because  neighborhood  people  regard  them  as  theirs.  But 
it  does  happen.  Vanita  Green  chose  not  to  try  to  restore 
her  portraits  of  Black  women  that  had  been  vandalized, 
beciause  she  wanted  people  when  they  saw  the  faces 
under  the  splattering  to  think  about  it. 

In  San  Francisco,  shortly  before  the  date  set  for  the 
dedication  of  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery,  a  three-hundred- 
foot  long  celebration  of  local  working  people  and  their 
struggles,  the  faces  of  all  Third  World  figures  were 
defaced  with   spray  paint.   When  the  vandalism  was 


366  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

discovered,  thirty  neighborhood  people  joined  the  artists 
in  removing  or  painting  over  the  damage  in  a  rush  to 
meet  the  dedication.  Shortly  afterwards  the  muralists 
received  an  unsigned  letter  that  apologized  for  the  attack, 
explaining  it  as  the  result  of  having  a  bad  night.  A  check 
for  seventy-five  dollars  was  enclosed. 

As  Los  Artes  de  Guadaiupanos  de  Aztlan  in  Santa  Ve 
had  to  contend  with  a  hostile  establishment  and  its 
police,  which  culminated  in  the  shootout  at  their 
Tonzntzin  School,  the  gang  painters  of  East  Los  u  horn 
Judy  Baca  worked  w  ith  were  also  targets  of  harassment. 
She  said  that  a  record  was  set  in  her  five  years  of  painting 
with  barrio  youth  when  during  the  summer  of  1974  only 
four  out  of  thirty-five  teenagers  w  ere  busted  on  City  wide 
mural  sites.  She  had  watched  the  police  planting  dope  on 
them  when  they  were  being  questioned  and  tried  to 
argue  the  cops  out  of  the  arrests.  A  number  of  young 
people  who  had  painted  with  her  had  been  killed  in  gang 
warfare.  While  I  was  photographing  the  mural  done  by 
the  Classic  Dolls,  a  young  Chicanas'  club,  a  police  car 
drove  up.  One  of  the  officers  called  out  that  he  had 
helped  with  the  mural.  He  explained  with  a  laugh  that 
the  police  had  left  the  "chicks"  alone. 

In  1978  in  San  Diego  Victor  Ochoa  said  he  was  ready 
to  "fly  the  coop."  He  had  been  supervising  murals  at 
Chicano  Park  for  years.  He  was  the  son  of  an  un- 
documented worker  who  had  been  a  truck  driver  in  Los 
Angeles  for  ten  years  before  he  fled  with  his  family  to 
avoid  an  Immigration  Service  sweep.  Raised  in  Mexico, 
Victor  was  working  in  a  photography  studio  in  Tijuana 
at  fifteen  and  then  came  back  to  the  United  States  to 
study  industrial  design  and  architecture.  He  served  as 
director  of  El  Centro  Cultural  in  Balboa  Park  from  its 
beginning  in  1971  to  1974  when  he  became  art  and 
recreation  coordinator  at  Chicano  Park,  employed  both 
by  the  city  and  the  Chicano  Federation.  Mural  designs 
had  to  be  approved  by  the  ten-to-twenty-member 
Chicano  Park  Steering  Committee,  a  self  selected  group 
of  residents  of  Logan  Barrio,  which  Ochoa  regarded  as 
conservative,  a  victim  of  its  own  Chicano  stereotypes  and 
Anglo  "brainwashing."  Some  members  of  the  steering 
committee  had  been  upset  by  the  murals  showing  nude 
women  and  the  oriental  versions  of  Quetzalcoatl  and  gila 
monsters.  Although  Ochoa  felt  little  attachment  to  the 
Virgin  of  Guadalupe  that  high  school  students  wanted  to 
paint  on  one  of  the  pylons  during  the  Mural  Marathon, 
he  gave  them  all  the  support  he  could.  Ochoa  had  also 
been  trying  to  reassure  better-off  Chicano  high  school 
students  who  came  from  elsewhere  and  were  anxious 
about  painting  in  the  barrio.  He  looked  back  to  the  early 
murals  of  1973  and  1974  with  the  greatest  satisfaction 
because  of  the  wide  involvement  of  local  residents.  He 
was  concerned  that  some  recent  works  by  individual 
artists  had  been  painted  at  Chicano  Park  to  advance  their 
careers  and  were  not  responsive  to  the  community.  But 


at  the  same  time  he  lamented  the  ignorance  and  oppres- 
sion within  the  barrio.  There  were  divisions  and  conflicts 
of  personalities,  especially  in  the  agencies  supposedly 
serving  the  barrio,  which  made  his  work  difficult.  He  felt 
himself  particularly  close  to  the  preteen  kids  whom  he 
liked  to  work  with  because  they  were  keen  to  make 
things. 

Ochoa  w  as  v\  idely  respected  in  Logan  Heights  and  by 
city  officials  becau.se  of  his  competence,  determination, 
and  reasonableness.  But  the  work  was  taking  its  toll.  He 
had  been  in  the  barrio  eight  years  and  was  thinking 
seriously  of  leaving.  He  said  that  he  wanted  to  develop 
his  own  art  in  connection  "with  people  who  had  clear 
directions."  He  was  thinking  of  going  to  Cuba  where  he 
believed  he  could  make  socially  conscious  art  in  a  cohe- 
rent and  supportive  setting.  He  felt  he  needed  the 
stimulation  of  a  wider,  international  art  than  he  could  be 
in  contact  with  in  Logan.  But  he  also  knew  that  after 
giving  him  training,  the  Cubans  would  expect  him  to  go 
back  and  work  in  his  barrio.  He  resigned  from  his 
position  at  Chicano  Park  in  the  summer  of  1979. 

The  Biography  of  a  Mural 

In  1975  after  having  watched  the  development  of 
murals  in  the  Bay  Area  and  around  the  country  and 
having  taught  courses  on  social  and  political  art  for  a 
number  of  years  at  San  Jose  State  University,  I  was 
tempted  to  undertake  a  mural  project  myself.  Since  the 
Bicentennial  year  was  in  the  offing  and  the  campus  was 
planning  programs  in  relation  to  it,  1  proposed  a  course 
designed  for  students  with  and  without  art  training  who 
would  do  a  Bicentennial  mural  for  the  university.  As  I 
was  not  an  artist,  I  sought  out  a  colleague  in  the  art 
department,  Robert  Freimark,  who  had  himself  done 
murals  with  young  people  and  who  shared  my  social 
orientation  and  desire  to  give  students  their  head.  Our 
department  chairpeople  gave  their  ready  approval.  Mine, 
in  fact,  was  a  member  of  the  campus  Bicentennial  com- 
mittee and  secured  us  a  two  hundred  dollar  grant,  put- 
ting us  in  touch  with  friends  of  his  who  owned  a  local 
paint-supply  house  and  a  lumberyard.  They  agreed  to 
contributions.  We  selected  a  wall  and  planned  to  com- 
plete a  nine-by-forty-foot  mural  during  a  fourteen-week 
semester.  The  site  was  a  broad  breezew  ay  entrance  to  the 
campus  where  thousands  of  students  walked  every  day. 
It  was  covered  and  would  protect  the  muralists,  who 
would  be  working  in  inclement  weather.  The  wall  was  of 
a  kind  of  brick  unsuitable  for  painting  directly  on. 
Therefore  we  would  attach  plywood  panels  to  it,  which 
we  assumed  would  be  more  satisfactory  to  the  adminis- 
tration. We  met  with  the  university's  executive  vice- 
president  and  the  director  of  facilities  planning  and  were 
encouraged.  They  agreed  to  the  site  and  asked  to  see  the 
finished  cartoon  that  the  students  would  develop,  but 
indicated  that  there  should  not  be  difficulty  about  ap- 
proval. 


At  the  beginning  of  the  semester  in  September  forty- 
six  students  registered  for  the  course.  Of  these  sixteen 
were  w ithout  art  training.  About  a  quarter  v\ere  Latino, 
one  was  Black,  and  one  Asian-American;  the  rest  uere 
White.  The  project  uas  explained  to  the  students  and 
they  were  urged  to  select  a  theme  they  felt  that  was 
important  to  them  and  all  those  who  would  view  the 
mural,  a  statement  that  would  justify  display  for  years  to 
come.  Fhe  first  few  weeks  I  showed  slides  of  the  current 
mural  movement  and  students  were  asked  to  read  the 
Mural  Manual,  an  excellent  how -to-do-it  handbook.  We 
also  made  a  field  trip  to  San  Francisco  to  see  the  murals  in 
the  Mission  District  and  a  very  large  work  of  Diego 
Rivera  at  City  College.  During  these  first  weeks  increas- 
ing time  w  as  devoted  to  discussions  of  possible  themes 
for  our  mural.  PVeimark  and  I  lay  back  on  our  view s;  we 
simply  tried  to  keep  the  discussions  moving  and  then  to 
identify  recurrent  topics.  For  three  sessions  the  students 
divided  up  into  self-selected  groups  and  continued  their 
dialogue.  I  here  u  as  a  w  ide  diversity  of  opinion.  I  hree 
or  four  students  felt  that  we  should  paint  a  "happy" 
mural,  not  necessarily  a  decorative  one,  but  not  one  that 
would  concentrate  on  social  or  controversial  problems. 
The  majority  however  believed  that  such  issues  had  to  be 
confronted  and  that  solutions  should  be  proposed.  Ihe 
principal  topics  that  emerged  from  these  discussions 
were  racism,  the  right  relation  of  the  individual  and 
society,  government  corruption,  population  control  and 
pollution,  education"  women's  liberation,  and  prison  re- 
form. I  was  impressed  at  the  degree  of  political  and  social 
concern  among  the  students,  who  had  been  accused  of 
post- Watergate  cynicism.  Although  some  women  stu- 
dents wanted  to  deal  with  the  theme  of  population 
control,  it  was  decided  that  this  was  a  message  already 
widely  accepted  by  our  prospective  audience.  After 
much  discussion  it  was  agreed  to  combine  all  of  the  other 
themes  and  relate  them  to  the  San  Jose  locale  as  w  ell  as 
their  national  context.  This  was  clearly  the  only  w  ay  to 
go,  for  each  topic  had  a  strong  constituency,  and  it  w  as 
the  end  of  the  sixth  week.  The  tentative  title  the  students 
selected  was  startling — "Freedom  vs.  Fxploitation  = 
Revolution." 

At  the  end  of  the  semester  when  we  were  evaluating 
our  experience  there  was  w ide  agreement  that  forty-six 
people  coming  from  diverse  experiences  were  too  many 
to  engage  in  such  a  dialogue.  The  students  thought  that 
twenty  was  the  maximum.  Discussions  of  theme  and 
later  design  revealed  that  the  students  had  had  little 
experience  in  collective  decision-making.  It  v\as  very 
difficult  for  them  to  listen  seriously  to  one  another  and 
compromise.  But  in  fact  many  learned.  In  general  they 
exercised  a  tolerance  and  patience  that  was  sometimes 
exhausting.  In  the  evaluation  there  w  as  w  idespread  feel- 
ing that  Freimark  and  I  had  let  these  discussions  continue 
too  long,  that  there  should  have  been  more  organization, 
deadlines,  and  guidance.  FVeimark  explaned  that  in  his 
studio  courses  he  tried  to  encourage  students  to  take  the 


Process  I  367 

initiative,  and  I  added  that  I  was  anxious  that  any  more 
guidance  on  my  part  would  have  risked  imposing  my 
view  s.  We  did  frequently  ask  questions  and  occasionally 
express  our  own  ideas.  No  doubt  our  opinions  affected 
some  of  the  results;  the  mural  would  be  not  only  the 
students'  but  ours  as  well.  Were  we  to  undertake  a 
similar  project  again,  we  would  move  the  dialogue  along 
faster  with  more  confidence. 

Another  criticism  the  students  offered  was  the  long 
delay  before  they  began  painting.  Fhis  w  as  painful  to  the 
art  students,  because  this  is  their  familiar  mode  of  ex- 
pression, and  hard  on  those  with  no  training,  because 
they  were  apprehensive  about  their  ow  n  abilities.  All  of 
us  agreed  w  ith  a  student  w  ho  suggested  that  they  should 
have  been  doing  practice  murals  from  the  beginning. 
Fhey  might  have  begun  in  small  groups  painting  panels 
on  long  rolls  of  butcher  paper,  and  then  worked  tow  ard 
larger  cooperative  compositions.  Fhis  would  not  only 
have  taught  them  about  design  and  using  materials;  it 
would  have  helped  them  get  to  know  one  another 
quicker.  As  it  w as,  we  delayed  asking  for  artwork  almost 
until  the  theme  w  as  decided  on. 

Fhere  followed  a  month  during  which  students 
brought  in  sketches  of  either  parts  or  full  compositions 
for  the  mural.  Some  of  the  sketches  were  of  hardly  more 
than  stick  figures,  but  they  received  serious  attention. 
Some  students  brought  in  photos  they  thought  would  be 
useful.  Fhey  were  shown  by  overhead  projectors,  and 
then  copied  on  butcher  paper  as  bits  and  pieces  seemed  to 
fall  together.  Some  of  the  most  satisfying  sessions  we  had 
occurred  when  five  cartoons,  each  ten  feet  long,  were 
being  done  by  different  groups  of  students  simultane- 
ously. This  did  a  great  deal  to  pick  up  morale,  and  it  w  as 
on  the  strength  of  these  experiences  that  the  students 
later  recommended  that  there  should  be  much  more 
collective  studio  w  ork. 

A  new  crisis  arose  w  hen  we  had  to  face  pulling  all  the 
cartoons  and  details  together.  The  approach  that  w  as  first 
tried  by  some  experienced  art  students  was  to  employ 
some  compositional  devices,  such  as  a  great  tree  on  w  hich 
all  our  ideas  w  ere  to  be  hung.  Other  proposals  included  a 
landscape  based  on  the  local  valley,  sweeping  abstract 
curves,  or  patriotic  bunting  that  would  flow  through  the 
whole.  The  mural  threatened  to  become  episodic  or  a 
collage  united  by  some  arbitrary  device.  The  students 
needed  to  be  brought  back  to  the  idea  that  murals  were 
made  forceful  by  bold,  monumental  figures  and  unified 
composition. 

Finally  we  took  as  our  central  motif  students  and 
community  people  of  all  ages  and  backgrounds  coming 
together  around  a  planning  table  to  make  the  public 
decisions  that  would  affect  their  lives.  The  thrust  of  the 
mural  was  to  call  for  the  active  political  involvement  of  all 
its  viewers  as  the  way  to  correct  contemporary  abuses  of 
power.  A  crowd  was  show n  streaming  to  the  table  in  the 
foreground  from  campus  buildings  in  the  back,  above 
which  the  city's  skyline  and  mountains  rose.  The  idea  of 


368  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


the  planning  table  was  borrowed  from  two  murals  of 
Rivera  on  the  distribution  of  land  to  the  peasants.  To  the 
left  was  a  large  domineering  figure  of  Al  Capone  (with  a 
CIA  cufflink)  suggesting  the  corruption  and  exploitation 
that  undermined  society.  (The  Mob  also  had  some  local 
connections.)  About  Capone  were  the  unemployed  and 
their  dependence  on  drugs  and  alcohol,  an  ungainly 
chorus  line  of  women  in  the  roles  into  which  they  have 
been  forced  by  sexism — a  nurse,  a  prostitute,  a  secretary, 
and  an  airline  hostess  inviting  customers  to  "fly  me." 
Nearby  was  Fleeta  Drumgo,  one  of  the  San  Quentin  Six 
who  was  kept  in  chains  during  and  eighteen-month  trial 
before  he  was  acquitted.  In  the  background  factories 
belched  smoke.  At  the  far  left  the  Statue  of  Liberty, 
monument  to  the  nation's  first  centennial,   raised  her 


Final  cartoon  of  San  Jose  State  University  students' 
Freedom  vs.  Exploitation  =  Revolution,  1975. 


torch  to  burn  a  three  dollar  bill  with  Richard  Nixon's 
portrait  on  it.  In  contrast  at  the  right  there  was  a  large 
head  of  Cesar  Chavez  and  a  march  of  farm  workers,  then 
Dennis  Banks,  leader  of  the  American  Indian  Movement, 
who  was  currently  defending  an  Indian  burial  ground  in 
San  Jose  from  being  excavated  for  a  Holiday  Inn.  At  the 
far  right  were  the  two  Black  athletes  from  San  Jose  State, 
Tommy  Smith  and  John  Carlos,  who  after  receiving 
medals  at  the  .Mexico  City  Olympics  in  1968  raised  their 


Some  of  the  San  Jose  State  muralists  with  presentation 
design. 


arms  in  clenched-fist  salutes  as  the  national  anthem  was 
played,  an  act  for  which  they  were  expelled  from  the 
Olympics  and  became  controversial  figures  at  home.  The 
students  felt  that  their  assertion  of  Black  pride  was  a 
fitting  way  to  balance  the  gesture  of  Liberty  at  the 
opposite  side.  Moreover,  the  mural  was  to  be  displayed 
in  an  area  adjacent  to  the  physical  education  depart- 
ments, and  one  of  the  chairmen  had  asked  that  some 
allusion  be  made  in  the  mural  to  their  activities.  This  was 
the  general  layout  that  was  presented  to  six  students  who 
volunteered  to  carry  it  through  in  detail  and  execute  a 
two-by-thirteen-foot  presentation  drawing.  When  some 
days  later  they  returned  with  it,  we  were  all  astonished 
and  delighted.  There  before  us  was  what  we  had  taken 
ten  weeks  to  arrive  at  and  what  we  had  begun  to  fear 
might  never  appear. 

Looking  back  over  the  design  process,  the  students 
later  offered  a  number  of  criticisms.  They  complained 
that  some  of  their  classmates,  especially  those  who  con- 
tributed large  sections  of  drawing,  were  reluctant  to 
make  modifications  that  the  majority  requested.  Some  of 
the  drafters  tried  to  justify  their  unwillingness  by  com- 
plaining that  they  had  done  more  than  their  share  of  the 
work.  The  untrained  members  of  the  class  felt  on  the 
other  hand  that  their  expectation  that  they  would  have  an 
equal  role  with  the  art  students  was  not  fulfilled;  they 
thought  the  more  experienced  students  had  taken  over. 
In  general  the  students  got  on  top  of  this  kind  of  abra- 
siveness,  but  it  was  the  result  of  an  unduly  drawn-out 
process  and  the  strong  differences  among  the  students  in 
ability  and  point  of  view. 

There  were  in  fact  a  variety  of  functions  the  students 
could  perform.  One  took  on  documenting  the  whole 
process  by  still  photography.  Two  shot  key  events  and 
did  a  series  of  interviews  with  participants  on  video  tape. 
A  number  of  students  on  my  encouragement  kept  jour- 
nals of  the  process.  Others  were  looking  forward  to  the 
carpentry  that  was  to  provide  the  surface  for  the  mural. 
Another  group  was  to  organize  the  dedication,  which 
was  to  be  an  elaborate  fiesta.  Everyone  was  to  participate 
in  the  painting. 

It  might  have  been  easier  to  let  the  forty-six  students 
divide  into  self-selected  groups  each  of  which  would  do  a 
mural.  If  the  ultimate  objective  is  cooperation,  it  may  be 
counterproductive  to  force  people  w  ith  different  outlooks 
into  the  same  mural  team.  A  dialogue  of  murals  could 
have  been  our  approach.  But  Freimark  and  I  believed 
that  it  was  important,  if  it  was  at  all  possible,  to  keep  the 
students  together  to  give  them  the  chance  of  developing  a 
common  statement.  Workmg  with  a  group  of  hetero- 
geneous people,  especially  on  a  campus  where  they 
at  least  had  in  common  their  roles  as  students,  seemed  to 
us  to  provide  young  people  with  some  of  the  experience 
they  needed  if  they  were  ever  to  get  together  in  their 
communities  after  college  to  solve  common  problems. 

At  the  time  of  the  completion  of  the  presentation 
drawing,  four^weeks  of  the  semester  still  remained.  It 


Process  I  169 

was  still  possible  that,  with  the  quick  approval  of  the 
administration,  we  would  be  able  to  begin  painting, 
which  enough  students  said  they  would  be  willing  to 
continue  during  the  winter  holidays  and  finish  during  the 
spring  semester.  The  six  students  who  had  done  the 
presentation  drawing,  Freimark,  and  I  now  brought  the 
cartoon  to  the  vice-president  and  facilities  planner.  The 
students,  who  were  apprehensive  about  visiting  top  ad- 
ministration on  our  very  large  bureaucratic  campus,  were 
nevertheless  articulate  in  explaining  the  mural  to  them. 
Then  there  was  silence.  Freimark  and  I  made  a  few 
additional  remarks.  Again  silence.  It  became  clear  that 
the  administrators  were  not  going  to  commit  themselves 
to  any  judgment.  The  final  decision  was  going  to  be 
made  elsewhere.  Whether  they  did  not  like  what  they 
saw  was  not  clear. 

It  had  been  decided  before  this  meeting  somewhere  in 
the  administration  that  the  cartoon  should  be  brought  to 
the  Campus  Planning  Committee  for  approval.  This 
seemed  reasonable,  and  we  hoped  it  would  be  the  last 
step.  Fortunately,  the  committee  was  having  a  regular 
session  two  days  later.  Again  the  students  showed  their 
drawing  and  explained  it.  One  member  of  the  commit- 
tee, a  representative  of  the  Alumni  Association,  charged 
that  this  was  not  a  Bicentennial  mural;  it  was  protest  art. 
Another  said  that  the  cartoon's  indictment  of  corruption 
was  not  something  he  would  like  to  look  at  every  day. 
There  were  some  compliments.  The  question  arose  as  to 
whether  the  mural  was  genuinely  representative  of  the 
campus.  A  sympathetic  committee  member  suggested 
that  the  cartoon  be  put  on  public  display  and  a  vote  be 
taken.  Although  this  suggestion  had  some  plausibility, 
we  responded  that  our  class  itself  offered  a  reasonable 
sampling  of  the  student  body.  We  had  wrestled  w  ith  a 
theme  and  design  for  the  better  part  of  a  semester,  v\  hich 
should  have  yielded  as  sound  a  consensus  of  campus 
views  as  could  be  arrived  at.  Moreover,  we  said  that  this 
was  the  expression  of  forty-six  students;  it  was  not 
intended  to  represent  the  definitive  campus  view,  how- 
ever that  could  be  arrived  at.  It  was  a  mural  made  for  the 
Bicentennial;  it  made  no  pretense  at  being  the  campus 
Bicentennial  statement.  There  were  plenty  of  other  walls 
crying  out  for  murals. 

During  the  meeting  the  facilities  planner,  w  ith  w  horn 
we  had  met  in  sessions  with  the  vice-president,  distrib- 
uted copies  of  a  document  that  we  were  now  seeing  for 
the  first  time.  Its  title  was  Policy  and  Procedures  on  the 
Acceptance  and  Installation  of  Art  Work  on  the  California 
State  University  and  College  Campuses.  In  addition  to  the 
steps  we  had  already  proceeded  through,  it  called  for 
examination  by  another  committee  w  ith  community  rep- 
resentation, and  thence  the  approval  of  thfe  university 
president.  If  these  levels  okayed  the  cartoon,  then  it  was 
to  go  to  Los  Angeles,  where  the  chancellor  of  the  state 
university  system  would  process  it.  The  document  con- 
tinued: 


370  /  COMMUNrrV  MURALS 


The  Chancellor  will  schedule  the  presentation  of  the 
art  work  design  to  the  Committee  on  Campus  Plan- 
ning, Buildings  and  Grounds  for  recommendation  to 
the  Board  of  Trustees  for  action.  If  required,  he  will 
also  schedule  the  item  on  the  agenda  of  the  Committee 
on  Gifts  and  Public  Affairs. 


This  would  take  at  least  months.  We  felt  that  we  had 
been  misled.  To  run  this  gauntlet  would  destroy  the 
project,  because  it  would  be  impossible  to  string  along 
the  students  until  all  approvals  had  been  acquired,  if  they 
ever  could  be.  And  what  justice  was  there  in  such  remote 
authorities  having  the  power  to  cut  down  what  was  a 
local  student  undertaking?  We  were  convinced  that  this 
procedure  would  not  have  been  invoked  had  our  mural 
not  touched  on  controversial  topics.  We  suspected  that 
the  Black  athletes  might  have  been  the  crux,  but  no 
explicit  objection  to  their  representation  had  been  raised. 
That  of  course  would  have  been  difficult  for  the  admin- 
istration to  do.* 

Finally,  the  local  Campus  Planning  Committee  did 
vote  its  approval  of  our  mural  without,  as  it  put  it, 
reference  to  its  content.  The  project  then  went  into 
limbo,  allegedly  awaiting  the  appointment  of  the  mem- 
bers of  the  next  committee  by  the  President.  We  sought 
to  find  out  whether  the  administration  was  going  to 
insist  on  the  whole  series  of  screenings.  But  the  vice- 
president  would  not  respond  to  phone  calls  and  requests 
for  a  meeting.  The  class,  hoping  to  build  some  pressure 
on  the  administration,  held  a  press  conference  with  the 
campus  daily  and  told  its  story.  We  would  have  to  wait 
through  the  winter  recess  to  plan  the  next  step,  but  we 
promised  ourselves  that  we  would  do  our  mural.  If  we 
were  not  allowed  to  use  the  planned  wall,  we  would  find 
some  other  way  to  make  our  statement  and  secure  at  least 
a  temporary  showing  of  it  on  campus.  This  firmness  of 
the  students  gave  all  of  us  the  sense  that  we  had  in  fact 
accomplished  something. 

When  the  spring  semester  opened  in  February,  the 
administration  had  not  yet  responded  to  our  phone  calls 
and  letters.  Nevertheless,  we  registered  fifteen  students 
for  "special  study"  who  we  hoped  would  be  the  core  of 
others  from  the  fall  who  might  return  when  the  painting 
got  underway.  We  decided  to  start  painting  the  unat- 
tached panels  pending  the  university's  decision.  The 
lumber  yard  that  was  to  contribute  the  materials  agreed 
to  supply  them  though  it  knew  that  the  administration 
had  tied  the  mural  up  in  red  tape.  But  when  we  went  to 
pick  up  the  wood,  the  owner  told  us  that  the  university 
vice-president  had  asked  him  not  to  provide  it. 

Three  weeks  into  the  semester  we  were  finally  able  to 
extract  from  the  administration  the  information  that  we 
woulcj  have  to  go  the  full  gauntlet  to  the  system's  board 
of  trustees,  if  we  got  that  far,  and  that  for  starters,  an  art 
committee  had  been  selected  by  the  president  and  would 
screen  our  work.  This  committee  put  a  quick  end  to  that 
line  of  procedure.  It  was  composed  of  two  local  busi- 


nessmen, two  alumni,  two  professors  from  the  art  de- 
partment, the  facilities  planning  director,  another  cam- 
pus staff  person,  and  the  student  body  president,  who 
did  not  show.  The  first  question  after  our  students' 
explanation  of  the  content  came  from  one  of  the  busi- 
nessmen: "Why  is  President  Nixon's  portrait  on  the 
three-dollar  bill?"  When  one  student  after  another  re- 
sponded with  vigor,  that  line  of  questioning  stopped. 

Then  one  of  the  art  professors  launched  an  attack  on 
the  competence  and  style  of  the  work,  and  the  rest  of  the 
committee  fell  in  line  with  him.  It  was  true  that  our 
thirteen-foot  drawing  only  suggested  the  color.  The 
other  art  professor  called  for  a  presentation  of  a  full-scale 
cartoon — all  nine-by-forty  feet.  Rivera  and  Orozco  and 
the  murals  on  the  campus  of  the  National  University  in 
Mexico  City  were  invoked  by  the  professional  and  lay 
members  of  the  committee,  and  our  composition  did  not 
measure  up.  Affirming  its  concern  for  excellence,  the 
committee  refused  to  acknowledge  the  importance  of  the 
public  display  of  serious  student  work.  What  we  learned 
was  that  it  is  difficult  for  a  screening  committee  to  oppose 
openly  a  mural's  controversial  content.  But  to  criticize  its 
artistic  quality  was  to  attack  it  with  safety  where  it  was 
most  vulnerable.  We  realized  that  presenting  a  more 
polished  cartoon  would  have  made  no  difference.  If  a 
committee  was  hand  picked,  as  we  suspected  this  one 
was,  to  block  the  painting  of  a  troublesome  work,  it  was 
likely  that  it  would  do  just  that,  even  without  being  told 
to. 

It  was  now  the  end  of  February.  We  did  not  have 
access  to  materials  and  the  students  were  beginning  to 
disappear.  Freimark  and  I  made  one  final  effort  to  get  the 
administration's  help.  We  wrote  the  vice-president  a 
letter,  expressing  our  sense  that  the  administration  had 
responsibilities  to  the  students  both  to  allow  them  to 
finish  their  course  work  and  to  express  freely  their  view 
of  the  Bicentennial.  We  said  that  the  elaborate  screening 
procedures  which  had  been  put  in  their  path  were  unrea- 
sonable for  the  display  of  student  work.  We  proposed 
that  the  outdoor  site  be  abandoned  and  that  a  portable 
mural  be  undertaken  that  could  be  hung  indoors  in  the 
Student  Union  for  as  long  as  there  was  interest  in  it. 
That  meant  our  backing  away  from  our  original  hope  of 
having  the  students  work  in  public.  The  letter  reached 
the  president,  and  he  agreed  to  our  proposal,  freed  up  the 
funds,  and  lifted  the  administration's  stay  on  contribu- 
tions from  the  community. 

We  were  both  elated  and  dismayed.  It  was  now  mid- 
March,  and  only  five  weeks  remained  in  the  semester. 
The  students  were  already  feeling  the  end-of-semester 
pressure  of  having  to  finish  up  work  and  prepare  for  final 
exams  in  other  courses.  Given  the  shortage  of  time  and 
the  declining  number  of  students,  we  redesigned  the 
cartoon  for  half  of  its  original  size.  It  was  now  planned  as 
an  eight-by-twenty-foot  work.  The  materials  were  col- 
lected, the  panels  cradled  in  two-by-fours  and  given  a 
gesso  ground.  The  cartoon  was  copied  on  them  from  the 


Process  I  371 


image  of  an  opaque  projector.  And  the  students  began 
painting.  They  stayed  with  the  mural  after  the  end  of  the 
semester  and  into  the  summer  until  jobs  and  vacations 
called  them  away.  The  actual  painting  of  the  mural  was 
the  easiest,  fastest,  and  most  enjoyable  part  of  the  entire 
process. 

When  work  was  suspended,  most  of  the  white  ground 
had  disappeared.  We  had  decided  to  work  in  a  two- 
dimensional  New  Realist  style  because  it  was  bold, 
readily  adaptable  to  a  large  flat  surface  and  was  within 
the  abilities  of  the  students.  Each  local  color  was  to  be 
limited  to  two  to  three  flat,  hard-edged  tones.  One  of  the 
most  experienced  painters  of  the  group,  Felix  Correa, 
oversaw  the  drawing  and  painting.  Under  his  supervision 
the  results  in  early  July  when  work  was  suspended  were 
impressive.  Correa  explained  Al  Capone's  thin  smile  as 
the  deceptiveness  of  the  system.  However,  a  number  of 
viewers  at  this  stage  felt  that  the  general  effect  was 
"sweeter"  than  we  had  intended.  The  tones  were  too 
pastel,  the  drawing  too  refined,  they  said. 

When  we  returned  to  the  campus  in  September  for  the 
fall  semester,  there  were  still  five  students  who  were  able 
to  continue  work  on  the  mural:  Jeannie  Stoia,  Graham 
Marshall,  Chris  Freimark,  Jan  King,  and  Jerry  Astorga. 
Correa  had  graduated.  Bob  Freimark  now  painted 
alongside  the  students.  Some  of  the  areas  were  repainted, 
and  in  general  the  color  became  darker  and  the  effect 
more  weighty.  The  earlier  refinement  was  lost,  but  a  new 
power  began  to  emerge.  It  was  decided  to  fill  in  the  large 
area  behind  the  farmworkers  with  rows  of  cultivated 
fields,  which  acknowledged  the  achievement  of  early 
Italian  growers  and  vintners  in  the  area  and  aesthetically 
balanced  the  crowded  left  half  of  the  mural.  The  students 
decided  to  paint  the  front  office  of  the  university  admin- 
istration with  its  windows  boarded  up  in  retaliation  for 
the  red  tape  we  had  encountered. 

Having  worked  every  Sunday  through  the  fall,  the 
painters  were  finally  finished  by  the  first  of  November. 
The  Student  Union  art  gallery  provided  space,  and  the 
Union's  Board  of  Governors  later  agreed  it  should  remain 
permanently.  There  was  total  contrast  between  the  de- 
Jight  of  its  student  members  and  the  difficulties  the 
administration  had  made.  When  we  saw  the  mural  in  its 
new  public  space  with  spotlights  turned  on  it,  we  were 
bowled  over. 

It  was  too  late  in  the  fall  semester  for  a  dedication.  Our 
Bicentennial  mural  would  have  to  wait  until  1977  for  its 
final  launching  and  festivities.  We  settled  on  Valentine's 
Day  as  the  appropriate  time  to  present  our  gift.  The 
Student  Union  provided  the  refreshments.  There  was  a 
guitarist  and  singing.  The  keynote  speaker  was  local 
Congressman  Norman  Mineta,  who  complimented  the 
muralists  on  the  outspokenness  of  their  work  and  their 
willingness  to  risk  controversy.  He  said  he  had  only  one 
criticism — they  had  not  shown  the  "concentration 
camps"  in  which  he  and  1 10,000  other  Americans  of  his 
Japanese  ancestry  had  been  incarcerated  during  World 


Felix  Correa  and  Jeannie  Stoia  at  work  on  the  mural. 


War  II.  We  were  pleased  by  such  criticism,  for  though  he 
was  correct  he  was  also  confirming  our  intention  to  make 
the  mural  a  strong  statement  about  the  America  we  saw 
and  the  need  for  change.  In  his  address  Mineta  said: 
"The  mural's  detractors  and  critics  will  be  those  who 
believe  patriotism  is  a  one-way  street,  that  one  cannot 
love,  defend,  and  honor  our  country  and  at  the  same  time 
recognize  that  we  have  made  grievous  errors  in  the  past." 
He  then  went  on  to  endorse  the  mural's  criticism  of 
American  society  and  called  on  his  listeners  "to  dedicate" 
themselves  "to  the  risk  of  caring,  of  getting  in- 
volved. .  .  ."*  Although  we  had  sent  invitations  to  the 


372  /  COMMUNITY  MURAI.S 


The  mural  in  progress,  summer  1976. 


members   of  the   university   administration,    none   ap- 
peared. 

The  ceremonies  were  concluded  by  a  powerful  speech 
by  Harry  Edwards,  who  had  organized  the  demonstra- 
tion of  the  San  Jose  State  Black  athletes  at  the  Mexico 
City  Olympics  in  1968  depicted  in  the  mural.  Edwards 
had  been  a  track  and  basketball  star  and  later  a  part-time 
lecturer  at  San  Jose  State.  During  the  same  fall  of  1968  he 
had  been  the  principal  initiator  thpre  of  one  of  the  first 
Afro-American  Studies  departments  in  the  United 
States.  Since  then  he  had  been  teaching  for  six  years  at 
Berkeley.  In  his  address  Edwards  criticized  what  he 
called  the  "narcissism"  that  had  overtaken  both  Whites 
and  Blacks  in  the  seventies.  This  self-absorption,  he  said, 
was  making  possible  the  increasing  erosion  of  the  gains  in 
education  that  Fhird  World  people  achieved  in  the  pre- 
vious decade.  He  cited  the  declining  enrollment  of 
minority  college  students,  the  drying  up  of  financial  aid, 
and  the  closing  down  of  ethnic-studies  departments.  He 
spoke  of  his  being  denied  tenure  at  Berkeley,  a  battle  in 
which  he  was  currently  embroiled  (and  finally  won).  He 
concluded  that 

what  affects  Third  World  people  affects  them  first. 
But  what  happens  to  us  eventually  happens  to  Whites, 
because  who  is  the  nigger  is  not  a  matter  of  color,  not 
even  a  matter  of  sex.  It  is  a  matter  of  power.  .  .  . 

So  Blacks,  Whites,  Chicanos,  everyone  must  get 
behind  the  push  to  keep  the  universities  open.  .  .  . 
Ihc  key  is  organization.  You  have  to  reinstate  the 
spirit  of  community  and  common  struggle  that  was 
cnaracteristic  of  the  sixties.  These  are  the  things  that 


you  can  do  and  yesterday  was  already  too  late  to 
start.'" 

As  a  result  of  Edwards'  speech  more  than  two  hundred 
students  marched  through  San  Jose  a  few  days  later  to 
urge  that  the  U.S.  Supreme  Court  reverse  the  decision  of 
the  California  court  on  the  Bakke  case  that  held  that 
special  admission  programs  for  minority  students  were 
illegal.  And  we  were  satisfied  that  the  dedication  of  our 
mural  had  contributed  to  a  renewal  of  activism. 

Having  talked  with  a  good  many  muralists  around  the 
country,  I  realize  that  the  experience  of  our  group  was 
not  unique.  Those  who  have  tried  to  do  murals  on 
university  campuses  report  that  they  also  get  run  from 
one  committee  to  another,  and  that  delays  seem  inter- 
minable. Nevertheless,  the  effort  is  worthwhile  and  via- 
ble. There  are  usually  acres  of  bare  walls,  but  it  may 
become  necessary,  as  in  our  case,  to  settle  for  portable 
panels  to  allow  the  students  to  be  outspoken.  To  be 
permitted  finally  to  paint  on  campus  walls  is  either  the 
sign  that  students  and  faculty  have  achieved  some  au- 
thority in  their  workplace  or  that  their  murals  are  incon- 
sequential. 

When  we  were  reviewing  the  first  semester's  work,  the 
forty-six  students,  in  spite  of  their  frustrations  and  the 
uncertainty  that  they  would  be  able  to  do  their  mural, 
were  unanimous  in  their  belief  that  such  collective  works 
of  art  should  be  undertaken.  Ihey  were  critical  of  the 
view  that  important  art  could  only  be  done  by  profes- 
sionals. They  also  agreed  that  it  was  necessary  for  lay 
muralists  to  develop  skills  to  be  able  to  express  their 
intentions  effectively.  In  spite  of  the  travail  and  the 
knowledge  of  where  we  fell  short,  we  all  felt  that  it  had 
been  worth  it. 


Process  I  373 


Harry  Edwards  speaking  at  dedication,  February,  1977. 


Murals  as  Performance  and  Process 

Of  all  the  visual  arts,  community  murals  are  uniquely 
a  performance  art.  Muralists  commonly  regard  the  pro- 
cess of  their  production  as  important  as  the  final  product, 
and  they  want  the  mural  to  continue  the  process  they 
have  begun.  For  them  and  often  for  their  communities  a 
mural'  is  a  verb.  It  is  an  ongoing  sequence  of  intense 
activity,  more  full  of  meaning  and  feeling  than  most 
because  it  draws  out  the  imagination  and  skills  of  people 
to  help  them  come  to  grips  w  ith  serious  public  concerns. 
The  artistry  is  in  the  doing.  Particularly  with  the  team 
murals  and  the  collaborations  of  professionals,  there  are 
the  collective  action,  the  ability  of  each  participant  to 
share  in  the  decisions  and  to  be  involved  at  every  stage, 
the  leaps  of  brainstorming  together,  the  mutual  support, 
the  shared  craftsmanship  and  learning  from  another,  the 
chance  to  enlist  the  help  and  ideas  of  community  people. 
There  are  hassles,  delays,  and  failures,  but  there  are 
colleagues  to  help  you  figure  out  what  went  wrong  and 
start  again.  For  the  single  artist  who  works  closely  with 
the  community,  either  through  formal  meetings  or  in  the 
street,  the  process  is  also  important.  For  the  community 
muralists  in  general  there  are  not  only  the  satisfactions  of 
producing  a  visible  and  useful  product,  there  are  also  the 


intrinsic  pleasures  of  the  day-to-day  process.  In  a  society 
in  which  the  narrow  ness,  regimentation,  and  boredom  of 
much  work  has  to  be  compensated  for  by  compulsive 
shopping,  hobbies,  and  entertainment,  the  doing  of  mu- 
rals is  demonstrating  that  the  process  of  people  working 
together  can  be  fulfilling  in  itself. 

The  heightened  activity  of  the  painters  usually  spreads 
to  the  neighborhood  as  local  people  are  draw  n  into  the 
process  of  public  meetings,  negotiations,  requests  for 
assistance,  and  the  casual  discussions  at  the  site.  It  is  by 
this  means  as  much  as  by  the  explicit  message  of  their 
imagery  that  the  muralists  hope  to  raise  the  conscious- 
ness and  energy  of  the  neighborhood.  Local  people  make 
varied  kinds  of  imput:  often  they  select  the  directing 
artists,  who  may  be  local  himself;  they  help  formulate  the 
theme  and  design,  provide  the  site  and  frequently  some 
of  the  materials  and  funding;  they  offer  technical  assist- 
ance, in  the  form  of  engineering  or  local  history;  they 
share  in  the  painting,  store  the  paints  at  night,  bring  out 
coffee,  and  mount  the  dedication.  A  mural  may  give  local 
people  experience,  if  not  in  making  art,  then  in  writing 
leaflets  and  press  releases,  in  doing  photo  documentation. 


i 


374  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

research,  and  organizing.  And  there  is  the  more  general 
experience  that  all  who  participate  get  in  community 
cooperation.  The  professional  muralists  say  that  they 
learn  immensely  by  working  in  the  neighborhoods,  not 
only  practical  skills,  but  about  individual  people  and 
their  own  society." 

Hence,  the  murals  break  through  the  distinctions  be- 
tween product  and  the  process  of  its  production  and  use. 
They  also  overcome  the  division  between  patron,  artist, 
and  audience.  Community  murals  are  only  alive  when 
they  stimulate  collective  behavior — while  they  are  being 
done  and  afterwards.  Otherwise  they  are  eviscerated 
shells — pleasant  to  contemplate,  but  not  living  organisms 
that  interact  w  ith  their  environment  and  generate  more 
life. 

The  performance  and  process  character  of  murals  and 
particularly  their  involving  numbers  of  people  in  their 
production  exhibits  their  connection  with  the  public 
demonstration.  Murals  are  in  fact  demonstrations  that 
create  the  means  of  renewing  themselves. 

An  example  of  the  importance  muralists  attach  to  the 
process  of  their  work  is  the  effort  of  the  students  of  Santa 
Ana  College  to  preserve  it  in  the  scene  above  their 
signatures  in  the  corner  of  their  large  library  mural. 
There  they  all  are  at  their  panels  before  they  brought 
them  indoors;  some  are  on  ladders,  some  working  as  they 
crouch  dow  n,  while  the  big  calavera  takes  shape  under 
their  brushes. 

The  process  of  making  a  mural  is  important  because  it 
is  a  source  of  authentic  community.  Community  is 
widely  recognized  as  much  more  than  people  who  hap- 
pen to  reside  and  work  next  to  each  other.  It  begins  w  ith 
mutual  help  and  a  grow  ing  concern  for  one  another  out  of 
which  emerge  commitments  and  the  sharing  of  larger 
tasks.  It  is  often  rooted  in  a  common  way  of  life  and 
heritage.'^  Community,  like  a  mural,  is  a  verb,  an  ongo- 
ing process  of  thought  and  action.  It  provides  chances  for 
its  members  to  develop  their  abilities  and  gives  them  a 
role  in  choosing  what  is  to  be  done.  And  when  people 
feel  that  they  are  useful,  respected,  and  growing,  life 
seems  meaningful.  This  is  what  happens  in  the  making  of 
many  of  the  murals,  and  when  they  succeed,  they  ad- 
vance a  neighborhood  or  other  group's  experience  of 
community  and  stimulate  it  to  further  action.  The  kind 
of  society  we  get  depends  on  the  kind  of  communication 
that  occurs.  Socially  conscious  murals  arose  in  reaction  to 
one-way  mass  communication  and  have  sought  to  en- 
courage public  dialogue.  In  addition  they  have  provided 
an  example  of  cooperative  community-focused  produc- 
tion. Doing  and  using  a  mural  are  community. 

Who  Are  the  People? 

This  brings  us  to  a  long  delayed  question:  who  are  the 
people  that  make  it  credible  to  speak  of  people's  murals? 
"We  The  People  Demand  Control  Of  Our  Com- 
munities"; "The  Neighborhood  Is  For  People  Not  Big 


Business"  read  the  leaflets  carried  by  the  protesters  who 
stride  out  of  one  wall.  Protect  the  People's  Homes  was  the 
title  of  another  work  against  urban  renewal.  A  neighbor- 
hood of  different  racial  groups  w  as  responsible  for  People 
ofLakeview  Unite,  "i  am  the  people"  proclaims  the  plaque 
alongside  a  wall  show  ing  a  family  propelling  the  world. 
People's  Painters  w  as  the  name  a  group  of  college  stu- 
dents took  who  did  socially  conscious  murals.  Walker, 
Weber,  Eda,  and  Rogovin  in  a  common  statement  distri- 
buted at  the  exhibition  of  muralists-in-action  at  the 
Museum  of  Contemporary  Art  in  Chicago  in  1971  said: 

We  are  dedicated  to  becoming  artists  for  the  people, 
entering  into  a  living  relationship  with  this  vast  audi- 
ence, drawing  on  the  people's  boundless  potential  for 
creativity. 

It  is  in  the  name  of  "the  people"  that  makers  of  murals 
affirm  their  life  together  and  protest  against  what 
threatens  it. 

The  muralists  and  their  constituencies  have  in  mind  a 
sense  of  who  they  are  and  what  is  owing  to  them  and 
often  others  far  distant  as  "the  people."  Selfhood  and 
membership  are  reciprocal  in  their  thinking.  Their  per- 
sonal identity  is  bound  up  with  not  only  their  families, 
but  also  with  their  neighbors,  fellow  workers,  asso- 
ciations, ethnic  groups,  and  ultimately  humankind.  And 
it  is  to  this  last  and  most  abstract  membership  that  they 
finally  turn  to  make  their  claim  to  fair  dealing.  They 
affirm  themselves  as  human  persons.  They  would  prob- 
ably paraphrase  one  or  another  of  the  nation's  founding 
documents  to  give  point  to  their  ideas  of  their  dignity  as 
members  of  humanity.  The  paradox  of  their  staking  their 
own  identity  on  so  broad  a  membership  makes  sense 
when  personhood  is  grasped  as  a  social  creation,  the 
result  of  person-to-person  interaction.  Self  and  society 
develop  together,  particularly  in  a  community  which 
draws  out  and  shapes  the  abilities  of  individuals  and 
provides  them  with  opportunities. 

It  was  during  the  sixties  that  this  idea  of  the  commu- 
nity as  the  proper  setting  for  human  growth  was  reas- 
serted and  struggled  for  in  the  face  of  racism,  mass 
society,  and  economic  and  political  centralization.  The 
movements  of  Black  and  Brown  Pride  and  Power  were 
among  the  first  efforts  to  reidentify  the  community  and 
its  control  by  its  own  members  as  essential  to  the  needs  of 
people.  Murals  became  one  of  their  instruments,  and 
these  wall  paintings  opened  up  the  possibility  of 
community-based  art  and  communications  to  other 
people  as  well.  The  first  murals  were  done  by  trained 
artists  who  had  grown  up  in  the  ghettos  and  barrios,  and 
they  gave  heart  to  socially  conscious  artists  from 
middle-class  backgrounds — some  ethnic,  some  White — 
to  become  involved.  These  artists  were  moved  not 
only  by  the  oppression  of  the  minorities  but  also  by 
their  own  dismay  at  mainstream  art  careers  and  the 
establishment  way  of  life.  Some  believed  that  making 


common  cause  with  the  most  exploited  and  helping  them 
organize  was  a  means  to  thoroughgoing  social  change.  It 
was  also  some  of  these  socially  conscious  painters  who 
had  been  initially  drawn  to  inner-city  art  who  helped 
interest  labor  unions  and  White  working-class  neighbor- 
hoods in  murals.  Some  people  of  the  counterculture  and 
some  parents  seeking  art  education  for  their  children 
came  to  murals  independently.  From  these  varied 
sources  murals  were  taken  up  by  street  gangs,  women's 
collectives,  senior  citizens'  groups,  tenants'  unions,  block 
clubs,  neighborhood  associations,  churches,  college  stu- 
dents, prison  inmates,  clients  of  halfway  houses,  and  in  a 
few  instances  the  well-to-do.  The  affluent  residents  of 
Philadelphia's  Hicks  Street  discovered  one  another  by 
doing  a  mural.  That  should  not  be  overestimated,  just  as 
it  is  important  not  to  exaggerate  what  murals  alone  can 
do  for  the  inner  city.  But  it  demonstrates  the  utility  of 
murals  in  bringing  people  together. 

What  all  of  these  makers  and  users  of  murals  share  is 
some  active  experience  of  community  which  they  either 
discovered  in  painting  together  or  already  knew  and 
sought  to  advance.  Because  this  art  supports  a  funda- 
mental social  need  and  because  it  is  an  art  in  which 
ordinary  people  can  participate,  it  is  reasonable  to  speak 
of  these  paintings  as  "people's  murals."  It  is  not  an  art 
limited  to  the  poor  any  more  than  to  a  particular  race, 
although  it  was  among  the  impoverished  minorities 
where  it  developed  and  is  still  widely  practiced.  In  a  dozen 
years  it  has  spread  to  moderate  income  groups  of  all 
races,  people  who  also  are  using  it  both  to  develop  their 
communities  and  to  resist  a  power  structure  that 
threatens  their  life  together. 

The  creators  and  public  of  the  murals  do  not  sen- 
timentalize about  "the  people."  While  the  desperation  for 
a  decent  way  of  life  often  narrows  people,  getting  to- 
gether to  discuss  ideas  for  murals  has  provided  them  with 
occasions  to  look  more  broadly  at  their  condition.  Their 
plight  and  sense  of  having  suffered  injustice  may  help 
them  to  an  awareness  of  their  rights  as  people  and  hence 
the  rights  of  all  people.  Demagoguery  may  mislead  them 
on  other  occasions;  but  when  they  deliberate  together 
freely  over  the  extended  time  that  the  preparation  of  a 
mural  requires,  they  may  arrive  at  views  that  are  angry 
but  they  are  usually  based  on  a  sense  of  common  justice. 
The  paintings  are  strikingly  free  of  expressions  of  intol- 
erance or  chauvinism.  They  may  affirm  that  "Black  is 
beautiful,"  but  they  do  not  imply  by  that  that  other 
people  are  not. 

Why  did  murals  that  addressed  social  issues  express 
only  progressive  points  of  view?  As  a  populist  vehicle 
they  could  have  taken  a  reactionary  direction,  for  the 
right  has  also  learned  grass-roots  organizing.  Local 
people  organized  at  this  time  to  oppose  the  integration  of 
neighborhoods,  school  busing,  and  affirmative  action  in 
employment.  There  was  widespread  support  for  the 
U.S.  intervention  in  Indochina.  There  was  still  a  popular 
responsiveness  to  red-baiting  in  unions,  and  all  progres- 


Process  I  375 

sive  causes  risked  being  branded  as  "communist."  There 
were  also  grass-roots  campaigns  against  the  Equal  Rights 
Amendment  and  public  funding  of  abortions.  Yet  murals 
did  not  take  any  of  these  positions.  There  were,  of 
course,  muralists  of  conservative  social  views,  but  they 
tended  to  exclude  explicit  politics  from  their  painting. 
The  explanation  of  why  murals  that  dealt  with  social 
issues  represented  only  progressive  views  must  lie  in  part 
with  the  fact  that  conservative  groups  usually  had  access 
to  the  mass  media  and  there  was  no  need  for  them  to  seek 
relatively  cheap,  labor-intensive  public  communications. 
For  instance,  neighborhood  associations  resisting  hous- 
ing integration  could  get  help  from  real  estate  interests  to 
finance  TV,  radio,  and  newspaper  ads.  It  was  the  grass- 
roots progressives  with  few  ties  to  corporate  business  that 
had  to  improvise  their  own  media.  Moreover,  the  artists 
who  cooperated  with  them  found  precedents  in  the  wall 
art  of  .Mexican  and  New  Deal  muralists  who  shared  their 
politics.  Progressive  artists  and  community  people  de- 
veloped a  fuller  participation  of  the  untrained  in  the 
making  of  public  art  than  had  ever  occurred  before,  a 
kind  of  collaboration  inherited  from  the  .Movement  of  the 
sixties,  when  college  students  and  young  professionals 
brought  their  skills  and  concern  to  voter-registration  and 
community  organizing  among  the  minorities  and  poor 
and  did  anti-war  work. 

Who  then  are  "the  people"  implied  by  the  murals? 
Potentially  everyone.  Not  individuals  alienated  from 
their  work,  locale  and  each  other,  but  persons  actively 
cooperating,  which  is  the  precondition  of  the  develop- 
ment of  their  personhood.  This  collaboration  requires 
the  full  participation  of  each  in  the  decisions  that  affect 
his  or  her  work  and  life.  The  concept  of  "the  people"  is 
essentially  equalitarian  and  runs  counter  to  all  discrimi- 
nation based  on  race,  sex,  or  class.  The  first  two,  while 
natural,  cannot  be  used  to  diminish  a  person's  humanity, 
and  the  latter — the  separation  between  those  who  work 
and  those  they  work  for — exists  only  to  perpetuate 
privilege  and  therefore  must  be  eliminated  if  "the  people" 
is  to  be  more  than  an  idea.  The  making  of  community 
murals  has  offered  an  approximation  of  how  democracy 
can  be  achieved  in  art,  politics,  and  all  kinds  of  work. 
People  have  made  murals  not  because  of  any  superior 
virtue  but  because  deprivation  had  forced  them  to 
depend  on  one  another  and  their  collective  creativity. 
Thrown  back  on  their  own  resources,  they  discovered 
and  are  making  the  rest  of  us  aware  of  w  ho  "the  people" 
are  and  what  they  can  do.  It  has  been  in  fact  a  rediscov- 
ery that  has  been  made  and  lost  again  throughout  his- 
tory. To  preserve  it  requires  continuous  struggle  and 
imagination. 

Fraternity 

The  concept  of  "the  people"  implies  not  only  liberty 
and  equality  but  also  that  other  value  that  the  revolution- 
ary tradition  has  sponsored  from  well  before   1789 — 


376  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

fraternity.  The  revival  of  interpersonal  relations  in  public 
affairs  was  one  of  the  achievements  of  the  Movement  of 
the  sixties  and  seventies  that  pressed  not  only  for 
economic  and  political  change  but  also  for  a  break  with 
the  manipulation  of  people  as  things.  What  was  sought 
was  not  merely  respect  for  the  other  as  a  person  but  an 
enlarged  sense  of  what  personhood  required — concern, 
openness,  trust,  and  sharing.  Fraternity  was  viewed  as 
both  a  means  and  an  end — the  solidarity  necessary  for 
common  action  and  a  sought-for  fellowship  that  arises 
out  of  mutual  aid.  Its  disappearance  as  the  cement  of 
community  was  largely  what  the  much-discussed  "alie- 
nation" of  the  time  was  about.  It  was  widely  understood 
that  it  had  been  eroded  by  an  economic  system  that 
placed  a  premium  on  competitiveness  and  reduced  per- 
sons to  commodities,  cogs,  and  statistics.  Racism,  it  was 
realized,  had  contributed  to  the  breaking  of  social  bonds 
to  provide  a  pool  of  cheap  and  tractable  labor. 

The  attempt  to  reestablish  fraternity  as  a  component  of 
public  life,  while  taking  different  names  and  forms  with 
different  groups,  exhibited  a  common  impulse.  Black 
Pride  and  Power  cultivated  a  profoundly  felt  sense  of 
brotherhood  and  sisterhood.  Heightened  by  music  and 
art.  Black  soul  produced  a  self-esteem  and  responsibility 
that  supported  collective  defense  and  community  build- 
ing. Correspondingly,  Raza  people  revived  their  sense  of 
carnalismo  and  addressed  each  other  as  carnales,  persons  of 
common  flesh  and  blood.  For  them,  too,  revitalizing  their 
cultural  heritage  was  a  means  of  shoring  up  their  tradi- 
tional communal  spirit  that  now  produced  Brown  Power 
and  efforts  at  local  control.  Similar  revivals  of  ethnic 
solidarity  occurred  among  people  of  Asian  and  East 
European  heritage,  w  hich  also  supported  social  activism. 

For  minority  people,  emotions  of  fraternity  were  near 
the  surface  of  their  daily  life,  partly  because  of  their 
drawing  close  together  in  the  face  of  an  inhospitable 
environment,  partly  because  they  still  valued  their  tradi- 
tional ways.  But  middle-class  Whites  who  had  grown  up 
in  a  competitive  mass  society  had  to  work  more  deliber- 
ately at  "relating,"  although  they  frequently  had  the 
spontaneity  of  youth  in  their  favor.  World  War  II  and  a 
continuing  liberal-left  humanism  promoted  among  many 
who  served  and  the  next  generations  of  students  a  belief 
that  caring  and  fellowship  had  to  play  a  role  in  public 
life.  Writers  like  Albert  Camus  and  Martin  Buber  ar- 
ticulated this.  To  some  this  meant  working  with  others  to 
help  them  liberate  themselves  from  racism,  poverty,  and 
war.  Public  activism  was  a  means  by  which  people 
sought  not  only  to  gain  some  control  over  their  lives  but 
also  to  deepen  their  experience  of  community.  Those 
associated  with  the  civil  rights  and  antiwar  movements  as 
well  as  the  New  Left  valued  personal  involvement, 
facc-to-face  dialogue,  "gutting  with  people,"  and  con- 
sciousness raising.  Groups  frequently  met  in  a  circle,  and 
the  "chair"  rotated  from  person  to  person  to  forestall 
dominaticm  by  anyone.  Consensus  rather  than  majority 
votes  were  sought  on  critical  issues,  discussion  continu- 


ing often  for  hours  with  the  hope  that  unanimity  could  be 
found.  Groups  watched  over  their  own  inner  dynamics 
and  devoted  time  during  meetings  to  mutual  criticism 
and  self-criticism,  a  technique  revived  from  the  Old  Left. 
The  slogan  of  the  civil-rights  movement,  "One  man,  one 
vote,"  was  given  new  depth  as  "One  man,  one  soul." 
Tactics  were  developed  to  get  through  to  the  other  side, 
to  impress  opponents  with  the  ethical  seriousness  of  your 
position.  This  meant  dealing  with  colleagues  and  oppo- 
nents with  the  hope  of  extending  fraternity.  But  in  spite 
of  efforts  to  make  women  equal  partners,  it  remained 
largely /ra/erw/V)/,  and  women  had  to  organize  their  own 
movement  to  be  able  to  be  accepted.  On  the  other  hand, 
among  muralists  women  from  very  early  were  treated  as 
equals. 

Meanwhile  others,  mainly  White  middle-class  young 
people,  sought  forms  of  relating  by  creating  a  counter- 
culture. The  desire  for  interpersonal  warmth,  trust,  and 
mutual  aid  led  some  to  communes  and  collective  working 
situations,  many  to  drugs  and  music,  and  some  to  the 
esoteric.  The  "good  vibes"  sometimes  supported  social 
activism  but  increasingly  became  detached  from  efforts 
at  serious  change,  and  much  of  the  youth  subculture  was 
co-opted  by  commercialized  music  and  fashions.  Simi- 
larly, their  parents'  encounter  groups,  which  bore  wit- 
ness to  society's  alienation,  concentrated  on  sensitivity 
training  rather  than  the  basic  conditions  that  made  for 
frustration,  which  often  resulted  in  their  becoming  better 
adjusted  to  the  system  that  exploited  them. 

Nevertheless,  White  middle-class  efforts  to  revive 
fraternity  as  a  component  of  public  life  left  behind  solid 
achievements,  the  most  important  of  which  were  con- 
tributions to  the  civil-rights  and  antiwar  movements, 
rank-and-file  union  organizing,  alternative  institutions, 
the  feminist  movement,  and  activism  against  domestic 
nuclear  energy. 

The  mural  movement  itself  was  shaped  by  each  of  the 
attempts  to  strengthen  public  fraternity — ethnic,  politi- 
cal, and  countercultural.  The  muralists'  preoccupation 
with  process  has  been  largely  a  concern  for  this,  and  they 
succeeded  almost  better  than  any  other  group  in  achiev- 
ing a  breadth  of  interracial  fellowship  on  the  job  because 
the  job  often  drew  out  their  ethnic  background. 

The  Professional  Muralists'  Relations  to  Communities 

While  most  of  the  muralists  working  with  neighbor- 
hoods today  have  broken  with  the  mainstream  art  world, 
some  have  maintained  connections  with  it.  For  instance, 
Clarence  Wood  and  Don  Kaiser,  who  work  with  the 
Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art's  Urban  Outreach,  also 
pursue  personal  careers  wholly  distinct  from  their  public 
interest  art.  Wood  does  abstractions  and  Kaiser  in  the 
mid-seventies  was  absorbed  with  twenty-foot-high  Coke 
bottles  and  bowls  of  spaghetti;  in  1979  he  was  exhibiting 
works  that  gave  the  appearance  of  big  self-supporting 
brush  strokes.  But  in  the  neighborhoods  they  help  young 


Process  I  377 


people  do  portraits  of  Black  heroes.  Alonso  Davis,  who 
coordinated  The  Wall  of  Visions,  operates  the  Brockman 
Gallery  in  Los  Angeles  and  does  abstract  painting  and 
sculpture  with  African  masks.  John  Weber  in  Chicago 
exhibits  at  local  galleries  socially  conscious  and  techni- 
cally adroit  canvases.  And  as  the  controversy  over  Iran 
was  boiling  up  in  the  fall  of  1979,  P'va  Cockcroft  was 
showing  at  a  New  York  gallery  easel  paintings  of  revolu- 
tionary women  there  based  on  a  recent  visit. 

Some  muralists  are  altogether  conscious  of  their  role  in 
helping  organize  communities.  The  very  process  that 
they  engage  in — working  with  community  people  to 
develop  a  theme  and  design  on  urgent  issues — is  or- 
ganizing. The  artist  is  an  educator  and  a  leader. 

Mark  Rogovin  thinks  that  being  a  professional  painter 
who  is  very  serious  about  improving  the  quality  of  his  art 
does  not  conflict  with  his  efforts  at  social  change.  Al- 
though he  does  not  think  of  himself  as  an  organizer,  he 
sees  his  role  as  helping  communities  articulate  their 
concerns,  which  he  believes  contributes  to  their  or- 
ganizing. To  be  the  kind  of  muralist  he  wants  to  be,  he 
says,  requires  that  his  art  and  activism  coincide.  To 
improve  his  art  is  to  make  it  more  socially  effective.  It 
seems  to  him  inadequate  to  speak  of  only  strengthening 
the  formal  aesthetic  qualities  of  murals.  Strong  art  means 
to  him  developing  images  that  teach  and  set  people  into 
motion. 

When  muralists  are  asked  if  they  think  of  themselves  as 
painters  first  or  as  professionals  with  skills  they  can 
contribute  to  social  action,  they  give  different  answers. 
Caryl  Yasko  did  not  hesitate  to  say  that  as  devoted  as  she 
was  to  change  and  working  with  neighborhood  people, 
she  was  primarily  committed  to  painting.  But  her  actual 
behavior  was  more  complex  than  her  words  would 
suggest.  When  we  first  talked  in  the  summer  of  1974,  she 
was  excited  about  a  new  wall  she  had  just  secured  in 
Chicago's  Logan  Square.  It  was  forty  feet  high,  the 
highest  she  had  yet  worked  on.  She  was  checking  out 
different  kinds  of  scaffolding.  She  talked  of  experiments 
she  wanted  to  do,  of  the  challenges  of  a  wall  with 
complex  surfaces,  of  trying  to  integrate  vents,  flues,  and 
roof  water  tanks  into  the  design  of  a  wall.  She  wished  she 
could  collaborate  with  architects  in  designing  buildings 
with  walls  planned  for  murals.  But  she  also  talked  about 
the  long  process  she  had  worked  through  with  the  com- 
munity people  of  Logan  Square.  It  had  been  a 
breakthrough — the  first  mural  in  that  White  working- 
class  neighborhood.  She  had  done  a  number  of  designs 
before  she  got  their  appyroval.  The  one  that  they  had 
selected  was  not  the  one  she  had  most  w anted  to  do,  but 
she  knew  that  she  must  satisfy  them.  Six  weeks  later  she 
said  that  the  negotiations  for  the  wall  had  fallen  through. 
However,  she  was  determined  not  to  sacrifice  the  efforts 
she  and  the  community  had  put  into  the  planning.  She 
had  secured  a  second  wall  and  was  about  to  begin  on  it 
although  it  was  the  end  of  the  summer,  and  it  would  take 
her  till  the  end  of  October  to  complete  it.  She  owed  it  to 


Caryl  Yasko  on  the  scaffolding  of  Our  Search  for 
Knowledge  in  an  Ever-Changing  Universe,  Madison, 
1977.  (Photo  Niki  Glen) 

the  neighborhood,  she  said.  Her  husband  and  children, 
who  were  with  her  in  Chicago,  would  have  to  return 
without  her  to  Texas  where  he  taught. 

William  Walker  on  one  occasion  spoke  about  his  con- 
cern that  there  might  be  a  contradiction  between  art  that 
sought  to  become  community-based  and  the  artist  w  ho 
moved  about  freely  without  roots  and  without  a  commu- 
nity that  had  claims  on  him.  To  Caryl  Yasko,  who  was 
present,  it  seemed  that  the  apparent  contradiction  was 
overcome  by  a  muralist's  intense  involveirient  with  a 
community  while  he  or  she  was  working  with  it — a  series 
of  public  meetings  and  negotiations  as  well  as  painting  in 
the  street  that  might  go  on  for  more  than  a  year.  In  1976, 
a  year  and  half  later,  Yasko  still  felt  she  could  identify 
with  successive  communities  and  wanted  to  learn  from 


378  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


new  areas  by  doing  murals  in  them.  She  had  liked  Hving 
for  two  years  in  Chicago's  Hyde  Park,  where  she  had 
done  two  works;  she  then  had  moved  to  the  North  Side 
and  done  murals  in  yet  other  and  very  different 
neighborhoods.  Later  when  her  husband  received  a 
teaching  appointment  at  the  University  of  Wisconsin  in 
Whitewater,  she  went  on  to  paint  walls  in  Madison  and 
Racine,  working  closely  w  ith  local  f)eople  and  maturing 
as  an  artist. 

In  1974  the  artists  of  the  Chicago  .\1ural  Group  looked 
to  Ray  Patlan  as  the  painter  among  them  who  was  closest 
to  a  particular  neighborhood.  At  that  point  he  had  given 
up  some  of  his  own  painting  and  was  finding  satisfaction 
in  introducing  young  people  to  murals  and  helping  them 
discover  their  own  abilities.  Ft  was  felt  by  some  muralists 
that  he  was  sacrificing  his  talent,  though  all  respected  his 
commitment  to  his  barrio.  Throughout  the  summer  he 
would  be  on  the  streets  with  neighborhood  teenagers, 
and  during  the  rest  of  the  year  he  taught  classes  in  local 
schools  and  continued  the  murals  on  the  inside  of  Casa 
Aztlan.  He  was  not  interested  in  a  private  artist's  career, 
but  he  did  leave  Chicago  to  teach  at  the  Chicano  Studies 
Program  at  the  University  of  California  in  1975  and 
1976.  He  said  he  had  grown  up  in  the  Pilsen  barrio,  had 
worked  eleven  years  at  Casa  Aztlan,  and  needed  a 
change.  There  had  also  been  a  disagreement  with  some  of 
the  staff  at  the  settlement  house,  and  when  a  good  offer 
to  teach  murals  and  graphic  art  at  Berkeley  came,  he 
snatched  it  up.  From  the  Chicano  Art  Center  at  the 
University  he  was  working  with  his  students,  some  of 
them  Anglos  from  the  School  of  Environmental  Design, 
on  neighborhood  murals.  Sites  varied  from  a  Telegraph 
Avenue  Mexican  restaurant,  a  Latino  student  center,  and 
a  high  school  to  a  business-district  wall  that  prisoners 
helped  design.  After  two  or  three  years  away  from  his 
barrio,  he  thought  he  would  want  to  return  and  become 
a  resident  muralist  again.  He  felt  there  were  walls 
enough  there  to  keep  him  busy  for  twenty  years  or 
more.  He  was  also  concerned  that  doing  murals  had 
become  so  popular  that  all  kinds  of  painters  were 
taking  a  hand  at  them  without  understanding  that 
people's  art  required  close  responsiveness  to  neighbor- 
hood residents.  He  criticized  some  of  the  newcomers  for 
being  more  interested  in  using  public  walls  to  do  their 
own  art  rather  than  the  community's.  To  be  an  effective 
people's  muralist,  he  said,  it  was  important  for  painters 
to  be  involved  in  the  discussions  and  politics  of  local 
organizations.  When  he  would  return  to  Pilsen,  he 
foresaw  making  the  barrio  the  focus  of  his  activity,  but 
aLso  taking  on  mural  commissions  elsewhere  in  Chicago, 
for  instance  in  public  buildings.  In  1976  he  thus  .seemed 
as  committed  to  community-based  art  as  he  had  two 
years  earlier.  In  1978  still  in  Berkeley,  he  was  now  a 
full-time  CKTA  muralist  with  the  newly  organized 
Commtmarts  and  was  working  in  the  neighborhoods 
though  mainly  on  collaborations  with  other  trained  art- 
ists on  such  works  as  the  La  Vchi  Song  of  Unity . 


The  Chicago  .Mural  Group  as  a  whole  has  been  active 
in  ongoing  ways  in  particular  neighborhoods,  returning 
to  do  new  murals  there  and  restore  works  as  they  age. 
During  the  winter,  when  the  artists  cannot  do  outdoor 
projects,  they  direct  team  murals  in  the  schools.  John 
Weber  had  particularly  absorbed  himself  with  working 
through  months  of  group  process  with  neighborhood 
associations  and  teenagers  to  bring  off  works.  By  1975 
C.MG  felt  the  need  to  consolidate  and  not  be  drawn  too 
far  afield  or  to  take  on  too  many  members.  They  decided 
to  do  fewer  murals  with  untrained  youth  teams  and  more 
collaborations  among  CMG  professionals  with  a  few 
local  artists.  The  CMG  painters  wanted  to  do  fresh  and 
more  solid  work  that  would  command  respect  from  local 
people  who  were  becoming  demanding  judges  of  wall 
art.  Thus  they  did  not  regard  this  new  direction  as  a 
turning  away  from  the  community.'''  By  involving  local 
artists  and  consulting  with  officials  of  the  sponsoring 
groups,  they  hoped  to  remain  in  contact  with  it.  They 
felt  that  their  outdoor  professional  work  was  balanced  by 
winter  participatory  projects  in  schools  and  the  training 
of  local  apprentices  who  showed  talent.  The  CMG  thus 
functions  as  a  professional  public  service  that  offers  its 
skills  to  different  neighborhoods,  schools,  and  unions  in  a 
conscientious  way.  Individual  artists  spend  a  great  deal 
of  time  in  particular  communities,  but  most  of  them 
value  their  mobility. 

No  member  of  C.VIG  had  concentrated  as  much  of  his 
art  in  a  single  area  as  Ray  Patlan  had  in  Pilsen.  And  what 
was  more  striking,  few  if  any  had  integrated  as  com- 
pletely as  he  the  doing  of  murals  with  residence  and 
social  action  in  the  same  neighborhood.  In  contrast  to 
Patlan  other  CMG  artists  were  engaged  in  a  community's 
struggles  mainly  as  muralists,  which  jtsclf  meant  a  con- 
siderable involvement.  But  often  they  did  not  live  in  the 
neighborhood  and  belong  to  the  political  groups  where 
they  painted.  This  division  of  work  and  residence  was 
shared  by  many  other  social  muralists.  And  in  most  cases 
they  did  not  perceive  it  as  a  contradiction;  they  painted 
where  the  opportunities  arose.  The  question  remains, 
however,  whether  individual  development  cannot  best  be 
integrated  with  the  development  of  a  single  community. 
It  is  a  question  that  is  fundamental  to  the  muralists' 
reexamination  of  what  a  professional  and  a  community 
should  be. 

The  muralists  of  the  Los  .'\ngeles  barrios,  on  the  other 
hand,  are  mostly  residents  of  the  areas  where  they  paint. 
But  in  spite  of  the  hundreds  of  murals  that  have  been 
painted  there,  the  energy  they  generated  has  not  been 
turned  sufficiently  to  organizing  and  community  control. 
Clearly  resident  muralists  are  not  enough. 

One  of  the  most  far-reaching  and  significant  instances 
of  the  involvement  of  a  number  of  muralists  in  their 
locale  is  that  of  the  artists  of  the  Barrio  Logan  in  San 
Diego.  Murals  began  there  as  an  instrument  to  the  very 
survival  of  the  neighborhood,  and  the  painters  envisaged 
their  painting  as  part  of  their  community's  reconstruc- 


Process  I  379 


tion.  They  not  only  expressed  their  vision  of  the  future  in 
paint,  but  helped  form  a  community  association  which 
they  have  tried  to  make  function  as  the  official  planning 
authority  for  the  barrio.  Both  their  social  and  artistic 
achievements  were  impressive,  but  progress  was  slow, 
and  the  coordinator  of  the  Chicano  Park  murals,  Victor 
Ochoa,  after  four  years  in  that  position,  felt  frustrated  by 
the  struggles  and  resigned. 

Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan  also  have  bound  up 
their  murals  with  their  involvement  in  the  social  institu- 
tions of  the  Santa  Fe  barrio  which  included  helping 
found  a  school  aimed  at  reshaping  the  way  of  life  of  local 
Chicanos.  Concentrated  involvement  in  the  local  scene 
did  not  preclude  painting  elsewhere,  in  Denver, 
Phoenix,  and  Las  Vegas,  New  Mexico.  But  the  shoot-out 
at  their  school  and  the  subsequent  trial  dried  up  their 
funding,  in  spite  of  the  acquittal  of  all  Chicanos,  and 
brought  an  end  to  the  muralists'  work  together. 

Esteban  Villa,  one  of  the  founding  members  of  the 
RCAF,  says  that  it  has  been  criticized  for  working 
outside  of  the  barrios  of  Sacramento  and  particularly  for 
its  traveling.  But,  he  adds,  w  hen  it  paints  elsew  here,  as  it 
has  in  San  Diego  and  Burley,  Idaho,  it  has  taken  as  many 
artists  and  young  people  as  possible,  with  a  view  to 
broadening  their  experience.  It  had  close  ties  with 
Chicano  centros  around  California  and  was  active  in  the 
statewide  Concilia  de  Arte  Popular  that  lobbied  the  gover- 
nor and  legislature.  Its  posters  were  exhibited  in  Cuba, 
and  it  showed  Cuban  posters  in  Sacramento.  It  did  not  see 
any  contradiction  between  its  intense  involvement  m  its 
home  barrios  and  its  going  outside  them. 

In  general.  White  muralists,  particularly  those  from 
middle-class  backgrounds,  are  more  mobile.  But  this  is 
not  true  of  all  of  them.  For  instance,  Mark  Rogovin  has 
lived  for  ten  years  above  the  storefront  Public  Art  Work- 
shop in  a  Chicago  Black  ghetto.  Besides  providing  ser- 
vices to  local  young  people  and  the  base  of  local  mural 
work,  it  is  a  resource  center  that  exchanges  slides  and 
literature  on  social  art  with  people  throughout  the  coun- 
try. 

During  a  lunch  break  in  a  Los  Angeles  murals  confer- 
ence in  1976  Rogovin  mentioned  that  Jim  Yanagisawa 
had  said  to  him  recently  that  muralists  were  going  to 
have  to  be  more  selective  about  where  they  did  work. 
Yanagisawa  had  argued  that  they  should  paint  only  in 
neighborhoods  that  showed  the  possibility  of  political 
movement.  Judy  Baca,  who  was  present,  said,  "No."  She 
had  to  help  with  painting  wherever  her  people  were  and 
needed  and  wanted  murals.  She  did  not  mean  a  particu- 
lar barrio,  but  Chicanos  all  over  Los  Angeles.  But  in  fact 
she  was  also  working  with  groups  from  all  races  in  the 
city.  Neither  she  nor  Yanagisawa  seemed  wrong.  Differ- 
ent muralists  have  different  kinds  of  links  with  the 
communities  they  work  in,  and  it  is  well  that  this  is  so, 
for  the  artists  will  then  have  that  much  more  to  learn 
from  each  other. 

The  experience  of  town  artists  in  Britain  was  described 


to  U.S.  muralists  by  David  Harding,  who  showed  slides 
of  his  work  in  Glenrothes,  Scotland,  at  the  West  Coast 
Murals /Graffiti  Conference  in  Los  Angeles  in  1976.  He 
made  a  deep  impression  on  a  number  of  them  w  ith  his 
account  of  resident  public  artists  who  w  ere  employed  for 
extended  periods  of  time  and  treated  as  professionals. 
John  Weber  said  in  1979  that  he  would  like  to  see  similar 
positions  in  neighborhoods  and  cities  in  this  country  w  ith 
artists  being  hired  for,  say,  five  years  and  accountable  to 
local  people.  He  envisioned  artists  living  and  practicing 
in  housing  projects,  for  instance.  In  one  he  or  she  might 
be  a  muralist,  in  another,  a  dancer,  a  poet,  or  director  of 
plays.  Mark  Rogovin  and  Barbara  Russum  have  said  that 
"There  should  be  a  public  art  workshop  in  every  block," 
for  their  experience  at  PAW  has  been  that  their  store- 
front studio  is  used  mainly  by  young  people  but  also  by 
adults  from  within  a  block  or  two. 

Thus  muralists  currently  find  themselves  in  varied  and 
sometimes  unsettled  relationships  with  communities. 
Many  live  in  the  area  where  they  paint,  and  some  of  these 
are  involved  in  local  politics  and  organizing  in  addition  to 
their  mural  work.  Others  arc  members  of  groups,  agen- 
cies, or  institutions  that  provide  services  over  an  area 
which  is  so  large  that  it  is  often  difficult  to  form  ongoing 
ties  except  on  a  professional  basis.  Yet  all  of  these 
painters  are  exploring  new  relationships  with  com- 
munities. 


Professionalism 

The  muralists'  concept  of  their  professionalism  is  af- 
fected by  their  desire  to  empower  people  in  their  com- 
munities. The  mural  movement  grew  out  of  the  neglect 
and  distortions  that  minority  people  suffered  at  the  hands 
of  professionals  in  public  education  and  communications. 
And  this  experience  was  matched  by  the  kind  of  service 
they  received  from  other  mainstream  professionals.  But 
the  people  of  the  inner  city  were  only  the  most  obvious 
victims  of  a  more  widepsread  unresponsiveness  of  profes- 
sionals to  clients  that  has  developed  in  advanced  indus- 
trial society  as  technicians  and  specialists  acquired  inter- 
ests different  from  the  people  they  were  expected  to 
serve.  Critics  have  pointed  out  how  professionals'  exper- 
tise and  access  to  high  technology,  their  idea  of  standards 
and  control  of  the  number  who  could  enter  their  calling, 
have  become  bound  up  with  the  advancement  of  their 
personal  careers.'*  .Meanwhile  the  manner  of  delivering 
services  has  made  the  public  increasingly  dependent  on 
professionals.  Some  difference  has  begun  to  have  been 
made  by  paraprofessionals;  but  with  relatively  little 
training  lay  people  have  begun  to  provide  many  of  these 
services  to  themselves  and  one  another  w  ith  often  greater 
sensitivity  to  their  actual  needs  than  professionals  could 
offer.  As  a  result,  the  traditional  bourgeois  model  of  the 
conscientious  expert  has  been  challenged,  and  a  new 
concept  emerged  of  the  professional,   who,   while  re- 


380 /COMMUNITY  MURALS 

maining  available  for  specialized  skills,  also  facilitates  the 
self-help  and  mutual  responsibility  of  ordinary  people. 
I  his  is  in  fact  a  revival  of  the  idea  of  community.'*  Fhe 
professional  muralists  have  followed  a  course  parallel  to 
this  "deprofessionalizing"  that  has  (Kcurred  in  education, 
health,  legal,  and  other  social  services,  in  "sweat  equity" 
housing,  in  urban  agriculture,  and  in  a  wide  range  of 
enterprises.'® 

The  full-time  muralists  have  realized  that  there  is  no 
professional  substitute  for  the  responsiveness  of  people  to 
their  own  needs  in  the  area  of  public  communications. 
The  problem  has  been  to  help  them  learn  to  take  advan- 
tage of  sympathetic  professionals  and  to  develop  media 
they  could  use.  This  meant  the  adoption  of  techniques 
that  could  be  readily  learned,  that  encouraged  participa- 
tion and  made  possible  effective  expression.  While  the 
artist  has  helped  and  trained  local  people  to  do  murals 
both  with  him  and  by  themselves,  he  also  has  been  able 
to  do  wall  painting  on  his  own  or  with  colleagues  which 
challenged  current  ideas  in  the  neighborhood  or  ex- 
perimented with  new  forms  of  expression. 

These  new  roles  for  the  professional  muralist  have  not 
meant  the  eroding  of  the  standards  of  art  but  the  meeting 
of  needs  that  were  previously  neglected  and  the  raising  of 
the  collective  iniatiative  of  local  people.  The  new  func- 
tions of  art  have  brought  with  them  new  standards  of 
quality  which  take  into  account  whether  a  work  is  re- 
sponsive to  the  special  needs  of  neighbors,  whether  it 
involves  them  in  its  making  and  strengthens  their  self- 
determination. 

While  most  lay  people  who  participate  in  the  making 
of  murals  will  not  go  on  to  make  a  career  in  the  visual 
arts,  their  experience  can  help  them  discover  the  im- 
portance and  satisfactions  of  public  dialogue  and  ac- 
tivism, and  encourage  them  to  seek  social  involvements, 
not  as  professionals  but  as  citizens.  Their  work  on  murals 
also  provides  them  with  a  model  for  vocations  that  are 
community-based. 

NOTES 

1 .  Eva  and  James  Cockcroft,  "Cityarts  Workshop — People's 
Art  in  New  York  City  "  Left  Curve,  Summer  1975,  p.  4  f. 

2.  "Chicago's  Wall  Paintings:  An  Artist  Sounds  Off," 
Panorama  section,  Chicago  Daily  News,  March  15-16,  1975,  p. 
17. 

3.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  5. 

4.  Information  about  Citywide  Murals  comes  from  discus- 
sions with  Judy  Baca  and  "Citywide  Mural  Program,"  a  pro- 
posal she  prepared  for  the  l^)s  Angeles  Board  of  Recreation 
and  Parks  in  1974. 

5.  Tern  Horowitz,  "Muraiizing  in  Chicago,"  Chicago  Express, 
July  19,  1972,  p.  5. 

6.  "A  Wall  .Mural  Belongs  to  Everybody,"  Youth,  Sep- 
tember 1972,  p.  63. 

7.  .Weber  recommended  reading  Paulo  Freire's  Pedagogy  of 
the  Oppressed  for  an  account  that  illuminated  his  own  methods 


and  those  of  other  muralists.  PVeire,  until  he  was  exiled  from 
Brazil,  trained  professionals  to  teach  reading  in  the  slums  of 
Recife  and  the  countryside.  By  developing  an  approach  that 
was  not  a  cultural  imposition  on  the  illiterate  but  rather  a 
means  of  encouraging  them  to  express  their  own  perceptions, 
he  was  able  to  help  them  build  a  workable  elementary  literacy 
in  thirty  to  forty  hours.  Their  ability  to  make  out  the  news- 
paper and  write  simple  statements  in  so  short  a  time  was 
released  by  introductory  sessions  that  gave  people  who  be- 
lieved they  were  ignorant  and  incapable  of  change  a  sense  of 
their  capability  and  an  eagerness  to  learn. 

A  teacher  would  meet  w  ith  a  "cultural  circle"  of  twenty-five 
to  thirty  participants  and  begin  by  projecting  slides  of  draw- 
ings show  ing  people  like  themselves  in  their  familiar  world.  He 
would  encourage  them  to  discuss  these  scenes  and  demonstrate 
to  them  that  they  had  opinions  worthy  of  respect  and  that  in 
fact  they  made  not  only  their  own  living  and  their  tools,  but 
also  the  ideas,  language,  and  social  arcangements  that  permit- 
ted them  to  come  to  grips  with  the  world.  "  '1  make  shoes,'  " 
said  one  participant,  "  'and  now  I  discover  that  I  have  as  much 
value  as  a  Ph.D.  who  u rites  books'  "  (Paolo  Freirc,  Education 
for  Critical  Consciousness  [New  York:  Seabury,  1974],  p.  47)  "  'I 
know  that  I  am  cultured,'  "  an  elderlv  peasant  said  emphati- 
cally. .  .  .  Because  I  work,  and  uorking  1  transform  the 
world.'  "  (Ibid.,  p.  47  f.)  Before  trying  to  teach  his  pupils  to 
read,  Freire  sought  to  help  them  understand  that  the  reflection 
and  labor  with  which  people  shape  nature  create  culture — a 
humanized  world.  (Ibid.,  p.  46)  Their  discussion  generated  in 
the  illiterate  a  pride  in  what  they  came  to  see  was  a  uniquely 
human  achievement — a  world  made  by  people  that  could  itself 
be  transformed.  Therefore  they  could  conclude  that  their  own 
situation  was  open  to  unforeseen  possibilities. 

Freire  says  that  the  educator's  role  is  to  offer  the  illiterate 
"the  instruments  with  which  he  canteach  himself  to  read  and 
write."  (Ibid.,  p.  48)  He  achieved  literacy  not  through 
memorizing  but  through  gaining  the  perspective  that  he  was  a 
creator  who  could  transform  himself  and  his  world  in  dialogue 
and  cooperation  with  others.  Fhe  members  of  the  circle  were 
then  ready  to  undertake  training  in  literacy  itself,  which 
depended  on  selecting  a  brief  set  of  words  that  were  important 
to  them  and  which  contained  all  the  phonemes  in  Portuguese. 
From  these  they  could  quickly  learn  to  make  out  other  words. 

Learning,  as  Freire  sees  it,  is  inherently  democratic  and 
education  for  freedom  when  it  allows  students  to  be  active 
participants  in  creating  their  own  know  ledge  and  culture  by 
encouraging  them  to  think  about  how  and  why  they  exist  the 
way  they  do  and  to  intervene  to  transform  it,  if  that  is  what 
they  want.  (Ibid.,  pp.  4,  160)  He  says  that  he  sought  a  literacy 
program  "capable  of  releasing  other  creative  acts,  one  in  which 
students  would  develop  the  impatience  and  vivacity  which 
characterizes  search  and  invention."  (Ibid.,  p.  43)  Central  to 
the  learning  process  is  the  developing  of  what  Freire  calls 
"critical  consciousness"  (Portuguese:  conscientizacao,  sometimes 
translated  as  "consciousness-raising").  (Pedagogy  of  the  Oppressed 
[New  York:  Seabury,  1973],  p.  19)  This  is  the  reflection  that  is 
necessary  for  people  to  be  able  to  transform  conditions  by 
identifying  the  conceptual  and  social  constraints  on  them.  Its 


object  is  to  help  those  who  are  learning  to  read  and  write  to 
examine  the  preconceptions  that  are  imbedded  in  their  lan- 
guage and  ideas,  the  way  they  "named  the  world."  (Ibid.,  p. 
133)  This  provides  a  way  to  break  through  the  fatalism  with 
which  they  regard  their  condition,  for  reflection,  Freire  be- 
lieves, will  reveal  that  their  self-depreciation  is  in  fact  the  result 
of  colonialist  and  racist  stereotypes  of  the  local  ruling  group. 
This  demystifying  of  reality  can  not  be  done  in  the  manner  of 
propaganda  but  only  by  a  person  trained  to  help  people  think 
the  matter  through.  It  is  crucial  that  they  work  out  the 
problem  themselves,  for  the  purpose  of  the  process  is  to  make 
them  masters  of  their  perceptions  so  that  they  can  take  control 
of  their  lives.  (Ibid.,  pp.  97,  118)  This  Freire  regards  as 
"cultural  revolution."  (Ibid.,  pp.  132,  156  f.) 

The  relevance  of  Freire's  ideas  to  the  people  who  make 
community  murals  is  not  difficult  to  trace.  His  use  of  slides  to 
stimulate  dialogue  and  his  getting  participants  to  reflect  on  the 
language  they  were  learning  to  read  and  write  are  comparable 
to  the  chance  that  is  presented  when  people  come  together  to 
make  a  mural.  It  can  become  an  occasion  when  the  professional 
muralist  can  help  them  develop  a  critical  consciousness  of  their 
images  and  their  actual  condition  to  determine  whether  they, 
too,  are  the  victims  of  stereotypes  and  who  profits  from  them. 
Coming  to  understand  that  the  way  people  see  the  world  is  a 
projection  of  someone's  interests,  they  can  begin  to  revisualize 
it  in  accord  with  their  own  needs  and  abilities.  The  mural 
process  thus  becomes  a  means  for  people  to  liberate  their  own 
thinking  and  provides  them  an  instrumentality  for  their  self- 
education  so  that  they  can  break  through  the  apparent  blind 
alleys  of  their  existence.   The  essential  feature  of  "cultural 


Process  I  381 

revolution"  that  it  holds  out  is  no  particular  program  but  the 
process  of  dialogue  and  expression  by  which  f)eople  can  grow 
through  critical  thought  and  intervene  to  change  not  only  the 
way  they  see  things. 

Freire  was  in  Chicago  for  a  conference  on  alternative  schools 
in  1977,  and  Weber,  who  took  him  to  mural  sites,  says  that  he 
was  delighted  by  what  he  saw. 

8.  "Universal  Alley,"  report  to  the  C.MG,  1974. 

9.  "Freedom  Through  Enlightenment,"  remarks  by  the 
Honorable  Norman  Y.  Mineta,  mural  dedication,  San  Jose 
State  University,  February  14,  1977. 

10.  Quoted  by  Tony  Bizjak,  "Edwards  charges  minority 
exclusion"  Spartan  Daily  (San  Jose  State  University),  February 
16,  1977,  p.  1  f. 

1 1 .  Some-muralists  like  Carlos  Almaraz  speak  in  the  manner 
of  Mao  not  only  of  serving  the  people,  but  of  going  down  to 
them  to  learn  about  their  life  and  to  work  among  them. 
(Almaraz,  "The  Artist  As  A  Revolutionary,"  Cbismearte,  Fall 
1976.) 

12.  Cf.  Eva  and  James  Cockcroft,  "People's  Art  and  Social 
Change,"  Radical  America,  March-April  1978,  p.  7. 

13.  "North  Side  Report— Summer,  1974,"  C.MG,  pp.  2,  9. 

14.  Ivan  Illich,  Tools  for  Conviviality  (New  York:  Harper  and 
Row,  1973). 

15.  Raymond  Williams,  Culture  and  Society  (New  York: 
Harper  Torchbooks,  1966),  p.  330. 

16.  John  C.  Turner  and  Robert  Tichter,  Freedom  to  Build 
(New  York:  Macmillan,  1972).  Also,  John  C.  Turner,  Housing 
by  People  (New  York:  Pantheon,  1977). 


7 


AESTHETICS  AND  STYLE 


The  Mural 


There  is  no  admission  price 

standing 

between  us  and  these  colors 

There  is  no  frame 

other  than  the  sky,  the  rain,  the  sun, 

the  people,  the  polluted  air. 

There  is  no  guard 

reminding  us 

not  to  touch 
not  to  stare  too  long 
not  to  lean  against 
not  to  piss  on  it. 

Is  this  a  work  of  art? 

And  where  are  the  precautions? 

Where  are  the  insurance  companies? 

Where  is  the  silence  that  goes, 

hand  in  hand, 

with  all  those  art  pieces  that  h 

n 

^inm 
u 
s 

e 
u 


Is  this  a  work  of  Art? 

Yes,  it  is! 
A  work  of  art, 
like  you  &  I, 
brother/ sister.     , 

These  images  on  the  wall 

have  come  to  live  among  us, 

to  hang  out  in  this  neighborhood, 

to  grow  old  and  wrinkled, 

to  die  among  us. 

This  museum  is  always  open, 

always  free, 

always  generous,  like  mama's  love! 

Is  this  a  work  of  art? 

You  better  believe  it! 

This  is  where  it  all  came  from! 

GO  ASK  THE  CAVEMEN. 


This  poem  was  written  by  Carlos  Baron,  a  Chilean 
refugee  who  teaches  drama  at  San  Francisco  State  and  is 
on  the  board  of  Commonarts  in  Berkeley.  It  was  read  at 
the  dedication  of  the  Berkeley  Viva  la  Raza  mural  in  1977 
and  the  following  year  at  a  ceremony  beneath  the  mural 
in  D.C.  where  the  painters  added  Baron's  slogan:  "A 
People  Without  Murals  Are  a  De-muralized  People."  His 
poem  captures  the  widespread  sense  of  neighborhood 
people  that  the  official  culture  of  their  society  is  cut  off 
from  them  while  there  is  an  important  need  for  public  art 
in  their  lives.  Where  murals  have  appeared,  they  are 
understood  as  acts  of  caring  and  community,  and  the 
poem  implies  that  this  is  the  primordial  source  of  art.  It 
suggests  too  that  people  and  their  life  together  are  also 
kinds  of  art,  and  that  murals  contribute  to  this.  The 
poem  points  to  the  principal  achievement  of  these 
murals — the  recovery  of  art  by  ordinary  people  as  a  vital 
part  of  .their  everyday  existence.  In  developing  com- 
munications media  to  meet  crucial  needs,  these  walls 
began  to  reconnect  art  and  daily  work  so  as  to  make  for  a 
fully  human  life  in  the  community. 

This  is  of  momentous  significance  because  art  as  a 
\ehicle  of  serious  meaning  had  become  as  remote  from 
most  people  as  the  museums  of  the  poem,  and  common 
occupations  offered  declining  chances  for  most  workers 
and  professionals  to  act  creatively  into  the  world  to  meet 
their  needs.  People  had  lost  control  over  their  percep- 
tions and  production,  and  as  a  result,  art,  work,  and 
human  needs  had  lost  contact. 


Aesthetics  and  Style  /  3S3 
AESTHETICS 

Art,  Work,  and  Community 

The  source  of  creativity  is  the  labor  process  itself.  It 
changes  nature,  shapes  it  to  meet  human  needs  and 
provide  new  satisfactions.  By  changing  the  world  and 
their  relations  to  it,  people  change  themselves  and  grow. 
And  the  pleasure  of  growth — of  greater  comprehension 
and  more  fulfilling  interaction  with  the  world — is  at  the 
root  of  aesthetic  delight.' 

The  poem's  example  of  cave  art  recalls  that  people's 
making  of  their  own  images  was  once  an  essential  part  of 
most  productive  work.  When  cave  dwellers  depicted 
animals  on  their  walls  to  insure  a  successful  hunt  or 
perform  a  seasonal  ritual,  the  making  of  visual  symbols 
was  as  important  to  them  as  the  fashioning  of  spears.  As 
people  relinquished  their  belief  in  the  magical  power  of 
imagery,  they  continued  to  give  meaningful  shapes  and 
figuration  to  their  walls,  utensils,  garments,  and  all  the 
gear  of  living.  With  these  visible  forms,  they  oriented 
themselves  in  the  world,  fixed  and  communicated  their 
ideas,  aroused  and  guided  their  activity,  molding  their 
consciousness  at  the  same  time  as  nature.  Because  this 
imagery  expressed  their  understanding  and  values,  it  was 


Carlos  Bardn:  the  words;  Centro  de  Arte  painters:  the 
image,  1978,  Adams-Morgan  section,  Washington,  D.  C. 


W^^TJiiiS^^vSr^ ' 


Ife 


3H4  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Rock  Painting,  c.  A.  D.  1000,  Cueva  Pintada,  Sierra  de 
San  Francisco,  Baja  California.  (Photo  Paul  Freeman.) 


essential  to  their  survival  and  growth.  While  human 
beings  were  otherwise  weak  in  relation  to  their  environ- 
ment, the  unique  source  of  their  power  and  astonishing 
development  has  been  their  visual  along  with  their  verbal 
symbols,  the  media  of  their  thinking  and  communicat- 
ing. And  everything  they  made  that  had  visual  form — 
their  mental  pictures,  murals,  and  equipment  for 
everyday  life — was  symbolic  in  so  far  as  it  expressed 
their  meanings.^ 

The  meaningfulness  of  their  imagery  could  not  be 
imported  or  imposed  from  outside  people's  own  experi- 
ence; it  was  produced  as  they  came  to  grips  with  their 
developing  needs  and  discoveries  and  reshaped  nature 
and  their  vision  of  it.  The  meaning  they  expressed  in  the 
visual  forms  of  the  things  they  made  was  the  meaning 
they  found  in  their  work:  its  utility  in  sustaining  life  and 
comfort;  the  orderliness  and  sensory  appeal  that  could  be 
discovered  in  or  given  to  things;  their  work's  capability  of 
communicating  their  ideas.  Also  meaningful  were  the 
pleasures  of  a  skilled  process  that  drew  out  the  abilities  of 
workers  and  through  which  they  grew.  And  in  addition 
there  were  the  satisfactions  of  working  with  and  for 


people  they  cared  about,  gaining  their  esteem  and  re- 
newing community.  When  work  was  meaningful  in  these 
ways,  it  showed  in  the  things  they  njade  and  heightened 
the  sense  of  life  for  producers  and  users.  And  since  the 
ancients,  it  has  been  regarded  as  art.^ 

Art  has  been  the  common  term  that  described  all 
skilled  making  by  artisans  whose  work  was  only  com- 
plete if  it  expressed  their  meanings  in  its  visible  forms. 
Mural  coordinator  Rene  Yariez  was  following  this  usage 
when  he  observed  that  "if  something  has  good  craftsman- 
ship and  a  little  soul,  it  shows.  .  .  .  Anything  that  is  done 
well  and  with  love,  honesty,  and  skill  is  art."^  The  belief 
that  shapes  and  imagery  that  signify  are  necessary  to  all 
skilled  work  is  exhibited  in  the  commonplace  pots  and 
pans  of  the  old  Greeks,  African  tribesmen,  indios,  and  the 
products  of  all  workers  who  have  been  masters  of  their 
labor.  A  drinking  cup  or  bowl  had  not  only  to  be 
serviceable,  it  had  also  to  exhibit  a  locally  meaningful 
shapeliness  and  design,  perhaps  retell  an  edifying  or 
amusing  tale,  or  preserve  a  familiar  scene.  It  thereby 
reinforced  or  expanded  the  experience  of  a  community. 
Correspondingly  public  murals  throughout  history  have 
commemorated  important  events,  projected  fundamental 
realities  and  urged  action.  This  art  in  domestic  and 
public  workmanship  that  shaped  daily  existence,  made 
for  a  culture,  a  meaningful  way  of  life. 


!f'iy4^'^^^- 


youth  crew  directed  by  Judy  Baca  (Social  and  Public  Art 
Resource  Center  and  City  wide  Murals):  ''1900  Immi- 
grant California,''  Tujunga  Wash  Mural,  1976,  San 
Fernando  Valley. 


Victor  Ochoa,  Rauljaquez,  and  local  youth:  IVarrio  Si, 
Yonkes  No!  Behind:  Michael  Schnorr  and  Susan 
Yamagata:  Coatlique,  Diosa  de  la  Tierra.  Further 
back:  Tony  de  Vargas:  Mural  for  Pinto  Union.  All  1978, 
Chicano  Park,  San  Diego.  . 


Isaac  Shamsud-Din:  Vanport — The  Promise,  1978, 
Albina  Human  Resources  Center,  Portland. 


James  Dong  and  Nancy  Horn:  V  Mural,  1976,  "'Some 
Events  in  American  History''  exhibit,  San  Francisco 
Museum  of  Modern  Art. 


Miranda  Bergman,  Vicky  Hamlin,  Thomas  Kunz,  Jane 
Norling,  Arch  Williams,  and  Peggy  Tucker  (Haight   " 
Ashbury  Muralists):  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery    ^ 
(partial  view),  1976,  San  Francisco. 


David  Bradford:  WAPAC  mural,  1977,  Fillmore,  San 
Francisco. 


Dewey  Grumpier:  Fire  Next    lime,   1977,  Hunter's 
Point  Recreation  Center,  San  Francisco. 


Margo  Bors,  Susan  Cervantes,  Jose  Gomez,  Denise 
Meehan,  Tony  Parrinello,  and  others  (Precita  Eyes 
Muralists):  China  Books  Mural,  1978,  Mission  Dis- 
trict, San  Francisco.  (©  All  rights  reserved) 


Daniel  Galvez,  Janet  Krenzberg,  Osha  Neumann, 
O'Brian  Thiele,  and  others:  A  People's  History  of 
Telegraph  Avenue,  1976,  Berkeley. 


Pedro  Romero:  Servicios  de  Salud  para  Su  Familia 
{Health  Services  for  Your  Family),  1979,  Pueblo. 


Mary  Pat  ton  and  local  artists:  Douglass  Street  Mural, 
1976,  Park  Slope,  Brooklyn.  (Rosenthal  Art  Slides) 


// 


^i 


Gilberto  Guzman:  Gold  Star  Mothers,  7977,  Bataan 
Memorial  Building,  Santa  Fe. 


John    Weber   and  Barry   Bruner   (CMG):    Nuestras 
Vidas — Our  Lives,  1978,  Chicago. 


_        Mitchell    Caton,   Justine   DeVan,    and   Calvin  Jones 
^        (CMG):  A  Time  to  Unite,  1976,  Chicago. 


Caryl  Yasko,  Niki  Glenn,  and  John  McNeilles:  Our 
Search  for  Knowledge  in  an  Ever-Changing  Uni- 
verse, 1977,  Madison.  (Photo  Caryl  Yasko) 


Students  directed  by  Robert  Freimark  and  .\iiin  Harnett: 
Freedom  vs.  Exploitation  =  Revolution,  1975-76, 
San  Jose  State  University,  San  Jose. 


Charles  Davis  and  George  Hunt,  directors,  and  art 
students  of  Shelby  State  Community  College:  A  Tribute 
to  Beale  Street,  1980,  Memphis. 


Mitchell  Caton,  William  Walker,  and  Santi  Isrowuth- 
akul  (CMC):  Wall  of  Daydreaming  and  Man's  Inhu- 
manity to  Man,  1975,  Chicago. 


Jose  Delgadillo:  Untitled  mural,  1973,  School  of  Design 
and  Crafts,  Mexico  City. 


Leopoldo  Flores:  Staircase  murals,   1974,   Casa  de  la 
Cultura,  Toluca,  Mexico. 


As  social  beings,  people  have  produced  according  to 
the  values  and  forms  that  they  have  worked  out  together, 
and  their  life  in  common  has  made  possible  the  develop- 
ment of  individual  personality  and  talent  that  have  kept 
communities  growing  and  vital.  But  for  labor  to  be  art 
requires  that  working  people  individually  and  together 
maintain  control  over  their  perceptions  and  production, 
and  this  they  have  had  frequently  to  struggle  to  achieve 
and  preserve.'^  Because  people  have  to  work  out  their 
own  meanings,  art  is  inherently  incompatible  with  servil- 
ity. When  it  becomes  official  and  academic,  it  becomes 
sterile. 

In  the  latter  half  of  the  twentieth  century,  most 
Americans  working  in  a  centralized  corporate  economy 
and  exposed  to  a  barrage  of  imagery  and  messages  from 
its  mass  media,  have  been  hard  pressed  to  maintain 
control  over  their  labor  and  ideas.  The  conditions  of 
modern  industrial  production  geared  primarily  to 
maximizing  profits  for  absentee  investors  have  provided 
little  opportunity  to  workers  for  initiative  or  expression 
to  give  meaning  to  their  lives.  And  this  has  been  reflected 
in  falling  worker  morale  along  w  ith  high  rates  of  absen- 
teeism and  personnel  turnover,  wildcat  strikes,  al- 
coholism, and  dependence  on  drugs.*  New  generations 
of  production  and  service  workers  and  increasing  num- 
bers of  professionals  have  reiterated  in  their  turn  the 
complaints  of  two  centuries  concerning  the  displacing  of 
skills  by  technology,  the  fragmentation  of  work,  its 
boredom,  impersonality,  regimentation,  and  pace.  Sur- 
veys indicate  that  what  people  w  ant  is  work  that  is  useful 
and  interesting,  jobs  that  offer  initiative,  expression,  and 
growth,  companionship  and  esteem,  and  over  which 
workers  can  exercise  control.^  These  are  the  lasting 
values  of  craftsmanship.  But  the  system  has  sought  to 
divert  workers'  attention  to  wages  and  fringe  benefits 
(that  are  necessary  enough),  and  to  leisure,  alluring  con- 
sumer goods,  mass  entertainment,  and  recreation. 

The  contemporary  fine  arts,  increasingly  supported  by 
business  and  government,  have  also  distracted  people 
from  meaningful  action.  High  culture  has  provided  both 
artists  and  their  audiences  v\  ith  the  pleasures  of  sensory 
form,  ingenious  workmanship,  and  the  savoring  of 
expression,  but  all  as  ends  in  themselves.  In  the  face  of 
alienating  vocations,  the  arts  during  the  last  two  cen- 
turies became  a  refuge  of  personal  creativity  by  aban- 
doning practical  uses  and  social  aims.  This  satisfied  many 
artists  and  their  patrons  for  whom  causes  and  ideology 
appeared  either  discredited,  naive,  or  threatening.  The 
disinterestedness  prescribed  by  mainstream  aesthetic 
theory  in  the  mid-tw  entieth  century  came  to  characterize 
both  "works  of  art"  and  "art  appreciation."  "Works  of 
art"  in  the  current  sense,  have  in  fact  appeared  occasion- 
ally through  history  as  luxury  goods  and  in  modern  times 
as  the  precious  collectibles  of  museums.  In  spite  of  their 
display  in  public  institutions,  corporate  offices,  and  the 
homes  of  the  affluent,  just  what  they  are  is  a  little 
mysterious.  One  effort  at  a  definition  of  a  "work  of  art"  is 


Aesthetics  and  Style  /  385 

to  say  that  it  is  any  human  product  that  exists  ostensibly 
only  to  be  contemplated  and  admired.  Most  of  what 
today  are  regarded  as  works  of  art  were  not  produced 
with  the  intention  of  becoming  such.  Fhey  were  pots  for 
the  household,  crucifixes  and  "idols"  for  devotion,  mu- 
rals and  posters  for  moving  people  into  action,  likenesses 
of  a  beloved  parent  or  meadow  for  remembrance.  They 
were  conclusively  transformed,  deactivated,  decultured, 
w hen  they  were  collected — that  is,  purchased  or  looted 
from  their  original  ov\  ners — and  became  works  of  art. 
Even  though  museum  staffs  provide  historical  informa- 
tion about  the  original  function  of  their  acquisitions,  it  is 
usually  offered  "objectively" — that  is,  in  a  manner  only 
to  increase  the  detached  interest  of  visitors,  not  to  make 
the  works  useful  and  relevant  to  their  lives.  But  this 
entertainment  is  not  altogether  detached,  for  by  provid- 
ing distracting  recreation,  it  eases  the  return  to  the  daily 
routine.  Furthermore,  in  spite  of  the  alleged  disinter- 
estedness of  their  appreciation,  the  public  or  private  pos- 
sessors of  works  of  art  frequently  use  them  for  secondary 
purposes,  such  as  investments  and  symbols  of  cultivation 
that  certify  status  and  legitimize  authority.  Indeed,  these 
purposes  often  depend  on  detachment  from  the  original 
meanings  of  the  older  artifacts  and  the  intentions  of  their 
makers. 

For  most  people  art  has  been  relegated  to  leisure — to 
occasional  visits  to  museums  and  perhaps  the  practice  of 
spare-time  arts  and  crafts,  which  channels  creativity  into 
marginal  activities  w  here  it  can  not  interfere  w  ith  soci- 
ety's serious  affairs.  People  are  denied  the  authentic 
culture  that  only  daily  work  that  they  control  can  yield, 
and  they  are  provided  w  ith  popular  or  high  culture  as  a 
compensation.  Culture  is  cool-out.  Against  this 
background  of  the  separation  of  ordinary  work  and 
creativity,  people's  murals  have  made  their  appearance. 


Murals  as  Community  Work 

Those  people  w ho  were  most  deprived  by  the  condi- 
tions of  culture  and  work  in  midcentury  were  the  work- 
ing people  of  the  barrios,  ghettos,  and  labor  camps,  many 
of  w  hom  v\  ere  v\  ithout  work  altogether,  w  hile  a  majority 
were  reduced  to  society's  most  menial  labor.  .Moreover, 
their  inherited  culture  was  neglected  and  systematically 
suppressed  in  educaticm,  employment,  and  public  life  so 
that  they  could  be  more  readily  assimilated  into  the  roles 
that  society  required  of  them.  It  was  also  ignored  by 
museums  and  mainstream  art.  These  conditions  finally 
provoked  what  was  called  a  "cultural  revolution" — the 
organizing  of  the  oppressed  around  their  common  heri- 
tage, customs,  language,  and  art — to  create  the  confi- 
dence and  solidarity  necessary  to  struggle  for  control  over 
their  lives.  Art  became  not  only  a  w  eapon  of  revolution, 
culture  as  a  whole  became  its  motivation — the  need  to 
preserve  a  w  ay  of  life,  people's  relations  to  one  another, 
and  their  belief  in  themselves.  It  was  the  trained  artists  of 


386  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

the  inner  city  and  migrant  camps,  like  other  local  people 
denied  chances  to  use  their  abilities  because  of  their  race, 
who  first  took  to  neighborhood  walls.  And  they  learned 
to  work  with  other  residents  to  reaffirm  their  common 
identity.  They  developed  not  only  a  new  medium  of 
public  communication  and  education,  but  also  a  technol- 
ogy of  working  together  that  became  a  model  of  social 
production.  These  efforts  began  to  reconstitute  art  as 
central  to  the  existence  of  communities  and  to  make  it 
possible  for  ordinary  people  to  begin  shaping  their 
world. 

It  was  people  who  had  experienced  the  greatest  op- 
pression of  their  labor  who  turned  to  art  for  the  most 
serious  kind  of  work — their  own  survival.  The  result  was 
the  reintegration  of  art  and  w  ork — the  return  of  urgent 
practical  purpose  to  the  human  propensity  to  make  im- 
ages, and  the  recovery  of  serious  expression  by  labor. 
What  was  at  stake  in  the  murals  was  the  defense  and 
development  of  people,  individually  and  together.  In 
time  many,  including  Malcolm  X,  perhaps  the  first 
spokesman  of  cultural  revolution  during  the  sixties,  came 
to  realize  that  solidarity  could  transcend  race  when 
there  were  common  aspirations  and  work.  And  this 
interracial  cooperation  was  also  aided  by  the  murals. 
People  of  all  races  turned  to  them  for  other  crucial 
uses — to  help  them  organize  against  the  destruction  of 
their  neighborhoods,  against  the  exploitation  of  their 
labor  and  unequal  treatment  by  the  law.  Murals  urged 
the  rights  of  women,  the  young  and  elderly,  and  the 
protection  of  the  environment.  They  protested  against  an 
unjust  war.  By  trying  to  effect  change  in  these  ways, 
murals  were  reuniting  art  and  productive  work. 

In  general  the  muralists  see  their  aim  as  the  develop- 
ment of  local  life.  As  one  of  the  statements  of  the  Chicago 
.Mural  Group  puts  it,  the  muralists  want 

to  create  art  that  builds  community.  .  .  .  We  aim  to 
integrate  art  meaningfully  into  the  process  of  commu- 
nity development  ...  to  bring  community  residents  a 
sense  of  pride  and  self-respect,  a  sense  of  common 
identity,  of  cultural  heritage  and  common  goals.  .  .  . 

And  in  Los  Angeles  the  Citywide  .Mural  Project  de- 
scribed itself 

as  people  standing  up  and  announcing  themselves; 
who  they  are,  what  they  can  give,  how  they  see,  what 
they  want.* 

And  its  successor,  SPARC,  sets  its  aim  as  "public  art," 
by  which  it  means: 

art  produced  for  and  with  neighborhood  people  that  is 
designed  to  meet  the  specific  needs,  concerns  [and] 
aspirations  of  a  particular  community.  We  believe  that 
by  making  the  artist  and  his  process  accessible  to  the 
people  we  are  demystifying  the  creative  process,  re- 
establishing the  position  of  the  artist  in  the  community 


as  visual  spokesperson,  increasing  environmental  and 
esthetic  awareness,  and  making  art  an  integral  part  of 
the  daily  life  of  the  ordinary  citizen." 

John  Weber  speaks  for  muralists  around  the  country 
when  he  says  that  the  aim  of  the  murals  is  "culturally  to 
empower  people."  By  making  art  out  of  their  own  expe- 
rience and  talent,  he  says,  it  becomes  for  them  an  essen- 
tial part  of  their  process  of  grow  th.  They  gain  control 
over  their  own  perceptions  by  meeting  together  and 
reflecting  on  their  experience  and  then  setting  it  forth  in 
imagery  that  encourages  others  to  act  v\  ith  them. 

Ihe  murals  themselves  and  the  process  of  producing 
them  perform  the  most  serious  function  of  art — renewing 
old  and  projecting  new  ways  by  w  hich  people  deepen  or 
transform  their  interaction  with  each  other  and  their 
surroundings.  Through  the  collaborative  activity  of  pub- 
lic art,  individuals  are  drawn  out  of  their  isolation, 
develop  new  abilities  and  understanding,  fresh  capacities 
for  fellowship  and  initiative.  The  process  of  painting  and 
the  finished  product  generate  new  human  relations. 
Local  people  discover  new  meanings  and  values;  they 
create  new  ways  of  being  in  the  world.  Many  muralists 
describe  their  work  in  the  words  of  social  activists  as 
means  of  "raising  consciousness"  and  "building  energy." 
What  is  meant  is  a  new  critical  aw  areness  of  themselves, 
the  causes  of  their  problems,  and  how  they  can  be  dealt 
with.  By  opening  up  their  horizon  to  new  possibilities, 
those  who  work  on  the  painting  and  those  w  ho  later  view 
it  often  gain  a  sense  of  personal  and  collective  empower- 
ment and  an  eagneress  to  act  together.  As  efforts  by 
which  people  defend  and  develop  their  lives  together,  the 
murais  have  begun  to  reintegrate  art  and  the  production 
of  human  existence.  Recovering  significance  in  social 
labor,  they  contribute  to  the  creatfon  of  a  meaningful 
way  of  life — a  culture. 

The  muralists  are  trying  to  overcome  the  separation  of 
art  from  the  ordinary  productive  activities  of  people. 
They  are  seeking  to  rescue  it  from  its  popular  reputation 
as  mysterious  or  frivolous  and  self-indulgent,  which  the 
avant-garde  was  partly  responsible  for  by  trying  to  make 
art  the  last  bastion  of  individual  expression.  They  are 
also  trying  to  recover  art  for  the  common  life  against  its 
reduction  to  luxury  goods  for  detached  appreciation.  The 
muralists  do  not  see  themselves  as  different  from  other 
workers  because  they  create  images,  for  if  the  producing 
of  billboards  is  a  form  of  productive  work,  community 
murals  are  also.  The  making  of  everything  requires  the 
shaping  of  forms  that  are  more  or  less  meaningful.  The 
problem  is  whose  meaning.  The  muralists  regard  their 
activity  as  simply  communications,  information  and  edu- 
cation work  that  is  more  responsive  to  the  public  than 
mainstream  media. 

The  professional  community  muralists  hold  that  w  hat- 
ever  their  skills,  they  are  working  people,  that  their 
making  of  images  is  not  fundamentally  different  from 
other  kinds  of  production  and  that  all  workers  should  be 


able  to  make  art  and  share  in  public  communications. 
This  is  illustrated  by  the  La  Fena  Song  of  Unity,  which 
shows  a  painter  laying  in  the  final  touches  on  the  mural 
while  next  to  her  carpenters  arc  constructing  the  door- 
way and  they  arc  enveloped  by  a  host  of  working  people 
from  all  over  the  Western  Hemisphere  singing  as  they 
march  out  of  the  wall.  Much  the  same  was  also  expressed 
by  the  community  arts  group  that  the  La  Pena  muralists 
belong  to  when  it  described  its  "desire  to  inspire  the 
commonartist  in  each  of  us.""'  Professional  muralists 
elsewhere  around  the  country  understand  their  services 
as  one  means  of  helping  working  people  become  articu- 
late. But  many  of  them  also  have  in  mind  that  workers 
should  find  in  their  occupations  chances  to  give  some 
meaningful  order  to  the  world  through  w hich  they  can 
express  themselves.  A  number  of  the  murals  have  cele- 
brated the  contributions  of  working  people  in  building 
modern  society,  and  others  have  affirmed  the  present  or 
hoped-for  satisfactions  of  people  in  their  labor.  There  are 
for  instance  the  scenes  in  Our  History  Is  No  Mystery  that 
show  Third  World  technicians,  including  women,  en- 
grossed in  their  work  alongside  another  woman  proudly 
frying  an  egg.  Ihere  is  also  the  lyrical  frieze  of  engine 
parts  in  Carlo's  Transmission  Shop.  Ihe  Pride  Inc. 
mural  and  the  images  above  the  tellers'  cages  in  the  Bank 
of  America  exhibit  the  professional  careers  that  minority 
people  want  access  to.  And  the  Wall  of  Respect  for  Women 
depicts  comparable  aspirations  at  the  top  of  the  tree  of 
their  history.  In  the  Polish-American  Razem  mural  in 
Chicago,  a  hammer,  a  drafting  triangle,  test  tubes,  and  a 
suspendered  working  man  are  linked  with  a  violinist, 
accordian  player,  dancers,  and  a  brush  and  pen  in  the 
paper  cut  out  wycinaka,  suggesting  the  related  kinds  of 
skill  and  artistry  of  local  people  and  their  heritage.  Many 
of  these  muralists  not  only  think  of  themselves  as  "cul- 
tural workers,""  they  also  are  affirming  that  ordinary 
work  should  be  cultural — that  is,  it  should  satisfy 
people's  desires  for  expression,  grow  th,  and  service.  The 
artists'  sense  of  this  creativity  is  dramatized  by  the  Black 
worker  whose  tools  are  extensions  of  his  hand  in  the 
mural  on  the  United  Community  Construction  Workers' 
labor  temple  in  Boston.  The  murals  thus  imply  a  theory 
that  locates  them  in  the  context  of  work  and  technology, 
which,  in  order  to  be  fully  human,  must  recover  the 
qualities  of  art. 

Aesthetics  of  the  Mural  Process 

What  is  aesthetic  about  murals?  The  term  itself  com- 
monly is  used  with  reference  to  the  enjoying  of  both 
works  of  art  and  the  process  of  making  them.  As  an 
experience,  the  aesthetic  is  w  idely  understood  as  activity 
that  is  more  intense,  coherent  and  meaningful  than  what 
is  usual  but  not  essentially  different  from  it.  In  fact,  the 
aesthetic  is  the  sense  of  vitality  and  fulfillment  that 
people  want  in  ordinary  life  and  sometimes  achieve  when 
they  are  moved  by  serious  needs  and  summon  up  all  their 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  387 

ability  to  overcome  obstacles  and  accomplish  something 
worthwhile.  This  is  what  muralists  value  in  the  process 
of  making  a  work,  for  it  involves  them  in  heightened  but 
orderly  activity  that  culminates  not  only  in  an  expressive 
and  useful  image  but  also  in  their  shared  growth.  Here, 
the  aesthetic  is  the  pleasure  of  feeling  fully  alive  and 
engaged,  of  acting  by  their  own  will  to  create  some 
expanded  and  deepened  interaction  between  each  other 
and  the  world.  Specifically,  what  is  aesthetic  is  the 
participants'  perception  of  the  process  as  it  unfolds — the 
effort  and  gradual  accomplishment.  It  is  a  movement  that 
has  its  own  stages  and  shape — of  anticipation,  of  disap- 
pointment and  recovery,  and  a  growing  sense  of  compe- 
tence that  accompanies  the  finished  image  that  puts 
together  all  that  has  gone  into  it. 

The  artistic  problem  for  the  muralists  is  to  sum  up  and 
clarify  w  hat  is  often  months  of  thought  and  effort  into 
imagery  that  can  grab  a  beholder  and  be  sufficiently 
understood  by  him  in  a  few  minutes  to  move  him  to 
further  thought  and  eventually  action.  The  painters  at- 
tempt to  guide  the  thinking  and  feeling  of  the  viewer  to 
an  experience  that  they  hope  will  approximate  what  they 
finally  arrived  at.  If  the  mural  works  for  the  beholder,  it 
will  raise  his  consciousness  and  energy  in  a  manner 
comparable  to  the  painters'  final  perception  and  provide  a 
similar  aesthetic  experience — the  understanding  and  ea- 
gerness to  act.  Thus,  what  is  aesthetic  about  these  murals 
is  their  producers'  and  users'  experience  of  growth  as 
creative  social  beings. 

What  is  particularly  impressive  about  the  murals  is  the 
scope  of  human  interests  and  abilities  that  they  draw  on 
in  contrast  to  other  contemporary  art.  Writing  about 
them  as  early  as  1971,  John  Weber  observed  that  "there  is 
no  necessary  contradiction  between  aesthetic,  expressive 
and  didactic  aspects  of  art. "'^  Years  earlier  John  Dewey 
observed  that  it  is  the  "completeness  of  living  in  the 
experience  of  making  and  of  perceiving  that  makes  the 
difference  between  what  is  fine  or  aesthetic  in  art  and 
what  is  not."'^  To  him  it  seemed  that  the  meaningfulness 
and  satisfaction  of  any  kind  of  work  depended  on  the 
degree  to  which  a  person's  whole  living  being — his  needs 
and  abilities — were  engaged  in  its  production  in  a  cohe- 
rent and  fulfilling  way.  But  modern  art  like  modern  life  is 
divided  and  fragmented.  It  tends  to  concentrate  on  one  or 
a  few  of  the  possible  human  concerns  that  skilled  work  in 
its  capacity  as  art  was  once  able  to  integrate — practical 
utility,  sensory  stimulation,  the  pleasure  of  form  and 
order,  the  advancing  of  social  and  spiritual  values,  the 
expression  of  the  personal  and  public.  Community  murals, 
however,  have  revived  the  effort  of  art  to  integrate  these 
interests,  and  most  important,  they  bring  people  together 
to  meld  their  ideas  and  abilities  to  meet  common  needs. 
The  aesthetic  dimension  of  the  total  process,  which  the 
completed  images  attempt  to  express,  is  the  shared 
awareness  of  people  working  out  an  understanding  of 
their  situation  and  carrying  out  their  common  develop- 
ment. In  this  way  the  murals  have  reestablished  con- 


388  /  COiMMUNITY  MURAI.S 

tinuity  between  art  and  the  production  of  human  exis- 
tence and  offer  models  for  comparable  efforts  in  daily  life 
and  work. 

Judging  Murals 

The  most  important  function  of  people's  murals  and 
the  basis  on  which  they  invite  judgment  is  their  effort  to 
liberate  and  enlarge  the  life  of  their  community.  Hence, 
it  is  not  only  the  imagery  of  a  mural  but  also  the  process 
of  its  making  that  must  be  judged.  And  they  have  to  be 
evaluated  with  respect  to  the  kind  of  society  they  promote. 

The  muralists  are  intent  that  there  be  no  condescen- 
sion, no  patronizing  of  untrained  neighborhood  residents 
who  participate  in  the  art  process.  They  take  people 
seriously.  If  the  ideas  of  a  mural  are  sentimental  and  do 
not  come  up  to  the  maturity  of  the  community,  in  fact 
fail  to  raise  it,  there  is  usually  no  attempt  to  conceal  this 
judgment.  If  the  forms  and  execution  of  the  painting  fall 
short  of  what  craftsmanship  demands,  the  painters  want 
to  be  shown  how  to  make  improvements.  Dana  Chandler 
says  that 

the  aesthetics  and  politics  of  murals  go  hand  in  hand. 
The  collaboration  of  a  professional  artist  and  the  un- 
trained must  help  a  community  get  the  best  image  it 
can  at  its  level  orunderstanding  and  ability.''* 

What  then  are  the  criteria  by  which  people's  murals 
can  be  judged? 


Does  the  work  serve  and  strengthen  the  community? 
Does  it  make  a  playground  a  more  attractive  and 
stimulating  place  for  children?  Does  it  enliven  it  with 
humor,  help  young  people  gain  pride  in  their  heritage  and 
identify  with  their  community?  Does  a  street  mural 
speak  to  the  urgent  public  concerns  of  local  people — their 
common  problems  and  aspirations?  Does  it  begin  where 
people  are  and  not  try  to  impose  ideas?  Or  beginning 
from  local  values  and  interests,  does  it  challenge  its 
viewers  and  not  only  reproduce  their  ideas?  Does  it 
deepen  residents'  understanding,  generate  discussion, 
even  controversy  that  is  necessary  to  develop  informed 
opinion?  Having  begun  with  the  concrete  problems  that 
grip  the  neighborhood,  does  it  show  how  they  are  part  of 
larger  ones,  as  the  issue  of  run-down  housing  has  led 
muralists  to  think  about  absentee  landlords  and  irrespon- 
sible investment?  Does  the  mural  debunk  stereotypes? 
Does  it  help  people  examine  their  assumptions,  espe- 
cially those  the  corporate  establishment  have  inculcated, 
such  as  free  enterprise  and  individualism,  that  make  it 
difficult  for  citizens  to  understand  their  own  interests? 
Does  it  bring  together  people  with  common  humane 
interests  rather  than  set  the  races,  the  sexes,  workers,  and 
professionals   against  each  other?    Does   it  attempt  to 


identify  the  real  cause  and  agents  of  community  prob- 
lems? Does  it  suggest  solutions  and  not  only  arouse 
anger?  In  short,  does  the  painting  help  people  change 
their  lives  individually  and  collectively?  Does  it  raise 
their  energy  for  common  action? 

These  are  questions  about  the  actual  effect  of  the 
mural  on  its  intended  public  and  therefore  can  perhaps 
best  be  answered  by  local  people.  But  an  outsider  can  ask 
residents  about  its  meaning  and  relevance  and  then  judge 
for  himself.  Although  we  are  visitors,  we  live  in  the  same 
society  and  share  comparable  values.  With  sufficient 
information  we  can  at  least  understand  and  perhaps 
identify  with  the  struggles  of  the  makers  of  the  mural  and 
their  community.  The  significance  of  a  work  of  art 
depends  on  whether  it  informs,  moves  and  strengthens 
not  only  its  immediate  audience  but  also  other  people 
who  are  concerned  and  have  a  stake  in  similar  issues 
elsewhere. 


Did  the  mural  engage  local  people  in  its  production  at 
some  or  all  of  its  stages?  If  it  was  not  a  team  effort  but 
done  by  a  trained  painter,  did  the  community  feel  that 
the  artist  was  one  of  them  so  that  he  or  she  could  be  given 
a  free  hand  to  express  and  stimulate  their  ideas?  If  a  team 
effort,  did  the  mural  give  local  people  serious  experience 
in  dialogue  and  collective  action?  Were  they  listened  to? 
Was  doing  the  mural  a  process  in  learning  what  commu- 
nity is  and  did  it  sharpen  people's  appetite  for  more 
shared  involvements?  Has  there  been  follow-through? 
After  completion  has  the  mural  been  deliberately  used  as 
a  focus  of  community  discussion,  gatherings  and  action? 
Again,  these  are  questions  that  can  best  be  answered  by 
local  people. 


Do  the  selection  and  setting  forth  of  the  images  effec- 
tively carry  out  the  mural's  purpose?  Do  they  make  its 
"message"  clear?  Are  the  forms  legible  and  their  meaning 
accessible  to  their  intended  audience,  though  not  neces- 
sarily without  effort?  Do  the  forms  avoid  unwanted 
ambiguities  and  uncertainties  of  meaning?  Does  the  work 
respect  the  ability  of  viewers  to  grasp  complex  ideas?  Do 
the  forms  take  advantage  of  the  freedom  and  idioms  of 
modern  art  and  their  special  possibilities  of  expression 
(since  popular  audiences  have  been  made  literate  in  these 
forms  through  the  film,  TV,  advertisement,  and 
museums)?  Are  the  forms  arresting?  Are  they  bold  and 
monumental?  Do  they  project  their  ideas  forcefully  and 
stimulate  energy?  Do  they  have  some  special  apf>eal  of 
beauty,  humor,  satire,  or  even  grotesqueness?  If  the 
figures  are  common  people  doing  familiar  things,  does 
the  painting  break  through  the  routines  of  daily  observa- 
tion and  help  us  see  them  and  hence  ourselves  with  fresh 
meaning  and  vividness?  If  the  artists  chose  to  use  forms 


from  a  community's  ethnic  heritage,  are  they  employed 
with  understanding  of  their  original  meaning? 

Do  the  forms  maximize  the  team's  opportunity  and 
level  of  experience  for  collective  decision-making  and 
painting?  Have  the  muralists  chosen  to  do  a  single  panel 
or  a  series  of  largely  independent  scenes  which  require 
little  interaction? 

The  effectiveness  of  the  artists  in  organizing  and 
clarifying  their  imagery  and  making  it  impressive  de- 
pends on  their  sensitivity  to  the  basic  resource  at 
hand — the  big  wall  itself.  Its  surface  and  its  vertical  and 
horizontal  boundaries  provide  a  framework  w  hich  can  be 
used  in  a  variety  of  ways.  They  relate  to  the  vertical  and 
horizontal  orientation  of  spectators  who  pass  in  front  of 
the  wall  and  may  face  it  squarely  and  obliquely.  And 
viewers  and  wall  are  tied  together  by  the  horizontal 
ground  both  stand  on.  The  muralists  must  take  account 
of  the  plane  of  the  wall  in  one  way  or  another:  they  can 
paint  "on  the  surface"  taking  the  wall  as  a  background  or 
they  can  pretend  that  it  is  a  w  indow  through  w  hich  their 
images  are  seen.  When  the  muralists  want  to  convey  the 
third  dimension  on  the  two  dimensional  surface,  they 
proceed  typically  in  one  of  two  ways.  As  Rivera  they 
may  adopt  the  traditional  Classic  method  of  arranging  all 
of  their  material  on  planes  parallel  to  the  surface  that 
thereby  convey  depth  by  appearing  to  overlap.  In  con- 


Diego  Rivera:  Land  Distribution,  1926,  National  Col- 
lege of  Agriculture,  Chapingo,  Mexico. 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  389 

formity  with  this  method  figures  tend  to  be  oriented 
frontally  or  in  profile,  as  in  Walker's  Black  Love,  v\  hich 
makes  for  a  highly  legible  and  ordered  composition  al- 
though there  may  be  a  great  many  details.  Walker  also 
uses  this  in  his  point-blank  profile  confrontations.  On  the 
other  hand,  muralists  frequently  adopt  the  Baroque 
method  used  by  Siqueiros,  conveying  depth  by  arrang- 
ing figures  and  lines  diagonally  that  seem  to  thrust  into 
depth  or  out  of  the  wall  toward  the  spectator,  as  in  the 
compositions  of  Los  Artes  of  Santa  Vc.  Figures  are  then 
ordinarily  shown  in  three-quarter  views.  While  the 
clearly  measured  Classic  arrangement  frequently  con- 
veys a  sense  of  calm,  the  rushing  oblique  directions  of  the 
Baroque  express  dynamic  drama.  In  addition,  the  Classic 
design  makes  for  a  self-contained  world  separate  from  the 
beholder;  the  Baroque  bursts  into  his  space  or  sucks  him 
into  the  painting's  world.  A  mural's  success  depends  on 
its  taking  advantage  of  these  possibilities  or  developing 
alternative  ones. 

There  are  additional  matters  that  bear  on  the  use  of  the 
wall.  Do  the  forms  take  advantage  of  the  special  configu- 
ration of  the  surface  and  use  it  to  dramatize  the  mural's 
ideas?  Rather  than  trying  to  paint  out  the  flues,  pipes,  air 
condensers,  the  ins  and  outs  of  the  wall  surface,  have  the 
muralists  used  them  inventively  as  part  of  the  design? 
Are  the  forms  adjusted  to  the  circumstances  under  which 
they  are  to  be  seen — the  length  of  time,  distance,  angle 
and  viewers'  likely  state  of  mind?  Ihese  obviously  vary 
widely  for  pedestrians,  drivers,  children  in  a  playground, 


390  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


loungers  in  a  park,  people  who  are  mounting  and  de- 
scending a  staircase,  clients  or  patients  in  waiting  rooms 
and  corridors,  and  participants  in  a  monthly  meeting  at  a 
union  hall.  Does  the  mural  make  the  adjustments  of  form 
necessary  in  very  large  works  so  that  it  can  attract 
viewers,  be  readily  grasped,  and  have  a  powerful  impact? 
The  most  familiar  is  increasing  the  size  of  the  higher 
images  to  compensate  for  their  distance  from  the  viewer. 
While  an  easel  painting  is  usually  best  seen  by  a  sta- 
tionary spectator  standing  squarely  in  front  of  it,  and  its 
composition  is  governed  by  the  rules  of  symmetry  and 
balance,  a  mural  is  usually  observed  by  a  moving  spec- 
tator who  approaches  from  the  side  and  may  stop  in  front 
of  it  to  take  it  all  in,  if  that  is  physically  possible.  Or  he 
may  stop  at  various  points  to  observe  it.  The  image 
therefore  needs  to  be  legible  from  sidelong  angles  and 
requires  modifications  of  perspective,  often  the  adopting 
of  multiple  angles  of  view  and  hence  vanishing  points. 

Siqueiros,  who  has  had  great  interest  for  the  commu- 
nity muralists,  has  dealt  with  such  matters  in  murals  like 
the  New  Democracy.  In  this  painting,  which  is  best  seen 
from  a  narrow  area  directly  in  front  of  it,  the  forms 
viewed  as  you  approach  it  from  the  side  are  not  only 
comprehensible;  they  are  overwhelming.  The  forceful 
central  figure  breaking  out  of  chains  seems  to  follow  you 
as  you  pass  in  front  and  will  not  release  her  grip  on  you. 
Such  technical  refinements  have  absorbed  increasing 
numbers  of  the  new  muralists.  These  matters  of 
perspective  are  especially  important  in  very  long  murals 
which  cannot  ordinarily  be  taken  in  all  at  one  time,  but 
with  the  proper  design  could  be.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is 


David  Siqueiros:  New  Democracy,  1944-45,  Palace  of 
Fine  Arts,  Mexico  City. 


not  unusual  for  a  mural  to  be  so  long  or  the  space  for 
viewing  it  to  be  so  constricted  or  interrupted  by  archi- 
tectural elements,  that  it  is  designed  to  draw  the  viewer 
along  it.  It  may  unwind  a  continuous  narrative  in  a  series 
of  panels  or  connected  scenes  like  Astrid  Fuller's  Spirit  of 
Hyde  Park  and  Caryl  Yasko's  Under  City  Stone  in  railroad 
viaducts  broken  up  by  columns.  There  is  also  the 
ninety-foot-long  mural  directed  by  Chuy  Campusano 
over  the  tellers'  cages  in  the  Bank  of  America  in  San 
Francisco,  which  consists  of  a  series  of  scenes  that  pass 
into  one  another  and  invite  the  viewer  to  walk  their 
length  but  are  brought  to  a  climax  in  the  center.  It  has 
also  a  secondary  focal  point  at  a  corner  where  patrons 
first  approach  it  that  had  also  to  be  worked  into  the 
overall  composition.  The  corners  of  walls  have  been 
seized  on  in  highly  imaginative  ways  by  other  muralists 
as  well,  most  notably  Los  Artes  of  Santa  Fe. 

QUALITY 

Some  people's  murals  done  by  ex{>erienced  artists 
without  the  help  of  assistants  have  accomplished  and 
individual  styles — for  instance,  the  murals  of  William 
Walker  and  Mitchell  Caton.  They  not  only  serve  their 
neighborhood;  they  are  also  works  of  high  artistic  quality 
that  deeply  impress  visitors. 

But  it  is  the  lack  of  finish  and  not  infrequent  awk- 
wardness in  the  handling  of  forms  that  raise  questions 


about  the  seriousness  with  which  people's  murals  are  to 
be  taken.  Works  like  Mario  Galan's  Crucifixion,  equally 
well  adapted  to  its  neighborhood,  are  done  in  what  may 
seem  a  more  "primitive"  style — "primitive"  from  the 
point  of  view  of  academic  training.  And  yet,  as  we  have 
seen,  it  has  immense  power  and  pathos  due  to  the 
directness  of  its  means  and  the  integrity  of  its  style  that 
derives  from  the  Hispanic  tradition  oi  t\\esantos.  There  is 
a  simplicity — a  starkness  and  consistency — about  the 
work  that  stamps  it  as  authentic.  The  forms  are  of  a  piece 
with  the  intention  and  sentiment;  and  the  intention  to 
memorialize  those  who  have  sacrificed  for  Puerto  Rican 
independence  is  worthy  of  respect.  These  qualities  of 
honorable  intention,  appropriateness  of  means,  and  ex- 
pressive power — the  ability  to  communicate  and  to  move 
the  viewer — are  criteria  applicable  to  all  people's  murals, 
and  for  that  matter,  all  works  of  art,  whether  they  were 
done  by  the  trained  or  the  untrained.  They  can  be 
applied  to  the  art  of  children,  and  the  work  of  the  master 
must  submit  to  them. 

The  murals  sometimes  seem  clumsy;  the  drawing  is 
frequently  inaccurate,  the  perspective  off,  the  poses  stiff, 
the  shading  inconsistent,  the  technique  "inexperienced." 
The  murals  often  are  not  "professional."  That  is,  the 
artists  have  not  mastered  the  conventions  of  academic  or 
fashionable  avant-garde  art.  Sometimes  their  knowledge 
of  their  lack  of  training  makes  them  reluctant  to  risk 
themselves.  They  are  usually  eager  to  learn  traditional 
skills  and  sometimes  fascinated  by  current  styles  that 
they  try  to  imitate.  However,  the  mainstream  conven- 
tions are  bound  up  with  the  mainstream  way  of  for- 
mulating and  representing  the  world,  which  often  in- 
volves polished  rendering  and  trivial  or  even  harmful 
content.  Moreover,  the  experiences,  values,  and  inten- 
tions of  the  muralists  are  usually  different  from  those  that 
are  the  basis  of  academic  and  avant-garde  styles.'*  The 
clumsiness  of  the  muralists  is  sometimes  due  to  their 
being  unequal  to  the  mainstream  conventions  they  bor- 
row; but  it  is  sometimes  only  a  seeming  awkwardness 
when  they  undertake  innovations  that  shock  our  expec- 
tations or  are  indifferent  to  the  expert  "finish"  we  are 
conditioned  to  value.  Sometimes,  however,  the  muralists 
fail  to  bring  off  their  experiments.  But  the  misses  and 
near-misses  of  their  efforts  to  work  out  forms  adequate  to 
their  ideas  are  more  valuable  than  a  slick  but  superficial 
success. 

Murals  have  changed  our  thinking  about  profes- 
sionalism. Instead  of  being  conceived  as  a  value-free 
technical  skill  that  can  be  used  for  any  purpose, 
craftsmanship  is  understood  by  muralists  as  the  ability  to 
adopt  means  that  lead  to  worthwhile  ends.  Ingenuity  and 
virtuosity,  even  imagination,  by  themselves  are  empty. 
The  medium  is  important  only  in  so  far  as  it  effectively 
expresses  an  important  experience  or  message.  If  the 
mural  makes  its  meaning  clear  in  a  moving  way,  technical 
polish  may  be  of  little  importance,  even  a  distraction.  As 
important  as  serious  purjxjse  and  clarity,  is  the  compel- 


Aes  the  tics  and  Style  /  391 

ling  image.  It  may  be  profoundly  simple,  like  Galan's 
Crucifixion  of  Don  Pedro  Albizu  Campos;  it  may  be  complex 
like  Caton's  textile  print  patterns  that  only  gradually 
disclose  their  figures  in  Nation  Time;  it  may  be  a  stunning 
leap  of  invention  like  the  X-ray  views  of  muscle  and  bone 
of  people  pulling  themselves  up  out  of  the  slum  in  Arise 
from  Oppression,  or  Los  Artes's  innovative  use  of  the 
"prow"  of  two  adjoining  walls  which  the  painters  turn 
inside-out  to  create  an  alternative  space.  These  examples 
are  but  few  of  the  startling  acts  of  imagination  by  which 
the  murals  often  take  hold  of  viewers.  When  this  occurs, 
an  incorrectness  of  draw  ing  or  lack  of  finish  in  rendering 
may  be  irrelevant.  The  urgency  and  conception  of  the 
image  that  come  through  with  sufficient  clarity  are 
enough.  It  is  not  patronizing  to  assert  that  a  more  "accu- 
rate" drawing  of  Don  Pedro  would  weaken  his  impact. 
You  accept  the  limitation  of  the  means  when  the  artist 
can  use  them  so  impressively.  An  awkwardness  in  a  work 
that  is  still  expressive  suggests  the  difficulties  that  the 
artist  has  had  to  grapple  with  and  may  make  it  more 
moving.  No  less  a  critic  than  John  Ruskin  observed  that 
imperfections  and  "rudeness"  are  often  signs  of  striving 
and  vitality  as  well  as  "sources  of  beauty."'®  Modern  art 
and  its  public  have  valued  roughness  as  a  sign  of  authen- 
tic emotion.  All  artists,  the  trained  and  the  untrained, 
have  a  restricted  range  of  materials  and  forms;  those  who 
move  us  do  so  by  what  they  make  their  means  do,  not  by 
their  erudition.  It  is  mainly  by  the  importance  of  what 
they  have  to  say  or  show  together  with  the  feeling  and 
imagination  of  its  envisagement  that  they  succeed.  The 
muralists  do  not  indulge  themselves  by  undervaluing 
drawing  and  technical  competence.  They  understand 
that  means  may  be  so  restricted  that  expression  is  crip- 
pled. They  are  eager  to  learn  and  the  untrained  soon 
recognize  the  value  of  discipline  and  experience.  What 
they  have  taught  us  is  that  powerful  art  is  the  result  not 
of  facile  professionalism  but  of  strong  thought,  feeling 
and  image-making  that  can  occur  at  all  levels  of  training. 
The  murals  have  also  demonstrated  that  social  and 
political  art  can  break  through  the  stereotypes  and  cliches 
of  protest  and  exhortation  when  artists  are  profoundly 
moved  by  the  concerns  and  reality  of  concrete  people  and 
a  vision  of  what  their  life  can  be.  The  ultimate  judgment 
of  a  mural  concerns  not  only  its  imagery  but  the  success 
of  the  total  process  of  making  it  and  assimilating  it  into 
the  life  of  the  neighborhood,  union  local  or  school  where 
it  has  been  done.  The  final  test  is  whether  the  painting 
makes  a  difference,  whether  it  raises  the  level  of  aware- 
ness, establishes  and  strengthens  bonds,  empowers 
people.  The  immediate  stimulation  and  excitement  that 
occur  around  the  doing  of  a  mural  are  easy  enough  to 
f)erceive.  And  often  it  becomes  part  of  a  campaign  to 
achieve  some  clear-cut  purpose — to  block  the  destruction 
of  neighborhoods  or  support  union  organizing,  the  suc- 
cess or  failure  of  which  can  also  be  observed.  Its  actual 
role  is  impossible  to  measure,  but  it  is  felt  by  local 
people.  The  power  of  murals  to  pick  up  people's  spirits  is 


392  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

demonstrated  by  the  holding  of  public  meetings  and 
celebrations  beneath  them.  The  tone,  the  vitality  of  an 
area  is  observed  again  and  again  to  change  because  of 
murals  and  the  activism  to  which  they  contribute.  And 
there  is  the  larger  community  that  includes  us  on  the 
outside  whom  the  murals  can  also  enrich. 

STYLE 

Style  is  the  coherent  set  of  expressive  forms  of  an 
individual  or  group's  activity  and  products.  It  arises  from 
a  set  of  related  and  recurring  shapes  and  gestures  through 
which  people  reveal  their  intentions  and  values.  Only 
when  action  is  deliberate  and  energetic,  when  it  is  per- 
formed with  interest  and  satisfaction,  does  it  have  style. 
Style  has  often  been  the  expression  of  the  craftsman's 
love  for  his  work.  And  work  that  is  done  with  style  is  art. 
Communities  and  classes  at  all  levels  of  development 
have  carefully  cultivated  and  guarded  their  distinctive 
styles  as  necessary  to  their  well  being  and  unity.  Since  at 
least  the  time  of  the  Renaissance  when  ancient  Classicism 
was  revived,  emerging  families  and  social  groups  have 
used  their  cosmopolitan  education  to  break  with  current 
styles  of  art  and  life  to  adopt  their  own,  particularly  as  a 
means  of  reinforcing  their  solidarity  and  distinction. 
This  process  has  accelerated  particularly  since  the 
eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  when  one  historical 
style  after  another  was  revived — Gothic,  Neoclassic, 
Roman  Republican,  Imperial,  and  Romanesque,  in  addi- 
tion to  the  "exotic"  styles  of  the  East.  These  were 
adopted  by  successive  generations  as  conscious,  often 
polemic  modes  of  self-presentation.  As  style  became  less 
rooted  in  the  daily  work  of  people  and  became  a  costume 
or  mask  that  could  be  donned,  it  became  fashion,  a 
matter  of  seasonal  consumer  stimulation  for  which  the 
whole  history  and  geography  of  the  world  was  ranged 
over  in  seeking  fresh  styles  to  promote  sales.  With  the 
emergence  of  the  avant-garde  in  the  last  century,  an 
effort  was  made  to  revive  the  authenticity  of  style,  but 
wholly  on  a  personal  basis,  consistent  with  the  indi- 
vidualism of  the  age.  Style  was  pursued  as  a  deeply  felt 
and  unique  means  of  self-expression,  but  it  also  became  a 
trade  mark  in  a  savagely  competitive  market.  To  use 
another  artist's  style  was  like  signing  his  name  to  your 
work.  By  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  a  painter  like 
Cezanne  might  during  his  maturity  move  through  a 
series  of  styles,  and  by  this  century  Picasso  could  freely 
work  in  different  styles  on  the  same  day  and  sometimes 
in  the  same  work.  Style  had  become  a  matter  of  indepen- 
dent interest  and  experimentation. 

The  muralists  have  been-  seriously  concerned  about 
style  but  have  not  been  so  proprietary  about  it  as  the 
avant-garde.  In  general  they  regard  it  as  the  expressive 
unity  of  their  work  necessary  to  its  impact  and  meaning, 
which  frequently  reflects  the  community's  ethnic  iden- 
tity. Their  effort  to  speak  for  a  neighborhood  or  other 
association  of  people  makes  their  sense  of  style  different 


from  the  individualist  self-expression  of  mainstream  art- 
ists. This  does  not  mean  that  each  community  attempts 
to  develop  its  own  style;  far  from  it.  But  the  style,  like 
the  message,  of  a  mural  is  often  a  subject  for  joint 
decision-making.  From  the  beginning  muralists — both 
the  trained  and  the  untrained — have  experimented  with 
ways  of  developing  collaborative  styles.  For  the  experi- 
enced this  has  meant  integrating  their  distinctive  man- 
ners. The  muralists  are  open  about  adopting  forms  from 
a  wide  range  of  figuration.  They  borrow  from  the  avant- 
garde,  TV,  film,  posters,  advertising,  the  comics,  or  the 
visionary  arts.  In  the  case  of  inexperienced  painters,  the 
borrowing  is  the  necessary  search  for  schemas  and  con- 
ventions from  which  to  make  a  beginning.  Among  other 
painters  borrowings  are  frequently  allusions  that  are 
necessary  to  the  meaning  of  the  work  and  which  they 
want  their  viewers  to  recognize  as  quotations.  This  is 
most  obvious  in  the  murals  that  rely  on  ethnic  heritage 
when  motifs  and  styles  of  earlier  cultures  are  seized  on  as 
a  means  of  reaffirming  pride  in  a  collective  identity. 


Styles  of  Black  Artists 

The  most  common  iconography  in  Black  murals  has 
been  the  portraits  of  leaders,  musicians,  and  sports 
heroes.  From  1967  when  the  Wall  of  Respect  was  done  in 
Chicago,  their  faces  have  appeared  on  ghetto  walls  all 
over  the  country.  These  portraits,  often  strong  and  com- 
pelling, often  done  in  a  graphic  Photo-Realist  style  de- 
riving from  photo- posters,  have  served  as  the  principal 
imagery  of  the  Black  muralists  because  Black  American 
culture  has  been  cut  off  from  its  roots  in  Africa.  The 
slaves  who  were  brought  to  this  country  were  denied  any 
visual  culture  and,  when  they  were  emancipated.  Black 
people  had  to  recreate  their  art  in  the  midst  of  a  hostile 
civilization.  Most  Black  artists  adopted  the  styles  of 
mainstream  White  culture  when  they  dealt  with  Black 
experience.  Being  removed  from  their  distinctive  past 
still  inhibits  the  development  of  Black  murals  in  the 
ghetto  in  contrast  to  the  Chicanos  who  have  the  advan- 
tage of  contact  with  a  recent  brilliant  revolutionary  art 
from  Mexico  and  a  continuous  tradition  that  goes  back 
four  thousand  years.  This  observation  was  made  by 
Elizabeth  Catlett  Mora,  an  especially  strong  Black 
graphic  artist  and  sculptress  who  has  lived  the  last  two 
decades  in  Mexico  after  spending  her  early  career  in  this 
country.  It  is  a  musical  culture  that  American  Blacks 
have  been  able  to  preserve  from  Africa,  and  it  is  in  this 
that  their  artistic  expression  has  been  fullest  until  the 
Federal  Art  Project  in  the  thirties  began  providing  Black 
people  with  training.  Now  Black  muralists  like  Walker 
and  Caton  are  among  America's  finest  living  painters. 

Eugene  Eda  in  particular  has  sought  to  explore  the 
possibilities  of  styles  associated  with  the  overseas  origins 
of  Black  culture.  As  early  as  his  work  in  Detroit  in  1968, 
he  began  working  with  the  styles  of  ancient  Egyptian 


palace  and  tomb  art,  which  he  regarded  as  one  of  the 
achievements  of  the  Black  people  of  Africa.'^  Two  years 
later  in  the  Wall  of  Meditation  in  Chicago  he  used  a  Black 
Egyptian  as  a  symbol  of  the  need  for  cultural  revolution, 
balancing  him  against  a  soldier  of  the  Black  Panthers  who 
meant  to  him  the  equally  important  self-defense  of  his 
people.  At  about  that  time,  also,  students  at  Merritt 
College  in  Oakland  and  Dewey  Grumpier  in  San  Fran- 
cisco were  employing  figures  from  ancient  Egyptian 
sculpture  to  remind  Black  young  people  of  their  heritage. 
In  1971  Eda  began  a  series  of  stylizations  of  Egyptian 
frieze  figures  for  the  doors  of  Malcolm  X  College  in 
Chicago.  1  he  supple  curves  of  their  arms  and  legs 
suggest  both  strength  and  refinement,  and  there  is  a 
ceremoniousness  with  which  they  go  about  their  crafts 
and  scientific  studies.  The  colors  are  sometimes  the 
muted  roses,  blues,  and  greens  of  the  ancient  frescoes, 
sometimes  the  brilliant  yellows,  red,  and  purples  of  West 
African  art  transferred  to  Egyptian  design,  but  these  are 
always  played  off  against  the  black  and  brown  silhouettes 
of  the  figures'  bodies.  Looking  backward  from  1979,  Eda 
says  he  liked  the  crisp  "graphic  style  of  the  Egyptians." 
Eight  years  earlier  he  wrote. 

In  art  there  is  a  need  for  a  more  truthful,  more  cohesive 
and  more  fruitful  relation  to  one's  culture  and  one's 
background.  Black  artists  must  not  be  imitative  of  the 
white  man's  art  today.  They  must  have  their  own 
values,  stemming  from  Black  men's  experience.'* 

The  most  popular  motif  from  ancient  Egyptian  art  to 
appear  in  murals  from  Philadelphia  to  San  Francisco  has 
been  the  gold  mummy  portrait  of  King  Tutankhamun, 
who  ruled  about  1350  B.C.  Its  success  is  due  not  only  to 
its  beauty  and  splendor,  but  also  to  the  wide  circulation 
of  new  color  photos  during  the  sixties,  which  long  pre- 
ceded the  exhibition  of  the  contents  of  his  tomb  that 
came  to  this  country  in  1977  after  most  of  these  murals 
were  done. 

Black  muralists  have  also  turned  to  other  sources  in 
their  cultural  heritage.  Eda  himself  at  Malcolm  X  College 
painted  a  pair  of  door  panels  with  giant  angular  West 
African  sculptural  figures.  But  muralists  have  made  little 
use  of  these  carved  prismatic  styles,  perhaps  because 
they  seemed  grotesque,  primitive,  or  avant-garde,  since 
they  were  "rediscovered"  by  Cubist  art.  Rather  than  these 
figures  Eda  preferred  not  only  the  more  graceful  Egyp- 
tian style  but  also  the  classic  forms  of  Ife,  which  he  and 
Walker  used  in  Detroit  on  the  Wall  of  Dignity  and  Saint 
Bernard's  Church.  The  style  of  alternating  black  and 
white  stripes  that  make  up  the  whole  fabric  of  the  surface 
of  one  of  Walker's  panels  on  the  church  recall  the 
dignified  scarifications  of  the  Ife  bronzes  as  well  as 
rough-hewn  woodblock  prints  on  textiles  and  decorative 
carving.  When  Walker  returned  to  Chicago,  he  con- 
tinued to  use  these  forms  in  the  "Peace-Salvation"  section 
which  he  added  to  the  Wall  of  Respect  and  in  the  crowded 
parallel  profiles  that  seem  to  vibrate  in  later  works.  In 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  393 
1974  Walker  said  he  would  like  to  take  a  group  of  young 
Black  artists  to  Africa  to  tap  the  old  sources. 

.Mitchell  Caton  used  African  tribal  art  in  his  adaptation 
of  angular  textile  designs  to  Universal  Alley  and  Nation 
Time.  He  and  Walker  also  employed  these  traditional 
elements  in  a  work  they  collaborated  on  in  1975,  melding 
their  characteristic  styles.  They  were  assisted  by  Santi 
Isrowuthakul  and  called  it  the  Wall  of  Daydreaming  and 
Man's  Inhumanity  to  Men.  It  stands  at  a  corner  that  Caton 
says  was  once  the  "mecca  cm  the  South  Side"  of  Chicago, 
a  center  of  clubs,  pimping,  drug  pushing,  and  fencing 
stolen  goods."*  While  the  illicit  traffic  had  slowed,  it  still 
continued,  and  the  artists  seem  to  show  in  the  painting 
what  keeps  the  underworld  alive  and  suggest  an  alterna- 


William  Walker:  Harriet  Tubman  Memorial  Wall 
(detail),  1968,  Detroit. 


Crowned  head  of  an  oni  (king),  bronze,  twelfth-fifteenth 
century,  Ife,  Yoruba  people,  Nigeria.  (Courtesy  Federal 
Department  of  Antiquities,  Nigerian  Museum,  Lagos, 
Nigeria) 


tive.  They  offer  two  large  scenes,  one  of  the  ghetto  that  is 
embraced  by  massive  faces  of  Klansmen  and  Nazi  storm 
troopers,  pressed  tightly  together  at  one  side  and  glaring 
across  at  a  pair  of  black  faces  at  the  other.  This  is  clearly 
the  imagery  of  Walker.  But  then  Caton,  in  his  manner  of 
condensing  and  concealing  images  within  images  that 
only  gradually  emerge,  extends  from  the  white  faces  an 
arm  across  the  bottom  that  holds  a  needle  to  the  neck  of 
the  Blacks.  Within  the  syringe  two  much  smaller  Black 
people  are  trapped.  The  big  arm  is  Ailed  with  symbols  of 


the  life  of  the  ghetto — a  spray  of  colorful  pills,  the 
fragment  of  a  piano  keyboard  and  a  few  bars  of  a  musical 
score,  a  black  mask  smoking  a  joint,  a  dagger,  a  wine 
bottle  and  goblet.  Above  and  in  the  center  of  the  panel 
rises  a  large  portrait  of  a  big-time  dealer,  in  which 
Walker's  style  of  scarified  flesh  is  here  used  to  convey 
creased  decadence.  With  small  white  skulls  for  eyes,  the 
flashily  dressed  figure  sports  a  wide-brimmed  white 
panama  with  hatband  patterned  in  patriotic  stars, 
suggesting  a  connection  with  government  officials.  He 


holds  a  match  to  melt  heroin  in  a  spoon  where  a  couple  is 
dancing  who  are  seen  against  a  hotel  entrance  and  an 
overhead  "el"  train.  This  is  apparently  one  daydream 
which  is  posed  against  a  very  different  one  on  the  other 
side  of  the  dealer's  head.  There  an  African  tribesman 
stands  with  dignity  displaying  his  strikingly  printed 
garment,  while  a  large  carved  mask  peers  out  of  ribbon- 
ing vines  that  recall  the  face  of  the  junky. 

In  the  section  to  the  right  Walker  presents  an  arrange- 
ment he  had  worked  out  before  in  The  History  of  the 
Packinghouse  Worker.  Here  he  shows  the  compressed  faces 
of  another  set  of  Klansmen  glaring  across  a  chessboard  at 
a  group  of  Black  Muslims.  In  the  midst  of  this  confronta- 
tion are  the  smaller  bodies  of  Malcolm  X,  Martin  Luther 
King,  Jr.,  and  John  Kennedy  sprawling  dead  on  the 
board.  Other  chess  pieces  still  remain  upright — a  Black 
child,  a  Southern  senator  with  a  bag  of  loot  who  is  paired 
with  a  Black  con  man.  There  are  also  two  naked  prosti- 
tutes, one  Black,  one  White,  who  bear  a  pimp  in  a  flashy 
convertible  on  their  backs.  Above  them  another 
Klansman  and  Muslim  point  pistols  at  each  other. 

The  flicker  of  Walker's  black-and-white  chessboard 
connects  with  Caton's  small  flashing  patterns.  The  mural 
as  a  whole  has  the  somber  tonality  that  appears  in  the 
artists'  other  work,  but  the  acid  scarlets,  oranges,  laven- 

William  Walker,  Mitchell  Caton,  and  Santi  Is- 
rowuthakul  (CMG):  Wall  of  Daydreaming  and  Man's 
Inhumanity  to  Men,  I97S,  South  Side,  Chicago. 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  395 

ders,  and  greens  of  Caton  are  also  utilized  here  by 
Walker.  The  inspiration  of  both  artists  by  African  tex- 
tiles and  carving  is  clear.  What  is  especially  impressive 
about  Walker  and  Caton's  work  is  that  they  can  generate 
so  much  fresh  beauty  from  the  imagery  of  their  heritage 
using  it  both  to  dignify  and  indict  their  own  time. 

Meanwhile  some  Black  artists  began  to  look  toward 
their  immediate  elders  and  a  contemporary  Black  expres- 
sion. William  Battle  and  Chico  Hall's  frieze  on  Pride, 
Inc.,  in  Washington  borrows  effectively  from  Jacob 
Lawrence.  The  abundant  use  of  black  forms  deepen  the 
bright  colors;  and  the  hard  edge,  flatly  painted  angular 
shapes  look  as  though  they  have  been  cut  out  by  scissors. 
Eugene  Eda  studied  with  Lawrence,  which  may  partly 
account  for  the  muralist's  affinity  for  the  crisp,  flat  forms 
of  Egyptian  art,  which  he  renders  in  bright  colors.  And 
James  Arthur  Padgett,  painting  at  the  Shaw  Community 
Health  Center  in  Washington,  may  owe  something  to 
Lawrence.  It  was  another  major  Black  artist  of  the  mid- 
century,  Charles  White,  whose  sophisticated  realism  in- 
spired the  graphic  arts  style  that  David  Bradford  used  in 
his  WAPAC  mural  in  San  Francisco. 

There  were  in  fact  no  uniquely  Afro-American  styles 
of  painting  available  to  Black  muralists  in  midcentury 
although  there  had  been  distinguished  painters  like 
Lawrence,  White,  and  Romare  Beardon  who  dealt  with 
Black  subjects.  What  the  new  muralists  could  draw  from 


396  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

their  West  and  Central  African  heritage  was  limited 
largely  to  sculpture  and  textile  design.  Hence  it  was 
understandable  that  Walker  should  look  elsewhere  for 
visual  ideas.  This  helps  explain  the  influence  of  Diego 
Rivera  on  such  works  of  his  as  Black  Love  and  The 
Packinghouse  Worker,  particularly  since  Walker  shared 
Rivera's  deep  feeling  for  working  people.  These  works 
preceded  Daydreaming  and  some  of  the  formal  ideas  he 
used  in  it  he  tried  out  first  with  them.  What  Walker 
learned  from  the  .Mexican  painter  is  suggested  by  com- 
paring fi/flc/^  Love  of  1971  with  the  1968  Saint  Bernard's 
Church  panel  in  w  hich  all  the  figures  are  frontal  or  profile 
and  overlap  each  other  but  still  seem  crowded  together 
on  the  surface.  This  is  appropriate,  however,  to  the  sense 
of  imprisonment  Walker  wanted  there.  In  Black  Love 
Walker  desired  to  convey  a  very  different  impression.  He 
still  u.ses  profile  and  frontal  views  and  arranges  his  figures 
in  overlapping  planes,  but  the  space  though  still  actually 
shallow,  has  a  much  greater  breadth.  There  is  also  a 
simplification  and  calm  in  spite  of  the  great  number  of 
figures.  While  the  Saint  Bernard  panel  responds  to  the 
vertical  linearism  of  the  Gothic  architecture  and  com- 
bines this  with  African  styles,  Black  Love  has  gained  from 
the  Classicism  of  Rivera.  Another  aspect  of  it  is  the 


rhythm  of  rounded,  stocky  ordinary  people  who  take  on 
dignity  because  of  the  way  they  have  been  generalized. 
This  occurs  whether  they  are  at  leisure  in  a  playground 
as  in  Black  Love  or  as  in  The  Packinghouse  Worker  at  their 
tasks  like  the  butchers  solemnly  dressing  beefs  or  in  a 
tense  labor-management  confrontation;  in  each  the 
figures  exhibit  a  self-contained  and  shared  power.  Simi- 
lar hulking  figures  face  each  other  in  the  standoff  ofy«y/ice 
Speaks. 

Walker,  who  acknowledges  his  admiration  of  Rivera,  is 
a  sufficiently  mature  painter  to  gain  from  a  variety  of 
sources  while  developing  his  own  distinctive  vision  and 
style.  The  roundness  of  the  heads  in  Black  Love,  some 
with  "naturals,"  are  reminiscent  of  halos  and  point  back 
to  a  source  Walker  directly  or  indirectly  shares  with 
Rivera — the  early  Italian  Renaissance  painters.  The 
highly  generalized,  rounded,  sculptural  figures  of  Giotto, 
Fra  Angelico,  and  Masaccio — gathered  together,  but  not 
crowded,  their  halos  giving  each  face  its  own  space,  seem 
to  have  helped  both  Walker  and  Rivera  deal  with  the 
problem  of  assembling  large  numbers  of  people  in  a 


Diego  Rivera:  Mural  of  the  American  Workman, 
1931,  San  Francisco  Art  Institute. 


harmonious  way.  Where  Walker  presses  his  faces  close 
together  so  that  they  become  a  rank  or  profiles,  especially 
in  scenes  of  confrontations,  he  may  have  again  borrowed 
from  early  Renaissance  groupings.  Even  the  coffered 
wall  in  Black  Love,  which  seems  intended  to  balance  with 
cavities  the  volumes  of  the  figures,  suggests  Renaissance 
construction.  It  also  carries  out  a  contrast  of  rectilinear 
with  circular  shapes  that  occurs  throughout  the  compo- 
sition. What  ultimately  lies  behind  Black  Love  and  other 
works  of  Walker  and  his  similarities  with  Rivera  are 
ancient  reliefs  like  the  Parthenon  frieze  with  its  solemn 
procession  of  the  common  people  of  Athens,  including 
their  children.  There  are  the  same  forms  and  design,  and 
they  create  a  common  sense  of  community. 

Particularly  in  reproductions  and  slides  the  rectangles 
of  Black  Love  make  the  composition  busy,  as  the 
framework  across  the  surface  of  The  Packinghouse  Worker 
also  risks  drawing  the  viewer's  attention  from  the  main 
subject.  But  when  the  paintings  are  seen  on  the  spot,  the 
rectilinear  forms  are  so  large  that  they  are  not  distracting. 
The  purpose  of  the  framework  that  overlays  The  Pack- 
inghouse Worker  seems  to  have  been  to  carry  the  window 
mullions  of  the  building  itself  into  the  mural  and  to 
clarify  the  action  by  framing  it  into  vignettes,  as  Rivera 
had  done  in  his  murals  of  workers  at  Detroit  and  San 
Francisco.  The  mullions  also  push  back  the  figures  into 
an  almost  palpable  space,  as  if  Walker  were  concerned 
that  the  composition  not  seem  flat.  Related  to  this  vertical 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  397 

framework  is  the  horizontal  checkerboard  motif  that  he 
uses  in  Daydreaming  and  Man's  Inhumanity  to  Man,  as  he 
had  in  Black  Love  and  The  Packinghouse  Worker.  It  not  only 
conveys  Walker's  idea  of  politics  as  a  very  serious  game, 
it  also  serves,  like  the  pavements  and  floors  of  Renais- 
sance art,  to  clarify  space. 

As  Walker  seems  to  have  learned  from  Rivera,  another 
Black  muralist,  Dewey  Grumpier,  went  to  Mexico  to 
prepare  himself,  and  his  work  exhibits  the  foreshorten- 
ings  and  perspective  effects  of  Siqueiros.  There  is  no 
reason  why  one  painter  should  not  learn  from 
another — this  is  the  principal  way  all  artists  learn — even 
from  artists  who  come  out  of  different  cultures.  In  spite 
of  the  fact  that  Walker  and  Grumpier  wanted  to  use  their 
art  to  support  Black  pride,  they  had  the  breadth  of  vision 
and  skill  to  adopt  art  from  different  ethnic  cultures  to  this 
purpose. 

Styles  ofRaza  Artists 

It  is  the  art  of  the  Mexican  revolutionary  painters — 
Rivera,  Orozco,  Siqueiros,  and  through  them  the  styles 
of  indio  and  popular  art — that  have  had  the  most  pro- 
found and  widespread  impact  on  the  new  neighborhood 
murals  in  this  country.  This  arises  in  part  because  of  the 
great  number  of  Latinos  doing  murals  today,  and  clearly 
they  would  not  have  turned  to  murals  were  it  not  for  the 
closeness  of  the  Mexican  heritage.  Moreover,  the  Mexi- 
can murals  were  a  genuine  people's  art  calling  for  full 
social,  economic,  and  political  liberation.  After  their 
revolution  that  ended  in  1920,  .Mexicans  used  murals  to 
project  many  of  its  issues,  which  were  similar  to  those 
that  absorb  working  people,  not  only  Ghicanos,  today: 
the  fair  distribution  of  the  nation's  wealth;  full  participa- 
tion of  citizens  in  their  government;  the  right  of  workers 
to  organize;  and  the  development  of  a  popular  culture  out 
of  the  needs,  experiences,  and  traditions  of  common 
people. 

One  of  the  unique  features  of  the  Mexican  mural 
renaissance  was  that  painters  of  academic  training  turned 
to  the  aesthetic  traditions  of  the  populace — the  mestizos  of 
the  villages  and  urban  barrios,  the  indios  of  the  more 
remote  areas — to  reconstruct  a  national  culture  that  had 
been  under  the  domination  of  foreign  elites  for  centuries. 
The  painters  not  only  celebrated  people  at  work,  at 
fiestas,  in  revolutionary  struggles,  and  organizing  to  re- 
build their  country;  they  also  adopted  the  styles  of 
popular  art.  Orozco  in  particular  assimilated  the  political 
cartoon  and  caricature  into  the  dignified  art  of  murals. 
The  popular  subjects  and  forms  of  Jose  Posada's  engrav- 
ings for  broadsides,  newssheets,  and  ballads  were  taken 
up  by  the  painters.  They  also  borrowed  the  archaic 
stylizations  of  popular  santos  and  pulqueria  art — the  stiff 
figures  and  gestures,  the  bright  colors,  the  clear  outlines 
of  surfaces  unveiled  by  atmospheric  haze,  and  the  mass- 


Diego  Rivera:  Detroit  Industry  (detail),  1932,  Detroit 
Institute  of  Arts. 


398  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

ing  of  portraits  in  a  single  composition.  Most  imf)ortant, 
the  culture  of  the  indios,  which  had  been  treated  with 
indifference  or  contempt  by  artists  until  the  second 
decade  of  this  century,  became  a  primary  resource  of  the 
painters  of  the  Mexican  Revolution.  The  indio  in  fact 
became  the  symbol  of  La  Raza,  the  people,  who  had  been 
oppressed  by  freebooters  from  abroad  and  the  privileged 
at  home,  and  now  sought  their  freedom.  Chicano 
muralists  in  turn  have  taken  up  this  imagery  in  order  to 
create  a  people's  art.  Hence  it  is  not  only  the  murals  of 
the  Revolution  but  also  the  popular  and  indio  arts  that 
have  provided  vehicles  for  Chicano  concerns. 

To  understand  the  enthusiasm  with  which  Chicano 
artists  have  made  murals  and  their  barrios  embraced 
them,  it  is  important  to  grasp  the  importance  of  art  to  the 
everyday  life  of  people  of  Mexican  heritage.  There  is  still 
in  Mexico  a  living  handicraft  tradition  which  does  not 
separate  artist  and  worker  as  we  do.  Moreover  there  is  an 
impulse  to  adorning  everyday  life  that  makes  for  the 
decorative  arrangements  of  food,  the  display  of  flowers 
and  plants  in  the  poorest  tenements  and  shacks,  the 
transformation  of  the  dashboards  of  buses  and  taxis  into 
elaborately  ornamented  shrines,  the  frequent  fiestas  with 
their  dense  paper  ornaments  overhead,  the  towers  of 
fireworks,  the  cakes  and  candies  oicalaveras  for  La  Dia  de 
los  Muertos,  and  the  "murals"  of  colored  lights  which 
display  portraits  of  Mexican  heroes  that  are  assembled 
for  holidays.  Art  is  intimately  bound  up  with  religion, 
the  home,  the  community,  and  politics.  Everything  must 
be  ordered  and  embellished  to  achieve  not  only  visual 
appeal  but  also  to  reveal  its  inherent  worthiness.  This 
sensitivity  to  beauty,  while  more  overt  in  Mexico,  is  too 
deep  and  too  ancient  a  consciousness  to  disappear  quickly 
when  Mexicans  come  to  this  country. 

In  general  it  has  been  through  both  book  illustrations 
and  slides  or  journeys  south  of  the  border  that  U.S. 
muralists  have  become  acquainted  with  the  painting  of 
the  Mexican  Revolution.  But  there  are  some  major 
examples  of  Mexican  mural  art  in  this  country:  Orozco  at 
Dartmouth  College  in  New  Hampshire,  Pomona  College 
in  California  and  the  New  School  of  Social  Research  in 
New  York  City;  Rivera  at  the  Detroit  Institute  of  Fine 
Arts  and  again  at  San  Francisco's  City  College,  its  Stock 
Exchange  luncheon  club  and  Art  Institute;  and 
Siqueiros's  crucifixion  of  a  farm  worker,  which  is  now 
beginning  to  emerge  from  the  whitewash  that  had  cov- 
ered it  in  Los  Angeles.  But  they  are  too  few  and  scattered 
to  have  affected  many  muralists. 

Among  the  Latinos  who  have  profited  directly  from 
the  Mexican  murals  in  the  United  States  is  Mike  Rios, 
who  depended  on  the  plumed  serpent  of  Rivera's  mural 
at  San  Francisco  City  College.  In  his  Mini-Park  painting 
Rios  transformed  the  plumes  into  scalelike  leaves  among 
which  indios  play.  His  sense  of  nature  as  a  living 
serpent — luxuriant,  potent,  a  friend  to  mankind — is  im- 
aginative and  beautifully  visualized.  Rios  also  shows 
sculptors  at  work  on  the  serpent's  head,  an  idea  borrowed 


>.4. 


David  Siqueiros:  Tropical  America  (detail),  1932,  lah 
whitewashed;  photographed  in  1975,  Olvera  Street  Mm 
ket,  Los  Angeles. 


both  from  Rivera's  City  College  and  Art  Institute  mur- 
als. In  the  latter  Rivera  presents  himself  on  a  scaffolding 
before  a  huge  image  of  a  worker  that  probably  suggested 
to  Rios  the  framework  around  his  serpent's  head.  This 
idea  was  also  adopted  in  the  Bank  of  American  mural  on 
which  Rios  worked  with  "Chuy"  Campusano  and  others. 
There  scaffolding  surrounds  the  images  of  a  giant 
Zapatalike  fighter  and  a  figure  representing  the 
professions — models  for  the  young  people  of  the  barrios. 
And  Rios's  fascination  with  blocklike  architecture  was 
likely  stimulated  by  Rivera's  cubist  depictions  of  Mexi- 
can towns. 

The  most  important  mural  that  Siqueiros  did  in  the 
United  States  was  Tropical  America,  painted  in  a  Mexican 
market  area  of  Los  Angeles  in  1932.^"  It  was 
whitewashed  within  a  few  years  because  it  showed  the 
"eagle  of  North  American  coins"  as  Siqueiros  himself 
described  it,  perching  on  top  of  a  cross  on  which  an  indio 


David  Siqueiros:  For  the  Complete  Safety  of  All 
Mexicans  at  Work  (detail),  1952-54,  Hospital  de  la 
Raza,  Mexico  City. 


David  Siqueiros:  The  People  to  the  University,  the 
University  to  the  People,  1952-56,  National  Uni- 
versity, Mexico  City. 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  399 

was  crucified.  Its  shapes  were  beginning  to  reemerge 
from  the  wall  in  the  early  seventies,  but  the  painter 
shortly  before  his  death  decided  that  it  was  too  damaged 
to  justify  restoration.  Nevertheless,  it  did  receive  new 
life  in  the  works  of  the  new  muralists.  Sergio  O'Cadiz 
and  the  students  at  Santa  Ana  College  included  it  in  their 
library  mural,  changing  the  eagle  to  a  dollar  bill  with 
scales  of  justice  awry.  And  the  image  of  the  crucified 
indio  suggests  a  similar  figure  in  the  San  Francisco  Bank 
of  America  mural  designed  by  Campusano,  but  here  he  is 
a  farm  worker  nailed  to  a  cross  prone  on  the  ground  he 
has  worked — a  compelling  variation.  This  image  also 
appears  in  Daniel  de  Siega's  Centro  de  la  Raza  wall  in 
Seattle.  If  these  are  not  conscious  borrowings  from 
Siqueiros,  they  at  least  have  common  roots. 

The  figures  of  Siqueiros  that  virtually  or  in  fact  bust 
out  of  their  walls  have  had  the  widest  influence  both  on 
Latino  and  other  muralists,  but  most  pervasively  on  Los 
Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan. 

One  of  the  most  meticulous  and  complex  efforts  to 
learn  from  the  Mexican  painters  is  Guillermo  Aranda's 
mural  on  the  inside  of  the  Centro  Cultural  in  San  Diego, 
which  was  described  earlier.  Aranda  drew  his  principal 
figure  of  the  tortured  indio  from  Orozco's  "Man  of  Fire" 
in  the  dome  of  the  Hospicio  Cabanas  in  Guadalajara.  But 
he  also  borrowed  imagery  and  technique  from  The 
Portrait  of  the  Bourgeoisie  (that  Siqueiros  painted  inside  the 
stairwell  of  the  Electrical  Workers  union  hall  in  Mexico 
City  in  1939)  and  a  series  of  later  murals  on  the  theme  of 
the  Aztec  martyr,  Cuauhtemoc.  The  themes  of  Aranda 
and  Siqueiros  are  similar:  the  exploitation  of  the  workers 
by  the  White  man's  capitalism,  militarism,  and  Chris- 
tianity. Aranda  changed  The  Portrait's  heap  of  coins 
being  minted  from  the  blood  of  workers  into  a  single 
silver  dollar  on  which  his  indio  is  crucified.  He  adopted 
the  gas-masked  financiers  and  generals  of  The  Portrait  and 
the  contrast  in  a  Cuauhtemoc  mural  of  a  tortured  naked 
indio    and    armored    White    soliders   equipped    with    a 


400  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

panoply  of  technology  and  a  dagger  in  the  shape  of  the 
cross.  But  Arnada  also  made  the  cross  a  syringe.  He 
transformed  The  Portrait's  ironic  double-headed  dove 
(which  is  also  a  warplane  suspending  a  naked  lynched 
Black  man)  into  a  similarly  ironic  California  quail  with 
vulture's  talons  that  has  torn  out  the  heart  of  the  indio. 
Siqueiros  explicitly  urges  workers'  armed  resistance  in 
The  Portrait,  but  Aranda  proposes  cultural  revolution. 
While  indicting  the  misuse  of  technology,  Aranda,  like 
Siqueiros,  adapted  it  to  humanized  purposes  in  the 
making  of  his  mural:  like  Siqueiros  he  used  spray  paint  to 
convey  the  transparency  of  flames;  and  inspired  by  the 
sculptural  murals  of  the  master,  he  created  a  huge 
styrofoam  fist  that  busts  out  of  the  mural's  surface.^' 
Aranda's  work  is  a  youthful  undertaking,  but  it  is  impres- 
sive. He  used  his  borrowed  imagery  and  technique  to 
convey  new  meanings  appropriate  to  the  Chicano  experi- 
ence. His  mural,  vehement  and  ambitious,  is  worthy  of 
its  models. 

Another  talented  painter  who  has  derived  some  of  his 
ideas  of  form  from  Siqueiros  is  Ray  Patlan,  who  had 
made  many  trips  to  Mexico.  His  early  works  at  Casa 
Aztlan  in  Chicago  followed  closely  the  New  Democracy 
and  Cuauhtemoc  Reborn:  Torture,  but  around  the  room  in  a 
series  of  panels  he  struck  out  on  his  own,  particularly 
toward  flat  patterns  and  two-dimensional  design.  As  late 
as  1978  he  joined  with  the  Commonarts  muralists  of 
Berkel^  in  doing  a  work  which  borrowed  from 
Siqueiros  both  in  its  high-relief  image  of  Victor  Jara  and 
the  avalanche  of  singers  and  musicians  who  descend  on 
the  viewer. 

Near  Casa  Aztlan  the  Mexican  tradition  is  also  invoked 
by  Marco  Raya's  Homage  to  Rivera,  a  close  quotation  of 
Man  at  the  Crossroads,  which  had  been  destroyed  at  Radio 
City  in  1934  at  the  direction  of  Nelson  Rockefeller 
because  of  its  portrait  of  Lenin.  Later  Rivera  painted  a 
somewhat  different  version  in  Mexico  City.  In  his  work 
Raya  substituted  for  the  young  worker  that  Rivera  placed 
in  the  center  with  his  hands  on  the  controls  of  the  future 
a  fat,  laughing  business  executive  with  bags  of  money  at 
his  feet.  To  one  side  a  worker  is  exhorting  a  crowd  and  at 
the  other  gas-masked  troops  advance  on  the  viewer  over  a 
prone  prostitute  from  Orozco's  Catharsis.  The  painting  is 
in  a  broad  caricature  style  like  Orozco's  plutocrats  and 
the  thrust  is  ironic — closer  to  Orozco's  indictments  than 
the  choice  between  fascism  and  socialism  that  Rivera 
intended.  The  contrast  between  Rivera's  stirring  op- 
timism and  Orozco's  anger  must  have  seemed  appropri- 
ate to  the  Chicago  barrio  forty  years  later. 

Willie  Herron  in  his  Doliente  de  Hildalgo  also  borrowed 
from  the  imagery  of  Orozco,  but  the  influence  of  the 
Mexican  master  was  broader  and  more  important  in  the 
grotesque  caricatures  of  Herron's  barrio  people  and 
probably  also  Carlos  Almaraz's  undocumented  workers 
and  agribusiness.  This  was  not  a  matter  that  was  un- 
common on  large  public  walls.  Orozco's  images  of  catas- 
trophe were  useful  to  Gilberto  Ramirez  and  Aranda  for 


their  triptich  at  San  Diego  State  University  and  later  the 
military-industrial  inferno  that  Ramirez  and  Tony 
xMachado  did  on  the  LULAC  building  in  San  Francisco. 
The  sooty  fire-glow  of  both  these  works  was  achieved  by 
a  painterly  technique  characteristic  of  Orozco.  Ramirez 
and  Herron  both  learned  from  him  how  to  make  an 
impassioned  but  controlled  indictment  of  society  in  a 
black,  white  and  grey  monochrome  accented  by  blue  and 
rose  that  sometimes  flare  out — a  harmony  of  tones  with  a 
long  Spanish  tradition  reaching  back  to  Velazquez. 
These  new  muralists  and  Rios,  too,  at  one  time  or 
another  worked  in  a  bold,  scrawling  brushwork  like 
Orozco's,  which  was  a  departure  from  the  much  tighter, 
flat,  or  firmly  outlined  and  modeled  styles  used  by  most 
community  wall  artists.  By  the  mid-seventies  a  few  other 
experienced  muralists  also  began  to  work  in  open,  broad 
painterly  styles  that  are  usually  employed  to  express 
intense  feeling  and  movement  and  to  represent  the  flicker 
of  light  rather  than  the  clear  and  still  contours  of  things. 

In  1974  the  painters  who  were  engaged  in  the  Bank  of 
America  mural  in  San  Francisco  tried  a  related  painterly 
technique.  Here  the  outlines  of  the  figures  are  clear,  but 
the  brush  strokes  are  equally  prominent  and  vibrate  often 
in  contrasting  lines  within  each  area.  For  instance,  the 
jacket  of  the  elderly  cotton  harvester  in  the  center  con- 
tains the  whole  spectrum  of  colors  in  flickering,  some- 
times swirling  brush  strokes.  The  texture  of  markings 
recalls  the  method  by  which  Diego  Rivera  applied  pig- 
ment to  wet  plaster,  gradually  building  up  his  fresco 
surface  as  the  color  was  absorbed.  However,  each  area  of 
Rivera's  surface  is  monochrome.  "Chuy"  Campusano, 
who  directed  the  project,  acknowledges  the  resemblance, 
and  his  drawings  show  its  other  source — his  sketching 
with  felt-tip  pens  in  oscillating  strokes. 

In  1976  two  of  the  painters  who  had  worked  on  the 
bank  mural,  Mike  Rios  and  Tony  Machado,  used  a 
broader  painterly  style /or  their  Basta  Ya  protest  of  U.S. 
imperialism  exhibited  at  the  San  Francisco  Museum  of 
Art.  They  adopted  the  free,  ragged  brush  strokes  and 
sketchy  outlines  that  Orozco  used  especially  in  his  later 
work.  However,  the  color  of  the  younger  painters  is  not 
the  somber  tone  of  Orozco  but  a  heated  golden  glow  with 
strident  reds,  yellows,  and  purples,  closer  to  the  bank 
mural.  Their  painting  shows  humanity — naked  and 
anonymous — attacking  a  rank  of  massive  American 
storm  troopers  in  helmets  with  tusked  boars'  heads.  The 
scene  of  violent  struggle  and  the  animal  faces  of  the 
military  also^uggest  Orozco.  In  a  later  mural  that  year  at 
a  Hawaiian  theater-restaurant  and  at  a  public  housing 
project  Rios  and  Seko  Fuapopo  pursued  this  painterly 
technique  to  create  lush  tropical  settings,  but  Rios  later 
returned  in  the  Community  Law  Office  mural  to  the 
solid  geometrical  forms  of  Classicism  learned  from  Riv- 
era. Meanwhile,  painterly  techniques  were  taken  up  by 
the  Berkeley  muralists  of  A  People's  History  of  Telegraph 
Avenue,  which  was  done  in  the  flecked  color  of  Impres- 
sionism and   Rubens.   They  tightened  it  up  in  their 


Jos6  Orozco:  Man  of  Fire  (detail),  1939,  Hospicio 
Cabanas,  Guadalajara,  Mexico. 


4()2  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


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Co-op  and   La  Pena  murals,   but  still  used  it  to  give 
vibrancy  to  their  processions  of  marchers. 

Apart  from  the  direct  influence  of  Mexican  painters  on 
U.S.  muralists,  there  was  a  wide  importation  of  symbols 
and  designs  from  traditional,  especially  indio  painting  and 
sculpture.  This  began  with  the  farm  workers'  thunder- 
bird  and  Virgin  of  Guadalupe  in  California  and  abstract 
designs  of  pre-Columbian  temple  moldings  in  Chicago, 
and  soon  motifs  from  throughout  ancient  Mexico  were 
employed.  Sometimes  many  of  these  were  combined 
with  portraits  of  leaders  and  historical  vignettes  into  a 
single  composition.  One  of  the  retaining  walls  at  Chicano 
Park  in  San  Diego  that  celebrated  the  anniversary  of  the 
takeover  by  the  community  was  painted  as  a  similar 
collective  effort  with  literally  hundreds  of  people  taking 
part.  The  result  was  a  heaping  up  of  images  which  were 
linked  by  pride  in  heritage.  The  joining  of  friends  and 
neighbors,  trained  and  untrained,  to  paint  in  a  spontane- 
ous way  determined  the  aggregate  character  of  the  imag- 
ery, and  they  were  prepared  to  paint  in  this  manner 
because  it  was  how  the  placas  that  crowded  barrio  walls 
were  arranged.  While  this  mural  was  getting  under  way, 
another  across  from  it  had  begun  in  the  same  fashion,  and 
some  of  the  trained  artists  tried  to  organize  its  imagery. 
Dividing  it  into  balanced  sections,  some  of  which  were 
independent  scenes,  and  making  the  center  brighter  than 
the  rest,  they  still  worked  in  an  add-on  manner.  While 
other  muralists  elsewhere,  especially  Chicanes,  also 
found  in  graffiti  walls  a  source  of  this  kind  of  aggregate 
composition,  there  were  additional  models.  The 
techniques  of  montage  were  made  familiar  by  photogra- 
phy and  the  graphic  art  of  ads.  Rivera  in  his  historical 


Marcos  Raya:  Homenaje  a  Diego  Rivera,  1972,  Pilsen, 
Chicago. 


epics  frequently  built  up  such  composites  of  figures  and 
scenes  which  he  had  learned  in  his  early  Cubist  canvases. 
He  also  looked  back  to  the  dense  imagery  in  the  ceilings 
and  walls  of  Spanish  Colonial  churches,  half  baroque, 
half  iW/'o,  and  earlier  still  to  the  murals  of  the  Aztecs  and 
their  predecessors.  There  was  thus  a  wide  variety  of  art 
which  was  particularly  of  interest  to  Chicano  muralists 
that  encouraged  some  to  compose  not  mainly  scenes  and 
narratives,  but  by  assembling  related,  sometimes  con- 
trasting, images  to  produce  a  cumulative  meaning. 
Among  the  muralists  who  worked  in  this  manner  were 
Rogelio  Cardenas,  Armando  Cid,  Regelio  Duarte,  and 
Bill  Butler  with  his  Chicano  gang  team,  while  some 
non-Raza  artists  also  used  this  method. 

Already  in  1974  there  was  discussion  among  Chicago 
artists  about  the  need  to  break  free  from  the  spectacular 
thrusting  perspectives  of  Siqueiros.  Moreover,  in  1975 
the  Chicago  Mural  Group  noted  that  the  influence  of  the 
Mexican  muralists  had  declined  and  that  artists  were 
working  more  in  flat  patterns  with  less  modeling  and 
shading.  This  arose  partly  from  doing  important  murals 
in  non-Latin  neighborhoods,  particularly  Razem  that 
utilized  folk  costume  designs  and  the  modern  poster 
composition  of  Poland. ^^ 

Some  sympathetic  followers  of  the  mural  movement 
like  Shifra  Goldman  in  Los  Angeles  were  expressing 
concern  at  least  as  early  as  1974  that  the  indio  symbols 
and  history  were  poorly  understood  by  those  who 
painted  them.  She  agreed  that  the  Chicano  mural  move- 


ment  may  have  had  to  begin  with  the  affirming  of  a 
positive  collective  identity  to  build  confidence  and  unity, 
but  she  contended  that  it  had  become  a  "romantic 
nationalism"  and  needed  to  outgrow  a  misreading  of  the 
past  and  come  to  terms  u  ith  modern  problems. 

To  be  sure,  a  new  history  had  been  created  by  Chicano 
artists  of  the  last  dozen  years  to  correct  the  neglect  and 
racism  of  Anglo  historians  and  popular  stereotypes.  The 
new  imagery  had  sometimes  played  loose  with  the  ac- 
tualities of  the  past.  No  more  probably  than  Rivera  did 
with  his  idealizing  of  the  history  of  the  indios,  but  bad 
history  cannot  in  the  end  be  of  real  help.  It  is  well  to 
remember  that  Orozco  was  bitterly  critical  of  those  he 
called  the  "indigenists,"  the  painters  and  historians  who 
celebrated  the  indios  at  the  e'xpense  of  the  Spaniards, 
neglecting  the  indios''  brutality  and  exacerbating  racial 
antagonism. ^^  While  there  were  violence,  superstition, 
and  authoritarianism  in  indio  culture,  particularly  the 
Aztec,  Chicano  muralists  preferred  to  see  struggles  for 
liberation  and  unity.  There  were  in  fact  both  humane- 
ness and  brutality,  but  the  artists  had  emphasized  the 
cultural  achievements  and  cooperation  of  these  ancient 
peoples,  which  were  considerable.  The  artists'  romanti- 
cism had  not  led  them  into  a  flight  into  another  world,  for 
they  had  addressed  present-day  problems;  it  lay  in  the 
selective  editing  of  history  to  make  it  useful.  Cultural 
nationalism  had  meant  trying  to  find  out  what  could  be 
learned  from  the  past  to  apply  to  modern  problems.  To 
Los  Artes  de  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan  and  their  com- 
paneros  at  the  Tonantzin  School,  for  instance,  it  meant 
not  only  adopting  the  imagery  of  indios  but  also  reexam- 
ining their  society  in  search  of  a  new  relationship  to  the 
land  and  an  alternative  to  modern  competitiveness.  As 
Saiil  Solache,  one  of  the  painters  of  the  UCLA  Chicano 
History,  said  in  response  to  those  critical  of  the  indi- 
genists, "What  symbols  can  Chicanos  use,  if  not  Mexican 
symbols?"  The  problem  was  to  employ  these  symbols 
honestly  and  in  connection  with  current  concerns. 

Other  critics  of  cultural  nationalism  have  likewise  felt 
that  it  was  perhaps  a  necessary  phase  but  that  alliances 
with  Blacks,  Latinos,  and  White  working  people  were 
important  to  build  in  order  to  contend  with  a  common 
enemy — "downtown,"  urban  renewal,  the  military- 
political-industrial  complex,  corporate  capitalism.  The 
familiar  response  to  this  has  been  that  people  have  to  get 
themselves  together  first  on  a  sustaining  basis,  and  those 
who  have  been  the  victims  of  racism  in  particular  have  to 
build  their  confidence  and  strength,  not  by  assimilation 
as  separate  individuals  into  a  mixed  population,  the 
"melting  pot"  dominated  by  a  White  establishment,  but 
collectively  on  the  basis  of  their  ethnicity  and  existing 
communities.  The  interracial  murals  of  Chicago,  for 
instance  the  one  done  under  the  direction  of  Jim 
Yanagisawa  and  Oscar  Martinez  demonstrating  the 
similarities  of  the  struggles  of  the  Japanese  and  Chicanos, 
suggested  how  j>eople  could  find  strength  in  their  own 
history  to  be  able  to  cooperate  with  other  ethnic  groups. 


Aesthetics  and  Style  /  403 

On  the  other  hand,  Lucy  Mahler's  Wright  Brothers  High 
School  mural  in  New  York  indicated  how  individuals 
from  a  racially  mixed  community  could  unite  around  a 
common  issue — the  demand  for  adequate  education  for 
their  children.  Among  muralists  there  has  been  wide 
recognition  that  individuals  need  to  be  free  to  choose 
whether  to  identify  with  an  ethnic  community  or  with  an 
integrated  one.  What  has  been  asserted,  however,  has 
been  that  a  vital  community  that  developed  its  own 
culture — ethnic  or  otherwise — offered  more  chance  of 
growth  to  a  person  than  his  being  on  his  own  in  a  mass 
society  with  its  exploitative  nonculture.  If  it  was  com- 
munity life  and  collective  action  by  v\  hich  people  could 
deal  with  many  of  their  needs  and  development,  then  it 
was  up  to  them  and  their  artists  to  express  v\  hat  united 
them.  Sometimes  it  would  be  their  heritage,  sometimes 
the  life-style  of  their  locality,  sometimes  their  work 
together. 

By  1978  the  role  of  Mexican  and  indio  imagery  was 
different  in  different  places,  but  it  was  changing.  It  still 
played  a  major  role  at  the  Mural  Marathon  at  San  Diego's 
Chicano  Park,  but  for  the  first  time  non-Latinos  were 
painting  there.  In  San  Francisco  there  were  no  new 
major  works  with  Raza  imagery.  In  the  La  Pena  Song  of 
Unity  in  Berkelely  the  composition  and  high  relief  of 
Siqueiros  were  there,  but  they  had  been  absorbed  and 
had  yielded  something  that  could  stand  on  its  own 
without  explicit  allusions. 

The  Murals  and  Social  Realism 

What  is  at  first  surprising  is  that  the  current  mural 
movement  pays  so  little  attention  to  the  styles  of  U.S. 
Social  Realism  of  the  thirties,  although  muralists  often 
make  a  formal  acknowledgment  of  it  as  a  predecessor. 
These  socially  conscious  painters  included  Ben  Shahn, 
Philip  Evergood,  William  Cropper,  Jack  Levine,  Jacob 
Lawrence,  Anton  Refregier,  Charles  White,  and  others, 
some  of  whom  later  turned  to  much  more  personal  forms 
of  expression.  Although  the  new  muralists  are  fighting 
some  of  the  old  battles — notably  for  jobs,  decent  hous- 
ing, union  organizing,  civil  rights,  social  justice,  and  a 
fair  share  of  the  nation's  wealth,  the  forms  and  styles  of 
Social  Realism  are  not  a  point  of  departure  for  most 
people's  painters  today.  The  principal  reason  seems  to  be 
that  most  of  the  new  murals  have  been  done  in  ethnic 
neighborhoods  and  most  of  the  murals  of  the  thirties 
were  painted  by  Whites  with  frequently  some  concern 
about  the  problems  of  minority  people,  but  this  did  not 
play  a  major  role.  What  connection  there  is  between  the 
imagery  of  current  murals  and  that  of  the  New  Deal  era 
lies  mainly  in  their  common  soufce — the  Mexican  mural 
tradition. 

Arnold  Belkin,  speaking  of  his  Against  Domestic  Colo- 
nialism, acknowledges  his  debt  to  the  Social  Realism  of 
the  New  Deal  era.  (He  also  says  that  as  a  teenager  he  had 
been  so  excited  by  Orozco's  Dartmouth  College  murals 


4()4  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

that  he  went  to  Mexico  to  learn  mural  technique.  There 
he  studied  with  Jose  Gutierrez,  the  inventor  of  ac- 
rylic, and  did  a  number  of  murals,  one  in  a  penitentiary.) 
Some  of  William  Walker's  murals  bear  a  resemblance  to 
Social  Realism  because  of  the  effect  of  Rivera  on  both. 
John  Weber  and  Jose  Guerrero's  murals  for  the  United 
Electrical  workers'  labor  temple  in  Chicago  shovy  clearly 
the  influence  of  both  Rivera  and  his  northern  admirers 
during  the  thirties.  Their  unpretentious,  stocky  and 
highly  generalized  workers  reflect  newspaper  cartoons, 
Rivera's  peasants  and  the  Classic  simplification  by  w  hich 
the  Mexican  master  dramatized  the  relation  of  laborers 
and  machinery.  And  these  connections  were  reinforced 
by  Weber's  interest  in  the  machine-classicism  of  Fernand 
Leger.  Also  in  Chicago  Caryl  Yasko  seems  to  have 
borrowed  the  style  of  the  clinic  scene  in  The  Health  of  the 
People  from  Rivera  via  Walker,  and  the  quarrymen  in  the 
Lemont  Bicentennial  mural  from  the  art  of  the  thirties. 

Although  Rivera's  impact  on  the  styles  of  artists  was 
great  in  both  Mexico  and  the  United  States,  Social 
Realism  w  as  more  of  an  orientation  tow  ard  the  aims  of 
art  than  it  was  any  single  set  of  visual  forms.  It  revived 
the  social  struggles  of  ordinary  people  in  daily  life  as  an 
important  subject  of  art,  and  its  painters,  espousing  the 
idea  of  the  artist  as  a  cultural  worker,  were  the  first  to 
speak  of  bringing  "art  out  of  the  studios  and  into  the 
streets. "^^  This  is  w  hy  they  turned  to  murals  in  public 
places,  and  w  hy  also  they  pressed  for  government  fund- 
ing for  the  arts.  Their  forms  ranged  from  personally 
stylized  realism  to  adaptations  of  popular  art — the  comic 
strips,  political  caricature  and  the  recently  rediscovered 
American  "primitive "  or  folk  painting.  This  interest  in 
popular  art  docs  connect  the  old  and  new  muralists  but 
by  analogy  rather  than  by  actual  borrow  ing. 


Other  Sources  of  Style 

There  have  been  additional  important  sources  that  the 
community  muralists  have  drawn  on  for  their  styles. 
Cartoon  styles  have  been  used  as  a  means  of  appealing  to 
a  popular  audience  in  a  familiar  idiom,  and  sometimes 
their  figuration  has  been  used,  as  by  Grozco,  to  debunk 
the  pompousness  of  official  murals.  The  muralists  in  San 
Francisco's  Mission  District  have  u.sed  "Comix"  styles 
and  the  animal  figures  of  Raza  cartoons  to  assert  the  local 
scene  with  pride  and  sometimes  self-irony.  In  Los 
Angeles  artists  enlarged  newspaper  caricatures  and  de- 
veloped more  personal  styles  like  the  Dada-doodles  of 
Robert  Chavez  and  the  grotesque  faces  of  Herron.  In 
Chicago  John  Weber  and  other  CMG  artists  used  a  Pop 
Art  version  of  the  comic  strips  for  their  ACLU  mural, 
and  Don  Pellctt  did  a  fantasy  of  w  alking  mouths  for  the 
delight  of  children  in  a  playground. 

Though  the  residents  of  the  inner  city  may  be  de- 
prived of  high  culture,  they  are  altogether  literate  in  the 
range  of  popular  figuration  that  extends  from  the  graffiti 
they  make  themselves  to  the  images  made  for  them  by 


the  public  media.  Prom  TV,  movies,  newspapers, 
magazines,  and  billboards  they  are  conversant  in  an 
enormous  range  of  visualization — the  fantastic  fragmen- 
tations and  juxtapositions,  montage,  multiple  and  shift- 
ing points  of  view  ,  high-contrast  effects  of  graphics  and 
X-ray  views,  all  of  them  wide  departures  from  academic 
realism.  They  are  familiar  with  images  designed  in  asso- 
ciative and  symbolic  ways.  Commerical  advertising  has 
served  as  a  vehicle  of  most  of  the  techniques  of  avant- 
garde  art  so  that  they  are  a  part  of  the  visual  grammar  of 
ordinary  people.  And  w  hen  it  comes  to  the  making  of 
murals,  they  want  to  try  it  out  themselves. 

A  very  different  approach  to  style  has  been  the  vision- 
ary forms  adopted  by  artists  throughout  the  country, 
some,  like  Bob  Hieronimus,  working  carefully  with 
traditional  esoteric  symbols,  others,  like  Gary  Rickson, 
adapting  a  legible  and  elegant  surrealism.  There  have 
also  been  the  more  eclectic  "head-artists"  who  borrow 
from  occult  lore,  Hobbit  romances,  and  science-fiction 
illustration.  But  the  most  widespread  examples  of  serious 
visionary  art  are  those  by  Raza  painters  who  have  fre- 
quently used  Catholic,  folk,  or  pre-Columbian  indio 
motifs  to  project  a  reality  behind  immediate  appearances 
that  is  rooted  in  the  social  experience  of  their  community 
and  its  heritage. 

The  Underlying  Convention 

The  form  that  a  great  many  neighborhood  murals 
share,  whether  they  borrow  from  indio,  Mexican  Revo- 
lutionary, African,  New  Deal,  or  graphic-art  styles — is 
their  planar  character.  In  most,  though  certainly  not  all 
murals,  the  images  tend  to  be  oriented  tow  ard  the  surface 
of  the  wall — the  picture  plane;  they  are  disposed  either 
on  it  or  in  overlapping  parallel  planes  that  appear  to  be 
behind  it.  There  is  a  pervasive  two-dimensionality  of 
design,  and  objects  are  arranged  in  simple  schematic 
ways,  sometimes  symmetrically  on  a  single  plane.  The 
human  figures  are  often  seen  frontally  or  in  profile,  and 
when  in  "three-quarter"  views,  they  are  felt  to  have 
turned  away  from  or  are  turning  tow  ards  a  frontal  plane. 
.Moreover,  the  figures  are  sharply  bounded,  sometimes 
w  ith  outlines,  sometimes  by  contrast  w  ith  the  colors  next 
to  or  "behind"  them.  It  is  the  characteristic,  the  distinc- 
tive forms  of  things  that  are  chosen  and  made  precise. 
There  is  relatively  little  shading.  Usually,  traces  of 
brushwork  are  eliminated  so  that  the  surfaces  tend  to  be 
flat  like  graphic  work.  There  is  no  suggestion  of  atmo- 
sphere, no  veil  of  blue  that  differentiates  nearer  figures 
from  farther.  The  most  distant  and  peripheral  details  are 
as  sharply  seen  as  the  closest.  Everything  is  in  equal 
focus,  w  hich  is  not  the  case  in  actual  vision. 

These  hard-edge  and  planar  characteristics  of  murals 
sometimes  are  the  result  of  images  produced  by  tracing 
silhouettes  and  pictures  show  n  in  overhead  projectors.  A 
variety  of  styles  also  has  been  created  by  using  the 
high-contrast  effects  of  photos  where  the  gradations  of 


tones  have  been  reduced  to  Hat  areas  with  crisp  edges  that 
often  take  interesting  shapes.  All  of  these  features  that 
make  for  a  two-dimensional  hard-edge  image  tend  to  pull 
the  subject  matter  forward  and  closer  to  the  viewer. 

The  flattening  and  planar  character  of  neighborhood 
murals  are  determined  by  a  variety  of  considerations. 
The  basic  ones  are  the  big  wall  itself,  larger  than  any  of 
the  images  that  will  appear  on  it,  and  its  capacity  to 
provide  a  framework  of  planar,  horizontal,  and  vertical 
elements  with  which  to  order  them.  Another  reason  for 
the  two-dimensional  images  is  that  inexperienced  com- 
munity participants  are  unpracticed  at  painterly 
technique,  chiaroscuro,  and  three-quarter  or  diagonal 
views,  and  tend  to  compose  figures  and  scenes  in  frontal, 
profile,  and  planar  ways,  the  typical  schematic  way  of 
presenting  things.  But  this  is  not  necessarily  a  sign  of 
inexperience.  The  masters  of  Egyptian  frescoes  used 
two-dimensional  design  with  superb  refinement,  and 
some  of  the  muralists  also  achieve  a  high  level  of  sophisti- 
cation with  it.  Planar  design  also  maximizes  the  legibility 
of  the  scene  that  often  has  to  be  quickly  understood  by 
pedestrians,  or  persons  in  moving  vehicles. 

Moreover,  the  message  is  often  conceived  in  terms  that 
invite  two-dimensional  presentation.  For  instance,  there 
are  the  confrontations  of  Blacks  and  Whites  or  labor  and 
management  in  Walker's  murals.  One  of  the  most  com- 
plex but  schematic  murals  of  ideas  is.Peace  and  Salvation, 
Wall  of  Understanding  in  which  Walker  urges  public  dem- 
onstrations of  Black  solidarity  from  a  point  of  view  that  is 
laid  out  above  the  marchers  in  a  sequence  of  two- 
dimensionally  designed  images.  Similarly,  the  dialecti- 
cal composition  of  Eda's  Wall  of  Meditation  presents  in  a 
schematic  two-dimensional  way  a  development  of  ideas 
overcoming  apparent  contradictions.  There  is  the  before 
and  after  or  the  problem  and  the  solution  of  Rogovin's 
Break  the  Grip  of  the  Absentee  Landlord,  which  shows  a 
Black  woman  in  her  burning  flat  as  opposed  to  the 
combined  efforts  of  people  of  different  races  to  w  ork  for 
change.  There  are  the  Latino  and  Japanese  sides  of  the 
mural  of  Oscar  .Martinez  and  James  Yanagisawa  showing 
the  parallel  struggles  of  their  people  in  America.  In  an 
heraldic  composition,  Dana  Chandler's  Knowledge  Is 
Power,  Stay  in  School,  Blacks  are  shown  breaking  out  of  a 
white  egg,  inspired  by  the  words  of  Black  leaders  at  one 
side  and  an  African  ancestor  figure  at  the  other.  The 
themes  of  murals  are  usually  formulated  so  that  an  almost 
emblematic  two-dimensionality  seems  most  natural  and 
effective.  In  general,  the  murals  do  not  represent  actual 
scenes;  they  represent  ideas.  The  figures  are  symbolic. 
And  such  ideas,  especially  of  conflict  and  struggle,  are 
most  legible  in  planar  designs,  frequently  in  symmetrical 
oppositions,  balanced  parallelism,  or  development 
through  stages.  In  murals  like  Mario  Galan's  Crucifixion 
of  Don  Pedro  Albizu  Campos  and  the  Classic  Dolls'  Mayan 
priestess  surrounded  by  self-portraits,  the  two-dimen- 
sional symmetry  arises  from  a  religious  conception, 
but  similar  iconlike  designs  occur  in  more  secular  murals, 


Aesthetics  and  Style  1 405 

like  the  Aztec  figure  at  Ramona  Gardens  carrying 
the  body  of  a  young  Chicano  killed  in  gang  w  arfare.  It  is 
these  murals'  preoccupation  with  conveying  a  message 
rather  than  a  visual  slice  of  life  that  determines  their 
composition  and  imagery. 

Closely  related  to  this  clarity  of  statement  is  the  im- 
mediacy of  their  images  that  muralists  try  to  get  to 
maximize  impact.  And  this  also  accounts  for  the  preva- 
lance  of  frontal  compositions.  Frequently  all  the  figures 
of  a  mural  are  condensed  to  a  single  plane  usually  very 
close  to  the  surface  of  the  wall.  Sometimes  the  whole 
subject  is  on  that  surface,  as  in  James  Brown's  enor- 
mously effective  Third  Nail,  that  shows  a  boy  shooting 
himself  up  with  heroin.  Other  murals  present  their 
figures  coming  up  out  of  the  bottom  edge;  hence  they 
appear  to  be  in  the  viewer's  space.  For  instance,  Caton's 
images  in  Nation  Time,  particularly  the  screaming  wo- 
man's head,  rise  out  of  the  ground,  and  the  artists' 
Polish  Robin  Hood  in  Razem  seems  to  emerge  from  the 
parking  lot  in  front  of  the  wall.  Mike  Rios's  pylon  figure 
twisting  off  the  tracks  of  the  Bay  Area  Rapid  Transit 
system  stands  in  the  space  of  neighborhood  spectators. 
Willie  Herron  overwhelms  the  viewer  of  his  mural  on  the 
back  of  a  basketball  court  by  massive  oversized  grimacing 
faces  that  rise  from  the  ground  and  crow  d  the  space.  The 
impact  of  particular  figures  in  a  mural  is  also 
strengthened  by  minimizing  their  recession  through 
multiple  vanishing  points  or  using  none  at  all.  Instead  of 
all  the  subject  matter  being  swallowed  up  by  a  single 
system  of  converging  projections,  individual  figures  or 
areas  are  given  their  own  perspective.  The  effect  is  to 
lend  an  independence  to  each  that  strengthens  the  power 
of  its  presence.  Nothing  in  the  mural  becomes  per- 
ipheral; all  comes  at  you  with  equal  force,  particularly 
when  you  move  along  it.  In  each  of  these  cases  the  images 
are  made  to  appear  very  close  by  their  flat,  planar 
handling  and  bright  color.  They  confront  you  directly 
but  remain  in  self-contained  space  on  the  surface  of  the 
wall,  hovering  potent  presences. 

This  happens  in  a  striking  way  in  Peace  and  Salvation, 
Wall  of  Understanding,  where  instead  of  presenting  his 
ground-level  figures  in  flat  profile  as  he  does  those  above, 
Walker  turns  the  drama  directly  towards  you.  He  catches 
the  ranks  of  Black  leaders  and  street  groups  as  if  by  stop 
photography  just  as  they  are  about  to  step  out  of  the  wall. 
This  preserving  of  the  plane  of  the  whole  mural 
dramatizes  the  self-imposed  discipline  of  the  marchers, 
and  at  the  same  time,  it  appeals  to  you  to  become 
involved. 

In  contrast  to  the  classic  planar  composition  of  Rivera 
and  many  community  muralists,  there  are  the  works  of 
Los  Artes  of  Santa  Fe  and  other  painters,  whose  images 
do  not  remain  on  the  surface  or  behind  it  bilt  seem  to 
break  through  the  wall  into  the  viewer's  space  in  the 
manner  of  the  lunging  arms  and  bodies  of  Siqueiros. 
Depth  is  rendered  by  diagonals  and  a  dramatic  fore- 
shortening of  figures.  Los  Artes  employ  this  effect  with 


406  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

virtuosity,  making  corners  of  walls  the  centers  of  their 
compositions  so  that  the  surfaces  themselves  bust 
through  the  picture  plane.  In  general  most  of  the  murals 
that  create  deep  space  do  not  suck  us  in,  in  the  manner  of 
much  Baroque  painting,  but  thrust  out  their  images 
toward  the  beholder.  They  accomplish  this  with  even 
greater  force  than  the  planar  compositions  of  muralists  do 
when  they  force  their  images  to  hover  before  us.  Both  of 
these  techniques  indicate  an  urgency  to  reach  people, 
confront  them  directly  with  a  message  and  move  them  to 
join  with  the  muralists.  The  dramatic  brush  strokes  and 
painterly  manner  of  Herron,  Ramirez,  Rios,  Cam- 
pusano,  and  the  Berkeley  Commonartists  also  project  the 
image  emphatically  and  express  their  strong  feelings. 

Many  of  these  techniques  the  muralists  use  to  bring 
their  images  close  to  viewers  had  been  widely  employed 
before  by  the  avant-garde,  films,  TV,  and  ad  art  with  the 
same  intention  of  involving  their  audience.  This  is  un- 
derstandable given  the  value  the  modern  world  places  on 
direct  personal  experience.  In  addition  there  is  the 
urgency  of  people  to  be  heard  and  connect  in  the  face  of  a 
barrage  of  competing  messages  and  the  skepticism  of 
viewers.  But  the  muralists  have  used  these  techniques  to 
meet  their  special  concerns.  The  immediacy  of  their 
images  ties  in  with  all  those  aspects  of  their  efforts  to 
unite  with  the  common  life — the  relevance  of  their  sub- 
jects to  local  concerns,  their  involving  of  residents  in  the 
production  of  a  mural,  and  its  intended  impact  on  the 
ongoing  life  and  actions  of  their  community.  This  im- 
pulse of  muralists  to  bring  their  image  as  close  to  the 
surface  of  the  wall  as  possible  or  to  break  through  it  into 
viewers'  space  is  an  effort  to  link  the  world  of  art  with  the 
everyday,  particularly  by  stimulating  social  activism  that 
would  continue  the  process  of  the  mural's  making.  This 
motivation  is  also  expressed  by  the  dominant  imagery  of 
these  paintings — the  public  demonstration  and  other 
kinds  of  cooperative  activity.  For  the  scenes  of  marches, 
picketings  and  people  working  together  constitute  the 
principal  subjects.  The  murals  themselves,  as  we  have 
seen,  are  a  form  of  popular  demonstration  and  commu- 
nity work.  Even,  when  single  figures  are  shown,  they  are 
usually  symbolic  of  the  community  or  ethnic  group,  or 
portraits  of  its  leaders  and  achievers  who  are  meant  to 
suggest  what  viewers  can  accomplish. 

Hence,  the  styles  of  the  muralists  like  their  imagery 
and  their  manner  of  working  are  means  by  which  they 
seek  to  make  art  an  integral  part  of  the  community's 
producing  of  its  own  existence.  The  visual  convention 
that  underlies  the  varied  styles  of  the  muralists  is  an 
immediacy  which  attempts  to  connect  art  and  the  com- 
mon life.  What  is  unique  about  the  images'  closeness  to 
beholders  is  that  it  is  managed  with  a  view  not  to 
providing  passive  compensations  or  enticements  but  to 
liberating  and  enlarging  daily  work  and  action. 


NOTES 


1.  Cf.  Sidney  Finkelstein's  gloss  of  Marx's  ideas.  Realism  in 
Art  (New  York:  International,  1954),  pp.  10-16. 

2.  Cf.  Lewis  Mumford,  Art  and  Technics  (New  York:  Col- 
umbia, 1960),  p.  16  and  passim.  Also,  Paolo  Freire,  Pedagogy 
pp.  66,  1 19  ff.  Cf.  here  p.  380  n.  7.  These  ideas  and  much  of 
what  follows  corresponds  to  Freire's  view  of  human  conduct 
(praxis)  as  a  process  of  reflection  and  action  by  which  people 
continually  transform  their  world  to  meet  their  needs  and 
develop  their  possibilities.  These  concepts  are  connected  to  an 
approach  that  has  ancient  antecedents  but  appeared  in  its 
modern  form  during  the  Enlightenment  with  the  idea  that 
humanity  creates  itself  and  its  world — its  own  perceptions, 
society,  technics  and  culture.  This  view  was  subsequendy 
elaborated  in  different  ways  by  Hegel,  Marx,  Dewey,  and 
Cassirer.  For  a  recent  formulation  that  emphasizes  the  relation 
of  art  to  work,  see  Adolfo  Sanchez  Vazquez,  Art  and  Society 
(New  York:  Monthly  Review,  1973). 

3.  The  cultured  Greeks,  who  had  no  term  for  the  fine  arts 
and  little  of  our  sense  of  them,  called  all  craft  and  art  tecbne,  the 
source  of  our  technology,  and  all  making  and  producing/)o»«u, 
the  origin  of  our  poetry.  Cf.  Herbert  Read,  To  Hell  with 
Culture  (New  York:  Schocken,  1964),  p.  10  f.  Also,  Lewis 
Mumford,  Technics  and  Human  Development  (New  York:  Har- 
court  Brace  Jovanovich,  Harvest  Books,  1967)  p.  9. 

4.  Quoted  by  Deborah  Rudo  and  Scott  Riklin,  "Galeria 
Suffers  $  yjots"  Arts  Biweekly  (San  Francisco),  July  15,  1977, 
p.  6. 

5.  While  throughout  history  people  have  been  able  to 
maintain  varying  degrees  of  control  over  their  work,  there  have 
of  course  been  eras  of  oppression  when  labor  that  was  mean- 
ingful to  its  workers  was  in  jeopardy.  To  the  extent  that  they 
could  still  identify  with  the  purposes  and  values  of  a  hierarchy, 
even  though  it  allowed  them  few  choices,  work  that  seemed 
justified  and  significant,  hence  art,  was  jx)ssible.  Sometimes 
their  only  freedom  lay  in  developing  their  skills  for  the  benefit 
of  elites,  which  on  occasion  rewarded  individual  virtuosity  but 
restricted  the  expression  of  craftsmen's  ideas  and  needs. 

6.  O'Toole,  et  al..  Work  in  America,  pp.  11,  29  ff.,  76  ff. 

7.  Ibid.,  pp.  4  ff.,  12  f. 

8.  Citywide  Murals  brochure. 

9.  SPARC  brochure. 

10.  Commonarts  announcements,  Winter-Spring  1978. 

1 1 .  Rivera  and  Siqueiros  spoke  of  themselves  as  master 
craftsmen,  skilled  manual  workers  or  technicians  in  the  early 
twenties  when  they  worked  with  teams  of  assistants,  organized 
an  artists'  union  and  sought  to  bargain  collectively  with  their 
employers,  asking  no  more  than  the  wages  of  master  masons. 
Cf.  Jean  Chariot,  The  Mexican  Mural  Renaissance  (New  Haven: 
Yale,  1967),  p.  242  ff  Also,  Brenner,  p.  247. 

12.  "Murals  as  People's  /^n"  Liberation,  September  1971, 
p.  47. 

13.  Art  as  Experience  (New  York:  Capricorn,  1958),  p.  26. 


14.  Address  at  College  Art  Associaton  Conference, 
Chicago,  1976. 

15.  Cf.  John  Berger's  comments  on  the  new  conventions 
adopted  by  "primitive  artists"  like  Ralph  Fasanella  in  "Primi- 
tive Experience,"  5'ew»  Days,  March  14,  1977,  p.  50  f. 

16.  "The  Nature  of  the  Gothic,"  The  Stones  of  Venice,  vol.  2, 
1853,  reprinted  in  The  Art  Criticism  of  John  Ruskin,  ed.  Robert 
L.  Herbert  (New  York:  Doubleday  Anchor,  1964),  p.  100. 

17.  There  had  been  scholarship  accumulating  for  more  than 
twenty  years  that  explored  the  relations  between  ancient 
Egyptian  civilization  and  the  Black  peoples  of  Nubia  in  the 
area  of  the  upper  cataracts  of  the  Nile.  The  leading  scholar 
whom  Black  muralists  have  directly  or  indirectly  depended  on 
was  Cheikh  Anta  Diop,  a  Senegalese  historian,  radiologist,  and 
philosopher,  who  at  the  World  Festival  of  the  Arts  in  Dakar  in 
1966  received  an  award  as  one  of  the  two  writers  of  the  century 
who  had  most  influenced  the  thought  of  Black  people.  (The 
African  Origin  of  Civilization,  New  York:  Lawrence  Hill,  1974, 
condenses  and  translates  two  earlier  works  of  Diop,  Les  Nations 
Negres  et  Culture,  1955,  and  I'Anteriorite  des  Civilizations  Negres, 
1967.  Cf.  also  Chancellor  Williams,  The  Destruction  of  Black 
Civilization,  Chicago:  Third  World  Press,  1974.)  In  his  studies 
Diop  brought  together  a  wide  variety  of  linguistic,  documen- 
tary and  anthropological  data  as  well  as  evidence  from  the  arts 
to  show  that  the  civilization  of  the  Pharaohs  was  a  Black 
culture.  He  was  led  by  his  research  to  conclude  that  after  the 
Sahara  dried  up  by  7000  B.C.,  its  Black  peoples  migrated  to  the 
upper  Nile  valley.  In  this  area,  still  called  Nubia  and  now  in 
the  Republic  of  the  Sudan,  they  developed  a  civilization 
which,  he  held,  they  carried  northward  into  Egypt  and  south 
and  westward  into  so-called  Black  Africa.  The  evidence  of 
Egyptian  sculpture  and  painting  that  he  assembled  is  striking. 
Because   Diop  was  convinced  that  ancient  Egyptians   were 


Aesthetics  and  Style  I  407 
Blacks  and  that  they  made  the  original  contribution  tow  ard  the 
civilizing  of  the  White  northerners,  he  believed  it  was  a  Black 
culture  that  was  the  source  of  what  is  meant  by  Western 
civilization.  This  line  of  thinking  had  its  effect  on  Malcolm  X, 
who  also  was  impressed  by  Louis  Leakey's  discoveries  of 
human,  perhaps  Negroid,  remains  dating  back  well  over  a 
million  years  in  East  Africa.  Malcolm  taught  that  the  Black 
was  the  original  race,  that  Black  civilization  preceded  White, 
and  that  the  Egyptians  were  a  Black  culture.  All  of  this  is  of 
course  conjectural  and  will  not  be  settled  until  much  more 
evidence  is  unearthed  and  evaluated.  But  the  impact  of  such 
theories  on  Black  people  today  is  understandable,  and  it  pro- 
vides a  source  of  inspiration  for  their  art. 

Malcolm's  original  stimulus  was  clearly  spurious — the  so- 
called  "Yacub's  History"  that  W.D.  Fard  communicated  to 
Elijah  .Muhammad  in  1931  and  which  became  doctrine  for  the 
Black  .Muslims.  It  held  further  that  the  White  race  was  bred 
from  the  Black  to  create  a  hell  of  devils  on  earth.  {Autobiography 
of  Malcolm  X,  pp.  162-168,  and  207)  This  teaching  Malcolm 
later  found  was  rejected  by  eastern  Islam.  (Ibid.,  p.  168) 

18.  Artists''  Statements,  from  muralists'  exhibit,  .Museum  of 
ContemfKjrary  Art,  Chicago,  1971,  reprinted  by  PAW,  p.  3. 

19.  "Forty-Seventh  and  Calumet — The  W'all  of  Day- 
dreaming and  .Man's  Inhumanity  to  .Man,"  rejjort  to  C.MG, 
1975. 

20.  Shifra  M.  Goldman,  "Siqueiros  and  Three  Early  Mu- 
rals in  Los  \ngG\ts,"  Art  Journal,  Summer  1974,  p.  324. 

21.  At  a  .Mexico  City  automobile  plant  and  later  at  the 
National  University  and  the  Polyforum. 

22.  C.MG,  "North  Side  Report,"  1975,  p.  5. 

23.  Jose  Clemente  Orozco,  An  Autobiography  (Austin:  Uni- 
versity of  Texas,  1962),  p.  107  ff. 

24.  Shapiro,  p.  23  f. 


8 


ORGANIZATION,  FUNDING, 
AND  CONTROL 


ORGANIZATION 


Community  muralists  have  organized  themselves  or 
have  become  attached  to  institutions  and  pubHc  agencies 
to  faciHtate  commissions,  provide  each  other  with  mutual 
support,  and  frequently  to  paint  together.  This  runs 
counter  to  the  competitiveness  of  mainstream  art  and  the 
urgency  of  the  avant-garde  painter  to  create  something 
new  and  uniquely  his  own.  It  is  against  the  current  of  art 
since  the  Renaissance,  when  painters,  trying  to  free 
themselves  from  the  restraints  of  medieval  guilds,  along 
with  the  new  entrepreneurs  helped  create  the  ideology  of 
modern  individualism.  But  over  the  centuries  their  new 
freedom  made  them  subject  to  the  often  arbitrary  patron- 
age of  the  rich  and  powerful,  an  official  academicism,  or 
an  impersonal  art  market.  There  was  also  the  threat  of 
being  absorbed  into  the  industrial  system  as  commercial 
artists  or  nondescript  workers  like  other  craftsmen  who 
had  had  to  hire  themselves  out  as  wageearners  and  lost 
both  their  skills  and  independence.  In  response,  painters 
cultivated  an  idea  of  lonely  genius,  each  creating  out  of 
his  own  insides,  unattached  to  other  artists,  society,  or 
tradition.  The  failure  of  artists  to  organize  when  indus- 
trial workers  were  forming  unions  arises  from  their  being 
self-employed  and  the  solitariness  of  their  work — a  single 
painter  doing  a  portrait,  landscape,  or  still  life  for  largely 
private  clients.  But  for  purposes  of  training  and  execut- 
ing large  public  commissions,  the  old  master-apprentice 
model  of  the  craftsman's  workshop  still  hung  on. 

Artists  began  to  organize  as  peers  when  a  new  kind  of 
commissioning  occurred,  and  they  brought  to  it  a  new 


conception  of  collective  work.  The  first  example  of  this 
that  bears  on  the  community  muralists  was  the  invitation 
by  the  Mexican  government  in  1921  to  artists  to  project 
on  public  buildings  the  meaning  of  the  recently  con- 
cluded popular  revolution.  The  painters,  particularly 
Rivera  and  Siqueiros,  came  to  the  project  with  an  idea  of 
cooperative  and  democratic  art  that  was  connected  with 
their  socialism  and  that  they  believed  had  roots  in  the 
traditional  modes  of  work  in  the  Mexican  village.'  They 
organized  a  Syndicate  of  Technical  -Workers,  Painters, 
and  Sculptors  and  work  groups  for  particular  mural 
projects  usually  headed  by  a  master  artist.  When  they 
came  to  the  United  States  during  the  thirties  to  paint, 
they  invited  painters  here  to  work  with  them,  and  this  as 
well  as  the  .Mexican  government's  projects  provided  im- 
portant models  when  the  Roosevelt  administration  at- 
tempted to  come  to  the  aid  of  artists  who  had  been 
thrown  out  of  work  by  the  Depression.  Artists  were  seen 
as  an  important  national  resource  and  were  employed  in 
public  service,  particularly  in  doing  murals  for  post 
offices,  schools,  and  other  public  buildings  throughout 
the  country.  More  than  a  hundred  community  art  centers 
that  provided  training  and  exhibition  space  for  neighbor- 
hood people  were  created  by  the  Federal  Art  Project 
between  1935  and  1943.  Artists  organized  into  unions  to 
protect  their  employment  under  federal  programs;  they 
formed  professional  groups  to  support  socially  conscious 
art  and  political  action.  The  government  sponsorship  of 
art,  the  cooperative  projects  of  artists,  and  the  idea  of  a 
people's  art  that  motivated  many  during  the  thirties 
provided  models  for  what  was  to  happen  in  the  late 
sixties  and  seventies.  But  what  was  unique  about  the  new 
muralists  was  that  the  initiative  for  these  undertakings 


came  much  more  from  below — from  local,  unestab- 
lished,  frequently  young  painters  with  the  active  partici- 
pation of  the  communities  themselves.  While  both  in 
Mexico  and  in  the  United  States  during  the  thirties,  it 
was  high-placed  government  officials  and  recognized 
artists  who  had  led  the  way  to  public  art,  the  new 
community  murals  were  grass-roots  from  the  beginning. 
We  shall  return  to  their  precedents  later. 

The  new  muralists'  experience  of  discrimination 
against  ethnic  groups  and  the  poor  had  taught  them  that 
it  was  the  isolation  of  people  in  mass  society  that  left 
them  exposed  and  powerless.  The  organizing  that  their 
murals  called  for  to  meet  community  problems  was  also 
relevant  to  those  they  faced  in  doing  public  art.  Muralists 
were  quick  to  understand  that  some  kind  of  organization 
was  crucial  to  their  securing  commissions  and  funding 
and  that  they  needed  groups  of  colleagues  or  assistants  to 
do  large  public  works.  In  some  cases  they  turned  indi- 
vidually to  the  agencies  of  municipal  government,  to 
museums,  schools,  and  universities  for  an  organizational 
base.  Or  they  got  together  themselves,  to  form  storefront 
offices,  workshops,  and  resource  centers,  often  in  con- 
nection with  professionals  in  the  other  visual  and  per- 
forming arts  who  wanted  to  work  with  neighborhood 
people.  .Many  found  a  vehicle  in  the  public-service, 
nonprofit,  tax-exempt  corporation  through  which  they 
could  solicit  public  funding  and  tax-deductible  contribu- 
tions from  private  and  corporate  sources.  The  manner  in 
which  the  Wall  of  Respect  was  done  in  Chicago  in  1967  is 
broadly  symbolic  of  the  kind  of  organizing  behind  the 
murals  that  were  to  follow.  It  will  be  recalled  that  it  was 
artists,  photographers  and  poets  from  the  Organization 
of  Black  American  Culture  and  a  neighborhood  group, 
the  Forty-third  Street  Association,  that  were  responsible 
for  what  is  widely  recognized  as  the  first  work  of  the 
movement.  This  combination  of  local  professionals  and 
community  people,  who  were  to  continue  to  rework  the 
wall  and  extend  painting  to  nearby  buildings  for  four 
years,  anticipated  comparable  efforts  around  the  coun- 
try, which  organized  themselves  in  different  ways  but 
brought  together  these  two  essential  components — local 
artists  and  the  community.  What  follows  is  an  account  of 
representative  mural  operations  in  the  approximate  se- 
quence of  their  founding. 

Sacramento 

The  Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front  dates  from  1968  as  a 
muralists'  group  that  gradually  extended  its  activities  so 
that  in  1972  the  Centra  de  Artistas  Chicanos  was  organized 
as  a  nonprofit,  public  service  corporation.  It  came  to  offer 
over  two  hundred  classes  a  year,  not  only  in  the  visual 
arts  but  in  music  and  poetry  as  well,  and  it  became 
increasingly  involved  in  researching  and  performing  the 
rites  and  fiestas  of  modern  and  ancient  Mexico.  The 
RCAF  and  Centra  were  the  first  and  one  of  the  few 
community-arts  groups  to  use  a  public  college  or  univer- 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Contral  1 409 

sity  as  a  base  of  their  mural  work.  Esteban  Villa  and  Jo.sc 
.Montoya  depended  on  their  Sac  State  salaries,  and  the 
university  granted  credit  to  students  to  do  art  in  the 
community.  High  school  students  could  also  receive 
units  for  this  work.  The  Centra  combined  other  activities 
with  its  art  programs:  a  Breakfast  for  Nifios  program, 
and  a  Raza  Bookstore  and  a  membership  co-op  that 
provided  automotive  service,  both  of  which  became  self- 
sustaining. 

Some  twenty  members  in  1979  had  been  with  the 
RCAF  or  Centra  almost  from  the  beginning,  and  its 
director,  Ricardo  Favela,  had  served  in  that  post  for  five 
years.  At  its  height  its  staff  numbered  fifty,  about  half 
of  whom  held  CETA  salaries.  There  were  also  volun- 
teers. The  staff  met  weekly  to  oversee  its  affairs. 

As  of  1979  the  Centro  had  received  about  $10,000 
from  the  California  Arts  Council,  and  a  $36,000  commis- 
sion for  murals  on  the  municipal  parking,  garage  came 
from  the  Sacramento  Redevelopment  Agency  under  the 
city's  ordinance  that  required  that  2  percent  of  expendi- 
tures for  the  construction  of  public  buildings  be  set  aside 
for  the  arts.  (There  were  also  county  and  state  compo- 
nents in  this  sum.)  In  addition  the  Centra  had  received 
$5,000  from  the  NEA  in  1978  and  revenue-sharing 
money  in  earlier  years.  It  also  depended  on  in-kind 
contributions  of  materials,  and  some  of  its  resources 
derived  from  the  sale  of  publications,  posters,  and  calen- 
dars. .Montoya  says  that  they  would  like  to  become 
economically  self-sufficient  and  not  have  to  depend  on 
grants  and  foundations. 

Boston 

Boston  was  the  first  city  where  establishment  institu- 
tions created  a  lasting  vehicle  that  coordinated  the  paint- 
ing of  community  murals.  The  connections  among 
neighborhoods,  artists,  their  teenage  assistants,  and 
funds  were  made  by  the  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art 
and  "Summerthing,"  a  project  that  was  operated  by 
young  administrators  in  the  .Mayor's  Office  of  Cultural 
Affairs  in  City  Hall.  .Murals  under  this  centralized  man- 
agement came  about  as  a  result  of  a  1968  report,  "The 
City  as  a  Museum,"  prepared  by  Adele  Seronde,  a 
Boston  artist  and  daughter  of  a  prominent  Boston  family. 
She  argued  that  contemporary  art  had  grown  so  large 
that  museums  could  no  longer  contain  it: 

Painting  on  outsize  city  walls,  making  bas-reliefs  in 
proportion  to  the  size  or  the  city,  are  acts  equivalent  to 
marching  in  the  streets — a  shouting  art  in  color  and 
form,  "I  m  alive!  I  live  here  and  I  care!"  The  awaken- 
ing of  city  walls — whether  by  paint,  mosaic  or  relief, 
by  near  or  projected  light — is  simply  a  step  in  the 
multi-dimensional  process  of  transforming  the  visual 
environment.^ 

With  an  initial  grant  from  the  Massachusetts  Council  of 
the  Arts  and  Humanities,  the  Institute  and  Summerthing 


410  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

collaborated  in  sponsoring  over  eighty  murals  between 
1968  and  1974.  Summcrthing  was  more  than  a  murals 
program,  how  ever.  It  sponsored  workshops  in  the  other 
visual  arts,  photography,  film,  drama,  music,  and  dance, 
and  brought  to  the  neighborhoods  national  performing 
groups. 

At  the  beginning  of  its  mural  activities  Summerthing 
would  send  out  coordinators  to  visit  local  organizations 
and  schools  to  discuss  the  possibilities  of  a  work.  Within 
a  short  time  organizations  were  seeking  its  assistance. 
Artists  w  ere  secured  either  by  the  neighborhood  groups 
or  from  a  pool  of  Boston  artists  that  Summerthing  kept 
contact  with.  The  artist  then  met  with  the  local  group 
and  a  Summerthing  coordinator  and  worked  up  a  design 
that  had  to  be  approved  by  local  residents.  Sometimes 
the  community  selected  from  a  number  of  designs  of 
different  artists.  Young  assistants  often  came  from  city 
high  schools  or  were  recruited  by  the  neighborhood 
groups.  There  was  no  neighborhood  funding  by  the 
sponsoring  groups  or  local  merchants.  City  funds  were 
used  only  to  maintain  the  Summerthing  office  and  its 
staff.  All  materials  were  provided  by  Summerthing, 
which  as  of  1971  paid  an  average  of  $500  to  the  profes- 
sional artists  for  each  mural.  Funding  came  from  big 
business  and  state  and  federal  agencies  like  the  National 
Endowment  for  the  Arts,  which  made  its  first  grant  to 
Summerthing  murals  in  1970.  All  funds  passed  through 
the  Boston  Foundation,  a  nonprofit  corporation,  that 
served  as  conduit  to  Summerthing,  whose  budget  peaked 
in  1971  at  $425,000,  about  a  quarter  of  which  came  from 
private  donations.  Fhat  year  there  were  some  1,500 
separate  events  and  activities."* 

The  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art  directed  the  mural 
projects  from  1968  until  1971  under  the  sponsorship  of 
Summerthing,  which  began  coordinating  murals  in  1970 
and  took  over  completely  from  the  Institute  the  follow  ing 
year.  The  Institute  continued  to  assist  by  such  projects  as 
a  symposium  on  public  art  held  in  1974  which  brought 
muralists  from  around  the  country  together  for  their  first 
formal  meeting. 

What  distinguished  the  coordinating  of  mural  activity 
in  Boston  from  the  muralist  groups  and  workshops  of 
other  cities  was  that  it  was  operated  by  administrators, 
young,  interested,  and  liberal,  within  the  political  estab- 
lishment rather  than  by  muralists  who  took  time  away 
from  painting  to  handle  their  common  affairs.  The  Boston 
method  was  more  centralized  and  removed  from  the 
communities  which  were  completely  dependent  on  city 
hall  for  organizing  a  mural  project.  One  of  the  results  was 
that  when  the  early  Black  Power  murals  of  Chandler  and 
Rickson,  which  Summerthing  sponsored,  generated 
public  controversy,  its  administrative  staff  shied  away 
from  such  subjects  in  the  future.  It  was  able  to  do  this 
also  because  Black  militancy  had  faded  by  1971.  Thus,  at 
the  same  time  as  Summerthing  took  over  from  the  Insti- 
tute of  Contemporary  Art,  the  murals  of  Boston,  even 
those    in    neighborhoods,    became    increasingly    super- 


graphics.  As  early  as  1969  Dana  Chandler  and  Adele 
Seronde  talked  about  the  need  of  Boston  muralists  to 
organize,  but  as  of  1974  this  had  not  happened;  and  while 
a  few  socially  concerned  murals  continued  to  be  done, 
they  were  exceptions  to  the  decorative  work  that  now 
dominated.'' 

New  York 

Like  Summerthing,  the  principal  organization  that  has 
done  community  murals  in  New  York  began  as  a  project 
of  city  government,  but  it  was  much  closer  to  the  people 
it  served.  It  was  founded  in  1968  by  Susan  Shapiro-Kiok 
in  a  recreation  center  in  the  Lower  East  Side  and  oper- 
ated under  the  Department  of  Cultural  Affairs,  which 
was  a  branch  of  the  Parks,  Recreation,  and  Cultural 
Administration  of  the  city.  Its  initial  projects  were 
ceramic  tile  murals,  but  after  its  first  outdoor  wall  paint- 
ing that  showed  a  public  official  accepting  a  payoff 
created  controversy,  its  staff  began  seeking  greater  au- 
tonomy by  broadening  its  funding  base,  and  in  1972 
Cityarts  became  a  nonprofit  corporation  and  an  affiliate 
of  the  Cultural  Council  Foundation.  It  moved  into  a  loft 
where  it  planned  murals  and  maintained  a  resource 
center.  In  1976  it  moved  again,  this  time  to  the  ground 
floor  of  an  East  Village  tenement. 

By  1978  Cityarts  was  the  progenitor  of  over  thirty 
murals  in  Manhattan.  With  codirectors  Susan  Caruso- 
Green  and  Alan  Okada  during  the  mid-seventies,  it 
created  from  four  to  six  murals  each  summer.  Although 
most  of  its  work  was  in  the  slum  and  project  areas  at  the 
bottom  of  .Manhattan,  it  has  produced  a  mosaic  pavement 
in  Greenwich  Village,  a  mural  in  Hell's  Kitchen,  the 
serpentine  bench  around  Grant's  Tomb  Uptown,  and 
from  1976  works  in  Brooklyn,  Harlem,  and  Staten  Is- 
land. 

Cityarts  for  a  number  of  years  was  doing  the  largest 
community  murals  in  the  country,  some  of  them  over  six 
stories  high.  They  also  involved  the  participation  of  large 
numbers  of  teenagers  with  one  or  more  professionals. 
The  Cityarts  muralist  who  directed  a  project  took  re- 
sponsibility for  securing  commissions  and  building  a 
team.  The  young  people  were  usually  recruited  through 
local  neighborhood  organizations.*  The  high  school  stu- 
dents were  paid  by  the  city  and  federally  funded 
Neighborhood  Youth  Corps.  In  1974  wages  were  $2.25 
an  hour,  $35  for  a  four-day  week,  and  college  art  students 
were  paid  $3.50  an  hour  as  Urban  Corps  interns.  In 
addition  to  this  the  projected  budget  for  1974  was  over 
$83,000.  For  apart  from  the  salaries  of  the  assistants,  the 
cost  of  a  large  mural  ran  from  $2,300  to  over  $10,400. 
The  fee  for  the  project  director  of  each  work  was  about 
20  to  33  percent  of  the  total  cost;  materials  amounted  to 
33  percent  and  office  overhead  ran  to  about  20  percent. 
Insurance  and  scaffolding  consultant  accounted  for  the 
balance.  Since  1970  Cityarts  has  been  funded  by  a 
variety  of  public  and  corf>orate  grants  from  such  sources 


as  the  NEA,  the  New  York  State  Council  on  the  Arts, 
Exxon,  Morgan  Guaranty  Trust,  McGraw-Hill,  and 
the  Arts  and  Business  Council.  In  1976  Cityarts  hosted 
the  first  national  murals  conference. 

Chicago 

The  oldest  mural  center  in  Chicago  is  the  Community 
Mural  Project,  which  was  formed  by  William  Walker 
and  John  Weber  and  had  its  first  proposal  partially 
funded  in  1970.  This  has  remained  its  name  for  the 
purpose  of  grants,  but  it  also  became  an  artists'  collective 
which  first  called  itself  the  Chicago  Mural  .Movement 
Group  in  1972  and  later  shortened  this  to  the  Chicago 
Mural  Group. ^  Once  it  was  well  established,  there  were 
from  six  to  a  dozen  artists  of  different  racial  backgrounds 
who  were  active  at  any  one  time.  In  all  about  two  dozen 
muralists  have  worked  with  the  C.VIG  and  are  respon- 
sible with  their  local  assistants  for  some  one  hundred 
murals.  The  painters  met  regularly  to  discuss  the 
direction  of  their  art  and  maintained  a  workshop-office 
through  which  arrangements  were  made  for  new  work. 

Winters  were  as  busy  for  the  group  as  the  outdoor 
painting  season  from  June  to  October.  During  the  cold 
weather  CMG  did  indoor  murals,  coordinating  student 
pro)ects  at  high  schools,  colleges,  and  community  service 
agencies.  In  the  winter  of  1973/74,  for  instance,  it  guided 
thirty-eight  such  works.  It  also  staffed  a  course  in  mural 
painting  at  the  School  of  the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago. 

In  its  early  years  the  CMG  sought  to  open  up  new 
neighborhoods  in  Chicago  to  murals  and  did  work  that 
has  reached  beyond  the  city  limits  as  far  away  as  Joliet 
and  Elmhurst.  At  the  same  time  it  responded  to  the 
continuing  requests  of  the  communities  it  had  worked  in 
for  new  murals.  It  also  was  pledged  to  maintain  the 
paintings  it  had  done,  which  became  an  increasing  bur- 
den as  they  were  worn  by  weather,  pollution,  and  de- 
facement. By  1975  the  group  began  to  confine  its  ac- 
tivities to  the  areas  it  had  worked  in  but  helped  other 
groups  get  started  elsewhere.^  At  this  time  also,  feeling 
the  need  to  develop  the  quality  of  their  work  CMG  artists 
shifted  from  projects  with  teenagers  to  collaboration 
among  professionals  with  a  few  community  assistants. 

Over  the  years  the  group  has  selcted  its  director  and 
office  manager  from  its  number  and  distributed  admin- 
istrative duties  among  the  other  muralists.*  Each  painter 
was  responsible  for  making  arrangements  for  the  mural 
he  or  she  directed  and  for  writing  a  report  at  the  end 
which  was  submitted  to  the  group.  A  North  Side  and 
South  Side  project  director  were  selected  to  co-ordinate 
murals  in  those  areas.  During  the  early  years  the  group 
met  as  a  whole  once  a  month.  There  was  a  three-person 
steering  committee  and  later  an  advisory  board  made  up 
of  twelve  longtime  supporters  from  the  neighborhoods 
where  murals  had  been  done.  Before  the  CMG  became  a 
nonprofit  corporation,  it  had  a  local  funding  agency  to 
serve  as  conduit  for  the  public  and  private  grants  that 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  41 1 

came  to  it.  This  was  the  Community  Arts  Foundation, 
uhich  provided  similar  services  to  local  theatrical  and 
writing  projects.  In  1972  the  CMG  applied  for  tax- 
exempt  status  but  only  received  its  IRS  number  four 
years  later.  From  then  on  it  could  receive  funding  di- 
rectly. As  a  corporation  it  was  governed  by  a  nine- 
member  board  of  directors  that  in  the  late  seventies 
included  three  muralists,  an  accountant,  lawyer,  a  di- 
rector of  one  of  the  neighborhood  groups  with  u  hich  it 
worked,  and  the  owner  of  the  firm  that  supplied  its 
scaffolding.  The  largest  donor  has  been  the  National 
Endowment  for  the  Arts,  which  since  1970  provided 
consistent  annual  grants  that  in  the  mid-seventies 
amounted  to  $20,000  for  summer  murals,  and  a  like 
amount  in  1975-76  for  the  winter  workshop  program.** 
Smaller  yet  substantial  grants  came  from  the  Illinois  Art 
Council  and  private  foundations.  Ihe  foundation  money 
provided  salaries  to  its  artists,  v\  hich  ranged  from  $200  to 
$800  a  month  but  in  1975  were  stabilized  for  all  profes- 
sional artists  at  the  higher  figure  with  half  stipends  for 
apprentices.  About  half  of  the  Group's  annual  budget 
went  to  salaries.  Its  summer  budget  in  1975  was  $46,800 
and  its  winter  estimate  for  1975-76  was  $50,900.  The 
foundation  money  for  artists'  salaries  was  matched  by 
contributions  from  the  neighborhood  sponsoring  group 
and  local  merchants  where  a  mural  was  done,  to  cover  all 
other  expenses,  including  supplies,  scaffolding,  and  in- 
surance. The  sponsors  were  also  expected  to  mount  the 
dedication.  In  one  instance,  300  shares  in  a  mural  were 
sold  to  local  people.  Hence,  approximately  half  of  (>MG 
expenses  were  born  at  the  grass  roots,  v\  hich  the  group 
took  considerable  pride  in,  regarding  this  as  necessary  for 
neighborhoods  to  take  a  serious  interest  in  a  mural.  John 
Weber  has  said  that  Chicago  murals  in  general  "are 
unique  in  the  extent  to  which  they  have  been  paid  for  by 
the  local  community."'"  Ninety  of  the  150  done  in  the 
city  between  1967  and  1975,  he  estimated,  received  no 
government  funding.  Fewer  than  a  dozen  to  his  knowl- 
edge had  not  been  at  least  partially  paid  for  by  grass-roots 
money. 

But  in  1975  funding  from  Chicago  foundations  was 
down  and  the  number  of  murals  sharply  curtailed.  The 
grants  that  the  'Visual  Arts  Program  of  the  NEA  had 
provided  since  1970  came  to  an  end  in  1976,  and  since 
1977  CMG  muralists  have  not  qualified  for  CETA." 
Doing  seven  or  eight  major  murals  a  year  between  1972 
and  1976,  CMG  could  afford  only  three  in  1977,  and 
work  the  following  year  was  also  limited.  However,  the 
Illinois  Arts  Council  that  had  not  provided  funds  to 
CMG  since  1974  came  through  in  1978  and  1979,  and  the 
NEA's  Expansion  Arts  program  gave  $7,500  in  both 
years.  While  overall  funding  was  down,  the  CMG 
nevertheless  helped  host  the  Second  National  Murals 
Conference  in  1978. 

As  members  of  a  collective,  CMG  muralists  sought 
ways  to  grow  through  cooperative  decisions  and  work. 
They  trained  apprentices  and  brought  new  members  into 


412  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

the  group.  They  held  together  for  a  remarkably  long  time 
in  spite  of  tensions  that  inevitably  arose.  In  1975  and 
1976  there  was  a  considerable  turnover  of  personnel 
partly  because  some  were  leaving  Chicago,  but  also 
because  of  disagreements.  Between  1972  and  1976  the 
number  of  members  averaged  about  a  dozen.  Many  of 
the  veteran  muralists  stayed  after  1976  and  new  artists 
joined.  In  spite  of  the  funding  difficulties  of  the  suc- 
ceeding years,  the  group  had  nine  active  painters  in  1979, 
and  there  were  five  more  loosely  associated  with  it. 

Casa  Aztlan,  the  community  service  organization  in 
Chicago's  Pilsen  Barrio,  has  been  an  independent  center 
of  mural  activity  and  had  in  Ray  Patlan,  who  was  also  a 
CMC  member,  a  resident  professional  muralist  who 
usually  had  a  number  of  projects  going  at  any  one  time. 
The  teenagers  who  worked  with  Patlan  were  paid  in  1974 
$2.50  an  hour  for  about  twenty  hours  a  week  by  the 
federally  funded  Neighborhood  Youth  Corps.  One  day  a 
week  they  would  take  off  with  him  for  recreation — a  trip 
to  the  beach  was  especially  popular  during  Chicago 
summers.  When  the  teenagers  returned  to  high  school, 
Patlan  followed  them  to  teach  art  and  photography.  At 
the  same  time  he  directed  college  students  who  were 
getting  credit  to  do  on-location  work  on  the  murals  that 
were  spreading  through  the  rooms  of  Casa  Aztlan.  In 
1975  after  a  fire  and  financial  difficulties,  Casa  Aztlan 
changed  its  organizational  character  and  cut  back  on  its 
services. 

After  Patlan's  departure  in  1975  murals  were  to  con- 
tinue around  Casa  Aztlan,  particularly  under  the  direc- 
tion of  Aurelio  Diaz,  Salvador  Vega,  and  .Marcos  Raya. 
A  series  was  being  planned  as  part  of  the  building  design 
of  the  new  Benito  Juarez  High  School  by  .MARCH 
(.Movimiento  Artistico  Chicano),  and  the  high  school 
itself  was  designed  by  a  Mexican  architect,  Pedro 
Ramirez- Vasquez.'^  After  much  delay,  funding  for  the 
mural  was  provided  in  1979  by  the  NEA,  Catholic 
charities,  and  the  Board  of  Education.  MARCH  had 
been  organized  in  Indiana  in  1972,  later  moved  to 
Chicago,  and  in  1974  sponsored  the  Blue  Island  mural 
that  Patlan  worked  on  with  others  and  that  was  the 
subject  of  a  landmark  federal  court  decision.  At  the 
Chicago  Circle  campus  of  the  University  of  Illinois 
MARCH  mounted  two  Mexposicions,  which  included 
works  of  Rivera,  Orozco,  Tamayo,  and  younger  artists. 

Another  important  Chicago  mural  organization  has 
been  the  Public  Art  Workshop,  founded  in  1972  largely 
by  one  painter,  .Mark  Rogovin.  With  additional  artists, 
the  storefront  workshop  does  wall  painting  in  collabora- 
tion with  neighborhood  organizations  and  schools 
throughout  the  city.  PAW  members  have  also  directed 
murals  in  the  suburbs,  Joliet,  Rockford,  Indiana,  and 
Nebraska.  It  has  operated  after-school  classes  in  draw- 
ing, painting,  silk-screen  printing,  and  photography  and 
has  a  darkroom  with  five  enlargers  with  which  it  de- 


Public  Art  Workshop  with. Mark  Rogovin  in  ivtnaa 
Chicago.  I 


veloped  a  photo  program  for  children  with  hearing  im- 
pairments.*^ Most  workshop  participants  come  from 
within  a  two-block  area.  It  maintained  a  gallery  in  the 
neighborhood  public  library  for  three  years  that  had  to 
be  discontinued  when  funding  ran  out.  PAW  also  pro- 
duces props  for  street  theater,  banners  for  marches,  and 
portable  murals.  Having  created  works  for  demon-* 
strations  against  the  Vietnam  War  and  repression  in 
Chile  and  South  Africa,  in  1979  it  did  the  official  banner 
for  a  rally  of  three  thousand  against  an  Arms  Fair  at 
O'Hare  Airport,  where  U.S.  manufacturers  were 
exhibiting  their  wares  to  an  international  clientele.  But  it 
also  does  artwork  for  local  discos,  showers,  and  wed- 
dings. It  operates  the  country's  most  extensive  resource 
center  of  slides,  clippings,  and  books  concerned  with  the 
current  mural  movement  and  its  predecessors  in  the 
United  States  and  Mexico.  The  Mural  Manual,  the  best 
how-to-do-it  guide  on  the  subject,  was  produced  by 
PAW,  which  is  also  sponsoring  an  English  translation  of 
Siqueiros's  How  to  Paint  a  Mural. 


PAW  has  been  involved  with  local  organizations  and 
campaigns  that  dealt  with  housing,  but  it  has  stayed  clear 
of  the  Democratic  machine.  Rogovin  says  that  PAW 
seemed  to  be  on  call  twenty-four  hours  a  day  for  all  kinds 
of  services,  including  occasional  bail  money.  Barbara 
Russum  estimates  that  half  of  its  efforts  are  devoted  to 
the  immediate  two  blocks,  a  quarter  to  citywide  activities 
and  the  remainder  to  regional  and  national  concerns. 
PAW  has  had  annual  $10,000  grants  from  the  NEA  and 
assistance  also  from  the  Illinois  Arts  Council  with  some 
positions  funded  by  CETA,  which  it  finally  withdrew 
from  after  1978  because  it  had  meant  accepting  personnel 
the  city  sent  and  because  Chicago  schools  often  could  not 
come  up  with  matching  funds  for  materials  for  mural 
projects.  PAW,  which  has  a  policy  of  seeking  paint 
supplies  from  the  community  where  it  does  a  mural,  has 
been  supported  mainly  by  contributions  and  services  of 
Chicago  residents. 

There  have  been  also  neighborhood  arts  organizations 
in  Chicago  that  have  provided  a  base  for  muralists,  such 
as  the  Puerto  Rican  Art  Association  with  which  Mario 
Galan  worked  and  the  West  Town  Community  Youth 
Art  Center,  which  sponsored  the  thirty-two  Bicentennial 
murals  along  Hubbard  Street. 

Philadelphia 

Here  the  principal  office  coordinating  street  murals  has 
been  the  Department  of  Urban  Outreach,  later  called 
Community  Programs,  at  the  Philadelphia  Museum  of 
Art.  Headed  by  David  Katzive  when  it  began  doing 
murals  in  1971,  it  came  under  the  direction  of  Penrty 
Bach  in  1974  who  continued  to  supjxjrt  neighborhood 
wall  painting.  The  murals  were  done  under  an  Environ- 
mental Art  Program,  which  Clarence  Wood  and  Don 
Kaiser  have  guided  in  the  field.  They  and  other  artists 
responded  to  requests  from  schools,  recreation  centers, 
and  neighborhood  groups.  As  of  1979  about  one  hundred 
murals  had  been  directed  by  DUO  or  DCP  and  three 
times  as  many  had  received  their  advice.  The  museum 
provided  the  brushes,  paint,  scaffolding,  and  know-how; 
the  neighborhood  or  school,  the  manpower  who  were 
often  teenagers  salaried  by  the  Neighborhood  Youth 
Corps.  Kaiser  and  Wood  were  employed  on  a  twenty- 
hour  a  week  schedule  by  the  museum,  which  left  them  at 
least  half  of  their  working  hours  to  pursue  their  own  art. 
The  murals  were  supported  in  part  by  the  NEA  between 
1971  and  1976,  and  afterwards  entirely  by  the  Philadel- 
phia Museum  Corporation,  which  has  broad  fund-raising 
capabilities. 

Baltimore 

Probably  the  first  murals  of  the  new  movement  to  be 
done  in  Baltimore  were  Robert  Hieronimus's  in  1968  and 
1969  at  Johns  Hopkins  University,  where  he  was  again 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  41 3 

painting  in  the  student  union  chapel  in  1974.  His  Bicen- 
tennial mural  was  one  of  the  works  done  in  the  neighbor- 
hoods also  in  that  year  under  the  auspices  of  the  city's 
Department  of  Housing  and  Community  Development 
with  funds  from  the  NEA.  An  open  competition  had 
been  announced  and  two  hundred  designs  were  submit- 
ted by  eighty-five  artists  to  a  panel  composed  of  the 
curator  of  the  Baltimore  Museum  of  Art,  a  state  college 
professor,  a  corporate  representative,  and  members  of 
the  HCD  and  mayor's  staffs.  Ten  designs  were  selected 
and  each  of  the  artists  received  $1,000  to  execute  them. 
Scaffolding,  paint,  and  brushes  were  donated  by  local 
paint  companies.'*  Although  neighborhoods  elsewhere 
have  chosen  among  the  design  proposals  of  different 
artists,  a  municipal  competition  is  not  a  common  way  of 
funding  the  murals  of  the  current  movement.  In  1975  the 
city  went  over  to  a  method  more  like  Boston's  when  it 
used  CETA  manpower  training  funds  to  support  local 
artists  who  were  recruited  by  the  Mayor's  Advisory 
Committee  on  Arts  and  Culture  to  do  ten  murals  in  a 
program  called  "Beautiful  Walls  for  Baltimore."'*  Under 
this  sixty  murals  had  been  done  by  1978.  Each  had  to 
meet  the  approval  of  a  neighborhood  group  or  residents 
reached  through  canvassing,  and  screening  by  a  profes- 
sional panel  was  also  required.'*  Early  guidelines  warned 
against  making  political,  social  or  moral  statements,  and 
muralists  therefore  had  to  tread  carefully. 

Hieronimus's  attractive  painting  and  serious  writing 
on  the  hermetic  symbolism  that  absorbed  a  number  of 
founding  fathers,  especially  Jefferson,  earned  him  the 
respect  of  the  conservative  establishment  of  Baltimore, 
including  the  mayor,  who  appointed  him  to  head  the  art 
committee  of  the  city's  Bicentennial  Commission.  He  is 
also  the  founding  director  of  the  Aquarian  University  of 
Maryland  (AUM,  the  primal  sound  of  occult  lore.)  His 
state-accredited  school  attempts  to  integrate  the  esoteric 
and  exoteric  sciences  and  includes  a  course  on  murals. 
Hieronimus  has  a  talent  for  winning  the  c(X)peration  of 
the  establishment  while  he  lives  and  works  within  the 
counterculture. 

San  Francisco 

The  principal  center  where  arrangements  were  made 
for  most  of  the  Latino  murals  in  San  Francisco  was  the 
Galena  de  la  Raza,  which  was  founded  by  Rene  Yaiiez 
and  Rolando  Castellon  in  1969.  In  1971  Yaiiez  was  able 
to  secure  $3,000  from  the  STEP  employment  program  to 
form  a  team  of  artists,  and  one  of  their  projects  was  the 
first  community  mural  in  the  Mission  District — the  one 
done  for  Horizons  Unlimited.  From  then  on  Yafiez,  a 
codirector  of  the  Galeria,  played  the  central  role  in 
bringing  together  the  Mission  muralists,  the  funding 
sources,  and  the  walls;  he  advised  the  artists  on  their 
designs  and  surveyed  neighborhood  response.  Mural 
funding  and  supplies  came  in  part  from  the  Neighbor- 
hood Arts  Program,  a  city  agency  that  helps  not  only 


414  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


resident  visual  artists  but  also  local  drama,  music,  and 
poetry.  But  there  have  been  few  administrators  of  the 
NAP  or  the  city  art  commission,  which  is  its  parent 
group,  who  have  had  sufficient  appreciation  of  the  needs 
of  the  muralists,  Yanez  says.  Funds  were  difficult  to 
raise.  Other  sources  have  been  the  Model  Cities  Organi- 
zation, the  Mission  Coalition  (an  amalgam  of  over  two 
hundred  local  groups),  the  Public  Housing  Authority 
and  the  Bank  of  America,  which  funded  the  large  mural 
in  a  local  branch.  The  Galeria  has  also  received  grants 
from  the  NEA.  One  of  the  difficulties  in  getting  funding 
for  murals,  Yanez  says,  is  the  limited  number  of  grants 
and  competition  with  other  San  Francisco  groups.  Yaiiez 
was  able  to  do  something  about  this  by  helping  to 
develop  CETA  funding  for  murals  and  community  arts 
in  general  that  the  Galeria  and  other  workshops  around 
the  country  were  to  use  widely  from  1975  on. 

The  Galeria,  a  storefront  art  center,  is  an  authentic 
people's  institution  and  has  been  involved  with  much 
more  than  murals.  By  1976  it  had  a  membership  of  sixty 
mostly  Latino  artists,  fifteen  or  twenty  of  whom  met 
every  month  or  two  to  set  policy  and  decide  on  exhibi- 
tions of  Raza  art  from  the  United  States  and  Latin 
America.  Among  them  were  Las  Mujeres  Muralistas, 
Mike  Rios,  Anthony  Machado,  Jesus  Campusano,  and 
Jerry  Concha.  Yanez  says  they  try  to  reach  every  group 
in  the  Mission.  There  have  been  exhibitions  of  local 
children's  art  and  graphics  of  San  Francisco  artists,  the 
prints  of  Jose  Posada  and  Leopoldo  Mendez  from  Mexi- 
can collections,  santos  from  New  Mexico,  and  yarn 
"paintings"  of  Huicholes  indios.  One  show  that  had  par- 
ticular appeal  to  the  elderly  explored  the  similarities  of 


Galeria  de  la  Raza,  San  Francisco.  The  art  in  the  windows 
supports  the  saving  of  the  International  Hotel  for  the 
elderly. 

old  family  photos  and  veWgious  santos  paintings.  Different 
kinds  of  bread  and  pastry  have  also  been  displayed  to 
demonstrate  the  art  in  everyday  life.  Ordinarily  the 
Galeria  does  not  try  to  sell  the  art  it  exhibits,  except  for 
printed  T-shirts  and  calendars.  Children  on  the  way 
home  from  school,  housewives  in  the  course  of  their 
shopping,  and  families  after  churcK  drop  in  and  feel 
comfortable  in  their  gallery.  Galeria  artists  do  workshops 
in  neighborhood  schools.  Yanez  in  1975  was  arranging 
for  silk-screen  artists  to  do  prints  to  be  exhibited  in  San 
Francisco  buses  and  streetcars  in  the  spaces  formerly 
reserved  only  for  ads  but  now  provided  without  charge 
by  the  Public  Utilities  Commission.  In  1976  the  Galeria 
began  a  color-Xerox  service  as  a  source  of  income  and  a 
serious  art  form. 

In  1974  and  1978  there  were  also  exhibits  of  the 
preparatory  drawings  for  local  murals.  But  as  we  have 
seen,  the  Galeria  withdrew  from  sponsoring  murals  early 
in  1976  because  Yanez  and  the  staff  believed  that  wall 
paintings  had  served  their  purpose  and  were  no  longer 
coming  to  grips  with  community  issues  in  the  Mission. 
The  Galeria,  however,  still  supervised  the  frequently 
changing  billboard  mural  outside  and  in  1978  was  spon- 
soring smaller  works  on  storefronts  as  well  as  the  renova- 
tion of  the  big  murals  it  had  been  responsible  for  years 
before.  Yanez  said  in  1978  that  the  Galeria  would  not  get 
involved  in  any  future  murals  unless  the  artist  agreed  to 
maintain  them  and  funds  were  assured  for  this. 

The  Kearny  Street  Workshop  began  as  a  storefront  in 


larny  Street  Workshop  and  James  Dong's  mural,  de- 
itlished  with  International  Hotel,  1979. 


the  International  Hotel,  the  home  for  over  a  hundred 
elderly  Asian-Americans  in  the  one-block-long  Man- 
ilatown,  focus  of  San  Francisco's  Filipino  community  on 
the  edge  of  Chinatown.  The  workshop  was  organized  in 
1971  by  students  who  had  been  in  the  San  Francisco 
State  College  strike  of  two  years  earlier  and  maintained 
contact  through  the  court  trials  that  followed  it  and 
participated  in  the  new  Ethnic  Studies  program  on  cam- 
pus. Jim  Dong  and  Michael  Chin  directed  the  work- 
shop's activities  which  included  instruction  in  graphics, 
photography,  ceramics,  poetry,  and  the  performing  arts. 
The  quality  of  its  work  was  exceptionally  high  and  it  was 
for  sale.  There  were  also  classes  for  children.  Dong 
describes  how  neighborhood  people  would  wander  in 
from  the  street  and  praise  or  criticize  the  work  of  the 
young  artists.  As  we  have  seen,  the  workshop  played  a 
major  role  in  trying  to  save  the  hotel  by  its  murals.  It 
produced  two  additional  ones,  one  for  a  local  elementary 
school.  Over  the  doorway  a  small  mural  offered  a  view  of 
passersby  from  above,  recalling  Chinese  and  Japanese 
perspective. 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  41 5 

The  workshop  began  under  the  auspices  of  the 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program  and  $2,000  from  the  XEA. 
Later  a  grant  of  $17,000  from  the  Endowment  made 
possible  the  expansion  of  facilities,  but  money  was 
mostly  eaten  up  by  rent  in  the  overcrowded  area  on  the 
edge  of  the  financial  district.  Little  was  available  for 
salaries.'^  When  the  tenants  of  the  hotel  were  evicted  in 
1977,  the  workshop  was  also  turned  out.  It  could  not 
afford  rent  anywhere  in  the  community  it  had  served  and 
had  to  take  more  cramped  quarters  about  a  mile  away 
outside  of  Chinatown.  While  some  new  mural  com- 
missions were  in  the  offing  in  1978,  it  was  very  difficult 
for  the  workshop  to  pick  up  the  pieces  and  restore  contact 
with  the  community. 

The  Haight  Ashbury  Muralists  were  a  half-dozen  local 
White  artists  associated  with  an  umbrella  neighborhood 
arts  organization — the  Haight  Ashbury  Workshop.  They 
were  more  outspokenly  radical  in  their  painting  and 
pronouncements  than  other  mural  groups,  which  made  it 
difficult  for  them  to  get  funding.  They  defined  them- 
selves as  "anti-imperialist  cultural  workers,  part  of  the 
international  class  struggle  for  Socialism."  They  uent  on 
to  say  that 

We  want  our  murals  to  join  and  support  the  demands 
of  the  many  cultures  for  self-determination  and  libera- 
tion. The  joy,  power,  and  energy  of  people's  cultures 
is  the  life-blooa  of  this  struggle. 

They  took  an  active  role  in  the  community  arts  move- 
ment in  the  Haight,  campaigning  with  thirty  other 
groups  for  over  five  years  for  the  conversion  of  a  local 
movie  house  into  a  cultural  center.  It  was  in  the  midst  of 
that  struggle  that  they  found  each  other  and  did  their  first 
work,  Rainbow  People,  on  a  storefront  to  decorate  the  line 
of  march  of  a  peace  demonstration  in  1972.  This  and 
other  early  works  had  to  be  paid  for  largely  out  of  their 
own  pockets.  Support  then  began  to  come  from  the  San 
Francisco  Neighborhood  Arts  Program  and  the  dona- 
tions of  local  merchants. 

In  1974  the  Haight  Ashbury  Muralists  helped  secure 
$10,000  in  federal  revenue  sharing  funds  for  the 
neighborhood,  and  the  group  was  selected  by  local  resi- 
dents to  coordinate  the  doing  of  murals  there.  After 
fending  off  efforts  of  real  estate  speculators  and  landlords 
to  have  the  money  deferred  to  the  painting  of  red,  white, 
and  blue  street  signs,  the  group  had  to  watch  the  money 
assigned  to  the  city  Art  Commission,  where  it  remained 
tied  up  for  months.'*  Finally  they  argued  their  case 
before  the  San  Francisco  Board  of  Supervisors  and  re- 
ceived funding  to  do  two  murals,  one  of  them,  the  three 
hundred-foot-long  Our  History  Is'No  Mystery,  on  a  retain- 
ing wall  along  the  yard  of  a  branch  of  the  city's  commu- 
nity college.  Although  the  imagery  contained  heavy 
political  material,  it  won  the  design  competition  for  the 
site  and  was  approved  by  the  community  college  board. 
Because  of  the  difficulty  in  securing  funds,  members  had 


416  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

to  take  outside  jobs  and  could  only  work  on  murals 
part-time.  In  1978  they  were  no  longer  working  as  a 
group,  but  two  of  their  number,  Miranda  Bergman  and 
Arch  Williams,  were  painting  as  CETA  muralists  at  the 
city  jail. 

The  most  recently  formed  community-based  group  in 
San  Francisco  was  the  Precita  Eyes  Muralists,  which  was 
organized  in  1978  by  Susan  Cervantes,  Judy  Jamerson, 
Tony  Parrinello,  and  others  who  had  painted  together 
before.  Their  first  major  work  as  a  new  group  was  the 
facade  for  China  Books  in  the  Mission  District.  By  the 
following  year  some  sixteen  to  twenty  people  from  dif- 
ferent ethnic  backgrounds  who  lived  in  the  Mission, 
people  with  varied  degrees  of  art  training  or  none  at  all, 
were  meeting  once  a  week  at  their  studio  in  the  .Mission 
Cultural  Center  to  discuss  arrangements  for  murals, 
work  on  portable  panels,  and  teach  one  another.  They 
also  came  to  develop  designs  and  paint  individually  as 
time  permitted  during  the  week  and  weekends.  Besides 
pursuing  temporary  exhibition  space  for  the  portable 
pieces  at  libraries,  schools,  and  other  institutions,  they 
were  seeking  outdoor  commissions  at  public  housing 
projects  and  the  Garfield  Park  pool.  Cervantes  provided 
strong  leadership,  and  while  much  of  their  painting  was 
volunteer,  she  was  salaried  as  a  CETA  artist  until  Sep- 
tember 1979.  She  had  studied  artists'  law  for  two  years 
and  was  seeking  to  establish  precedents  for  the  protection 
of  muralists   by  contracts.   Among  the  issues   were   a 


guarantee  of  the  maintenance  of  works  by  their  sponsors 
and  the  need  for  advance  warning  when  there  was  an 
intention  to  remove  them,  which  would  give  muralists  a 
chance  to  respond.  The  idea  of  an  ongoing  organization 
in  which  nonprofessional  artists  played  a  large  role  was 
not  typical  of  mural  groups,  which  usually  recruited  the 
untrained  for  separate  projects  and  sometimes  provided 
for  a  few  apprentices.  Precita  Eyes  was  introducing  new 
opportunities  to  community  people,  and  its  work  with 
portable  murals  was  particularly  adapted  to  its  purposes. 

San  Diego 

When  Chicano  artists  and  community  people  occupied 
the  area  beneath  the  Coronado  Bridge  in  1970,  they  also 
took  over  the  city-owned  Ford  exhibition  hall  in  Balboa 
Park  and  created  an  art  center  there.  The  city  tried  to 
force  them  out  and  finally  provided  an  abandoned  water 
tank  also  in  the  park  and  funds  to  help  renovate  it.  Some 
forty  artists,  who  called  themselves  Los  Toltecas  en 
Aztlan,  transformed  it  into  El  Centro  Cultural  de  la  Raza 
with  workshops  for  children  and  adults  in  mural  and 
easel  painting,  graphics,  weaving,  dance,  theater,  and 
music.  The  Centro  also  produces  its  own  publications 
and  mounts  fiestas  and  special  events.  During  the  seven- 
ties muralists  envelojped  the  outside  and  inside  of  the  tank 


Centro  Cultural  de  la  Raza  inside  the  old  water  tank  in 
Balboa  Park,  San  Diego. 


in  imagery.  Victor  Ochoa,  who  directed  El  Centro  from 
1972  to  1974  arranged  for  the  major  funding  of  the  first 
murals  at  Chicano  Park  in  1973  and  became  art  director 
there  in  1975  as  an  employee  of  both  the  city  and  the 
Chicano  Federation  of  San  Diego  County.  The  Federa- 
tion itself  brought  together  a  spectrum  of  service  agen- 
cies. The  Chicano  Park  Steering  Committee,  made  up  of 
Logan  Barrio  residents,  decided  on  all  mural  proposals, 
and  held  the  lease  on  the  neighborhood  center  beneath 
the  bridge  where  the  Federation  and  Ochoa  had  their 
offices.  The  bridge  murals  that  were  funded  at  the 
beginning  by  the  Centro,  a  local  labor  organization,  the 
artists  and  residents,  in  time  gained  support  from  the 
local  church,  the  NEA,  and  the  California  Arts  Council. 
Nearby  big  business.  National  Steel  and  Pacific  Gas  and 
Electric,  on  occasion  provided  scaffolding  and  hard  hats. 
The  park  itself  was  maintained  by  the  city,  and  the 
bridge  pylons  were  an  in-kind  contribution  of  the  state. 
Securing  financial  support  had  always  been  a  struggle, 
and  there  were  also  divisions  in  the  barrio  itself  that 
Salvador  Torres,  who  lived  there,  laid  to  Model  Cities, 
the  Chicano  Federation,  and  other  agencies  vying  to 
control  Chicano  Park.  Their  staffs  were  not  necessarily 
from  Logan,  and  local  people  had  begun  to  mistrust  them 
and  were  withdrawing  from  public  participation,  Torres 
said.  In  1979  Ochoa  resigned  and  the  Federation  moved 
out.  Torres  said  he  had  given  up  on  Chicano  Park  being 
able  to  secure  public  funding  for  its  murals  and  looked 
for  assistance  from  local  heavy  industry  as  well  as  small 
business  and  even  the  private  incomes  of  artists  who  in 
the  past  had  contributed  out  of  their  own  pockets.  With 
his  dream  of  extending  Chicano  Park  all  the  way  to  the 
bay,  he  looked  to  cooperation  with  the  cannery  and 
shipyard  that  stood  between  the  already  painted  pylons 
and  the  shore.  Similar  hopes  of  local  cooperation  and 
self-sufficiency  had  been  entertained  by  muralists 
elsewhere,  but  the  possibilities  of  working  with  big 
industry  were  uncertain.  As  citizens  and  taxpayers,  local 
people  were  entitled  to  claim  government  funding  of 
cultural  services.  Torres  himself  hoped  that  the  State 
Coastal  Commission,  whose  function  was  to  preserve  and 
extend  public  access  to  the  shore,  would  assist  Logan 
Barrio  in  restoring  its  connection  with  San  Diego  Bay 
where  he  and  his  friends  had  swum  years  before. 

Los  Angeles 

As  of  1978  there  were  said  to  be  over  one  thousand 
murals  in  Los  Angeles,^"  more  than  half  in  its  Chicano 
barrios.  Most  of  these  were  done  with  the  help  of  a 
number  of  community  art  centers.  Goez  Gallery  was  one 
of  the  first,  opening  in  1969.  Its  intention  has  been  to 
provide  an  outlet  for  East  Los  Angeles  artists  who 
worked  in  all  media,  from  nail-head  reliefs  to  metal  scrap 
sculpture  to  easel  painting  and  graphics.  Its  craftsmen 
also  do  handmade  furniture  and  decorating.  Goez  in  1974 
served  three  hundred  local  artists,  some  working  on  the 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  I  '^Xl 

premises,  but  most  using  the  gallery  as  their  agent  and 
exhibitor.  By  1979  Goez  was  responsible  for  one 
hundred  and  fifty  local  murals,  and  the  Baroque  and 
illustrator's  styles  of  its  core  staff  of  Arenivar,  Botello, 
and  the  Gonzalez  brothers  had  a  large  influence  on  other 
East  Los  wall  painting. 

The  Mechicano  Art  Center  began  in  1969  in  Los 
Angeles'  "gallery  row"  as  a  showcase  for  local  Chicano 
artists.  When  it  ran  out  of  funds,  it  moved  to  East  Los 
and  became  a  community-based  artists'  collective  that 
maintained  exhibition  space  and  a  workshop  for  easel 
work,  graphics,  and  the  planning  of  murals.  Located  on  a 
street  corner,  it  displayed  murals  on  both  its  facades, 
while  other  wall  paintings  its  artists  have  directed  are  to 
be  seen  in  the  barrios,  particularly  at  the  Ramona  Gar- 
dens public  housing  project  where  it  was  responsible  for 
fifteen  murals  and  at  Echo  Park  where  it  did  twenty-five 
more  by  1977.  Mechicano  assisted  in  the  elaborate  art 
program  at  the  East  L.A.  Doctors'  Hospital  a  few  doors 
down  the  street.  The  workshop's  activities  were  financed 
by  the  NEA,  and  in  L977  the  collective  was  refunded, 
but  the  following  year  divisions  within  it  had  made  it 
inactive.^' 

In  1977  the  largest  organized  community  wall  art  pro- 
gram in  Los  Angeles  was  Citywide  Murals.  Judy  Baca, 
its  director  then,  recalls  that  it  took  her  five  years  of 
doing  murals  as  an  art  instructor  for  the  Department  of 
Recreation  and  Parks  and  a  year  of  lobbying  before  the 
city  agreed  to  provide  financial  support  in  1974  for  the 
program.  Typical  of  a  year's  work  at  Citywide  was 
1974-75,  during  which  it  completed  forty  murals  in 
different  neighborhoods  throughout  the  city,  working 
with  190  community  people. ^^  That  year's  budget  pro- 
posal.projected  fifteen  murals  by  locally  based  adolescent 
teams  under  the  direction  of  an  artist  from  the  neighbor- 
hood. As  we  have  seen,  their  designs  required  the  ap- 
proval of  community  residents.  Team  members  in  1974 
received  Neighborhood  Youth  Corps  wages  of  approxi- 
mately $2.22  an  hour  for  126  hours  on  an  approximately 
10-hour  a  week,  twelve- week  schedule.  .Murals  were 
done  both  during  the  summer  and  after  school  during  the 
rest  of  the  year.  The  artist-director  of  each  mural  re- 
ceived $50  for  his  initial  sketches  and  $345  when  the 
mural  was  completed.  In  addition,  twenty  elementary 
school  and  senior  citizen  murals  were  planned  for  which 
all  personnel  would  be  volunteer.  Finally  there  were 
projected  five  murals  done  entirely  by  professional  artists 
who  would  receive  $395  each.  The  full  year's  budget 
amounted  to  $102,000,  which  included  the  wages  for  the 
teenagers.  Salaries  for  the  director  and  two  additional 
staff  people  had  been  budgeted  for  $23,570,  but  it  was 
realized  during  the  first  year  that  more  staff  was  needed 
to  coordinate  so  large  a  program. 

Citywide  murals  developed  a  resource  center  at  its 
headquarters  inside  the  cavernous  Olympic  Swimming 


418  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Mechicano  Art  Center,  East  Los  Angeles.  Murals:  left:  A. 
Esparza,  1972;  right:  Leo  Linton,  1973. 

Mechicano  Art  Center.  Gallery  in  background  was  at 
front  of  workshop. 


Stadium  in  Exposition  Park.  It  secured  projectors  and  a 
slide  collection  documenting  local  murals,  those  done 
around  the  country,  and  the  history  of  art.  It  also  ac- 
quired a  van  and  nine  sets  of  scaffolding  to  permit 
simultaneous  projects.  By  the  spring  of  1976  it  appeared 
that  there  would  be  critical  cutbacks  in  further  funding 
by  Los  Angeles,  which  like  other  cities  was  suffering  a 
financial  crisis.  However,  officials  were  lobbied  and  in- 
undated by  letters  from  individuals  and  art  organizations 
on  behalf  of  Citywide,  and  its  budget  was  restored  for 
another  year.  The  city  funded  thirty  more  Citywide 
murals  during  the  1977-78  season,  but  that  was  the  end. 
Since  its  beginning  Citywide  had  done  one  hundred  and 
forty-five  murals,  employing  approximately  one  hundred 
artists  and  five  hundred  neighborhood  teenagers,  chil- 
dren, and  seniors,  reflecting  the  ethnic  diversity  of  Los 
Angeles.  Some  thirty  grass-roots  organizations  had  been 
worked  with.^^ 

In  1976  Citywide's  advisory  board  realized  that  it  was 
fighting  a  losing  battle  for  city  funding.  In  addition  it  had 
repeatedly  been  refused  support  by  the  NEA,  which 
Baca  believed  was  due  to  there  being  no  Chicanos  on  its 
staff.  The  board  decided  to  reorganize  as  a  nonprofit  tax 
exempt  corporation,  which  it  hoped  would  make  possible 
a  wider  range  of  public  and  private  funding.  It  also 
expanded  activities  beyond  murals  to  include  other  forms 
of  art  and  selected  as  its  name,  SPARC,  an  acronym  for 
Social  and  Public  Art  Resource  Center. 

Ten  artists  in  residence  were  supported  during  its  first 
year  by  CETA  funding,  California  Arts  Council  grants, 
and  other  sources.  There  were  $157,685  in  grants  and 


$51,450  in  donations.  Nevertheless,  Judy  Baca,  with 
eight  years  of  experience  in  directing  murals,  could  only 
take  a  $382  a  month  salary.  She  estimated  that  the  cost  in 
1978  of  a  typical  SPARC  or  Citywide  mural  of  400 
square  feet  that  took  about  nine  weeks  to  do  was  $5,710. 
This  broke  down  into  these  items: 


Artist  at  $10/ hour  for  200  hours 

10  young  assistants  at  $2.65 /hour  for  100 

hours  each 
Scaffolding  at  $140  per  month 
Sandblasting  wall  in  preparation 
Compressor  rental  (for  preparation  of  wall 

and  spraying  final  sealer) 
14  gallons  of  paint  at  $20  a  gallon 
Brushes 
Coating  finished  mural 


$2,000 

2,650 
300 
200 

80 
280 

50 
150 

$5,710 


In  time  experience  showed  that  the  ratio  of  five  youth  to 
an  artist  was  more  satisfactory,  with  artists  working  from 
35  to  40  hours  a  week  and  the  teenagers  25. 

Murals  frequently  were  larger  than  8  X  50  feet.  In 
1977  Pacific  Telephone  paid  $31,000  for  a  10,000- 
square-foot  mural  depicting  community  history  done  by 
Baca  and  three  assistants  in  nine  w  eeks  on  two  sides  of  its 
building  in  the  Highland  Park  section  of  Los  Angeles. 
However,  the  architectural  firm  that  contracted  the 
commission  took  10  percent  off  the  top.  SPARC'S  most 
ambitious  project  is  the  Tujunga  Wash  mural,  which  in 
its  first  season  extended  along  a  quarter  mile  of  the 
cement  channel  with  scenes  of  California  history  and 
when  completed  is  planned  to  be  a  full  mile.  Apart  from 
the  painting,  Tujunga  Wash  is  a  major  achievement  in 
coordinating  logistics  and  funding.  In  1976  this  included 
ten  artists,  five  historical  consultants,  food,  sanitary 
facilities,  paint  materials,  and  forty-seven  tons  of  sand  for 
sandbagging  to  keep  out  drainage.  The  painters  them- 
selves the  first  year  were  eighty  teenagers  u  ho  had  police 
records  and  they  were  paid  by  federal  juvenile  justice 
money  that  came  down  through  state  and  local  conduits 
to  Project  Heavy,  the  local  program.  The  total  cost  of 
paying  the  youth  $2.65  an  hour  was  $20,000.  Additional 
and  in-kind  assistance  came  from  the  Army  Corps  of 
Engineers,  the  L.A.  Flood  Control  District,  and  other 
groups.  The  cost  of  the  first  quarter  mile  was  $100,000. 
But  in  1977  the  project  could  not  continue  because  there 
was  no  funding.  In  1978  only  enough  money  was  raised 
to  support  thirty-six  young  people  to  go  on  with  it.  Judy 
Baca  believed  that  there  was  decided  racism  in  the  op- 
position to  the  work,  which  was  expressed  by  references 
to  it  as  "Tijuana  Wash."  Again  in  1979  lack  of  funds 
forced  postponement  to  the  follow  ing  year. 

SPARC  projects  also  included  working  with  local 
young  people  to  produce  murals  for  the  sides  of  munici- 
pal buses  and  an  outdoor  gallery  of  fifteen  portable 
murals  done  each  year  to  circulate  on  sites  along  freeways 
provided  by  Cal-Trans  (the  Department  of  Transporta- 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  419 

tion).  The  California  Arts  Council  had  agreed  to  help 
fund  this  but  canceled  its  grant  in  1978.  In  1977  SPARC 
mounted  an  NEA-funded  conference  of  artists  with 
business  people,  public  officials,  educators,  and  commu- 
nity representatives  to  examine  the  role  of  business  and 
government  in  supporting  public  art.  They  discussed 
how  in  the  face  of  a  tightening  economy  taxes  could  be 
justified  for  this,  how  legislation  could  help,  for  instance 
by  tax  incentives  to  business,  and  whether  a  significant 
number  of  people  could  be  given  employment  on  pub- 
licly funded  art  projects.  SPARC  described  its  aims  as 
the  incorporating  of  the  artist  in  the  community  and  the 
community  in  the  production  of  public  art.^*  It  v\as 
seeking  "to  encourage  the  development  of  the  artist  as 
community  organizer  and  spokesman."  It  proposed  set- 
ting up  a  program  of  scholarships  and  apprenticeships  to 
help  street  youth  receive  a  professional  education  in  the 
arts.  And  it  also  called  for  creating  a  meeting  place  v\  here 
Los  Angeles  artists  could  discuss  urban  problems  and 
solutions. 

In  the  fall  of  1977  SPARC  and  Citywide  moved  from 
their  oversized  quarters  in  the  Olympic  Swim  Stadium 
to  what  had  formerly  been  the  city  jail  of  Venice.  The 
offices  were  on  a  much  more  convenient  scale,  and  cells 
were  turned  into  storage  rooms.  The  staff  was  reminded 
by  their  new  premises  that  they  were  involved  in 
humanizing  their  society.  Moreover,  the  location  of  the 
new  Public  Art  Station  was  in  the  midst  of  the  minority 
neighborhoods  of  Venice,  where  Chicano  and  Black 
gangs  were  clashing.  The  artists  had  their  work  cut  out 
for  them. 

But  in  midsummer  of  1978  the  eleven  positions  in 
SPARC  that  were  funded  by  CETA  grants  were  in 
jeopardy,  as  were  other  neighborhood  arts  programs  in 
Los  Angeles.  Baca  believed  this  was  the  result  of  efforts 
of  the  establishment  California  Confederation  of  the 
Arts,  which  was  the  official  monitor  of  CETA  artists 
locally,  to  scuttle  community  arts  groups  like  SPARC. 
But  the  positions  v\  ere  maintained,  and  the  confederation 
had  by  1979  become  more  open  to  murals.  It  had  given 
up  its  oversight  role  of  CE  FA  artists  and  had  secured  a 
seat  on  the  state  Arts  Council. 

Also  as  of  1979  Citywide  Murals  still  existed  as  a 
municipal  agency  with  a  director  who  served  as  the 
executor  of  its  completed  murals,  but  it  was  not  doing 
new  works.  In  1979  SPARC  was  planning  an  Outdoor 
Gallery,  a  program  which  initially  sought  five  locations 
on  the  walls  of  local  businesses.  On  each  wall  brackets 
would  be  installed  that  would  permit  the  rotation  of  up  to 
five  portable  murals  a  year.  The  businesses,  w hich  would 
pay  a  fee  for  the  service,  could  thus  exhibit  a  variety  of 
works  annually.  While  the  lack  df  funds  forced  SPARC 
to  cut  back  to  only  three  murals  during  the  summer  of 
1979,  it  launched  its  PCP  van,  a  traveling  multimedia 
show  to  warn  youngsters  about  the  perils  of  "angel  dust." 

During  the  seventies  there  w  ere  other  mural  programs 


420  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

as 


Staff  of  SPARC  (Social  and  Public  Art  Resource  Center) 
at  their  Public  Art  Station,  the  old  city  jail,  Venice. 
(Photo  SPARC) 

in  Los  Angeles.  The  County  of  Los  Angeles  funded 
twenty  works  in  1973  and  1974  under  an  Inner  City 
Mural  Program  as  a  pilot  project  of  the  Cultural  Affairs 
Section  of  the  county's  Department  of  Parks  and  Recrea- 
tion. The  NEA  matched  the  county's  funding.  The 
works  ranged  from  a  graffiti  mural  by  Frank  Romero  to 
Kent  Twitchell's  Photo-Realist  Old  Woman  of  the  Freeway 
and  supergraphics.  The  state  granted  encroachment 
permits  for  murals  on  highway  retaining  walls, ramps, 
and  overpasses,  which  set  a  precedent  for  such  projects. 

The  Los  Angeles  Street  Graphics  Committee  operates 
out  of  the  Brockman  Gallery,  which  also  handles  avant- 
garde  easel  art  and  was  the  first  art  gallery  owned  by 
Black  people  in  the  city.  Street  Graphics  had  sponsored 
about  thirty  murals  and  public  works  of  sculpture  as  of 
1976.  Its  Wall  of  Visions,  a  series  of  panels,  some  of  them 
by  professionals,  was  coordinated  by  Alonso  Davis  on  a 
very  long  retaining  wall  along  Crenshaw  Boulevard. 
Street  Graphics  worked  with  the  help  of  Citywide  Mur- 
als, the  county  Parks  and  Recreation  Department,  the 
NEA,  and  CETA. 


There  were  other  groups  as  well  that  did  murals,  such 
as  Self-Help  Graphics  in  East  Los,  Saint  Elmo's  Village, 
and  EPIC  (Educational  Participation  in  Communities). 
And  nearby  in  Compton  was  the  Communicative  Arts 
Academy.  Roderick  Sykes,  the  principal  artist  at  Saint 
Elmo's,  said  in  1979  that  they  did  not  need  a  lot  of 
money.  They  had  operated  with  the  help  of  the  schools 
which  they  provided  workshops  for,  Expansion  Arts  and 
private  contributions,  most  notably  by  Herb  Alpert  of  A 
and  M  Records.  The  Communicative  Arts  Academy, 
which  had  also  received  Expansion  Arts  aid  and  was 
supported  by  membership  dues  of  the  local  people  it 
served,  went  under  in  1975,  partly  as  a  result  of  its 
building  being  demolished  by  urban  renewal.  Its  spirit 
survived  in  Compton  however  in  the  work  of  muralist 
and  poet  Elliot  Pinkney  and  the  Robeson  Players,  a  local 
dramatic  group. 

Berkeley 

Although  some  of  the  earliest  murals  of  the  current 
movement  were  done  in  Berkeley  and  Oakland,  the 
organizing  of  muralists  came  late  to  the  East  Bay.  The 
Song  of  Unity  on  the  facade  of  La  Peiia  was  among  the  first 
murals  sponsored  by  Commonarts,  a  nonprofit  commu- 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  I  42 1 


IIIIH  '  " 


"7!H 


Musical  performance  at  SPARC.  (Photo  SPARC) 


nity  cultural  group  that  was  organized  late  in  1977  to 
serve  the  low  and  moderate  income  areas  of  Berkeley. 
Muralists  Ray  Patlan,  Osha  Neumann,  and  O'Brien 
Thiele  helped  found  Commonarts.  It  soon  had  free 
workshops  going  not  only  in  murals  but  also  in  photog- 
raphy, playwriting,  circus  skills,  African  and  Latino 
dance  and  music,  African  hairbraiding,  folklore,  and 
storytelling,  as  well  as  classes  in  the  short  story  and  basic 
writing  skills.  It  had  already  achieved  collective  decision 
making  and  was  seeking  to  build  a  "common  political 
base"  among  its  staff  and  "to  inspire  the  commonartist  in 
each  of  us."^^  It  had  organized  as  a  nonprofit  corporation, 
and  Neumann  sat  on  its  board  of  directors.  Under  con- 
tract to  the  city  of  Berkeley  to  provide  an  artists-in-the- 
community  program,  Commonarts  had  twenty-five  staff 
members,  sixteen  of  whom  held  CETA  positions,  one 
and  one-half  of  which  were  for  muralists.  A  full-time 
position  in  1978  meant  a  salary  of  $750  a  month  with 
benefits.  Commonarts  also  received  funding  from  the 
California  Arts  Council  and  local  foundations,  but  it 
received  no  money  directly  from  the  city. 

Summary 

One  of  the  problems  that  directors  of  mural  workshops 
and  local  art  centers  complain  about  is  that  they  get 


trapped  by  administration  and  do  not  get  out  to  do  their 
art.  Mark  Rogovin  did  very  few  murals  during  the  time 
he  was  putting  together  the  Public  Art  Workshop.  He 
had  to  handle  phone  calls  and  correspondence  and  ar- 
range exhibits;  he  assembled  a  library,  slide  collection, 
and  file  of  reprints  for  distribution  to  people  interested  in 
community  arts.  At  the  same  time  he  was  also  working 
on  the  Mural  Manual.  Finally  PAW  was  able  to  afford 
staff  help,  partly  through  the  assistance  of  CETA. 

One  Saturday  in  1976  Judy  Baca,  looking  very  weary 
after  what  she  described  as  a  hard  week,  complained  that 
she  was  unable  to  find  anyone  willing  to  learn  and  stay  in 
staff  positions  at  the  Citywide  Murals  resource  center. 
She  wanted  to  be  freed  from  the  work  of  administering  as 
many  as  forty  murals  a  year  and  return  to  painting  with 
young  people.  She  told  of  receiving  a  tape  from  a  gang  to 
the  effect  of  "Hey,  Judy,  we  miss  you.  .  .  ." 

Rene  Yanez,  who  until  1976  coordinated  most  of  the 
Mission  District  murals,  said  that  what  the  Galeria 
needed  was  a  few  people  with  college  training  in  arts 
management  who  could  free  up  the  artists  who  did  the 
heavy  administrative  and  curatorial  work.  He  tried  to 
persuade  local  artists  to  take  arts  management  training, 
but  found  little  enthusiasm  for  it.  The  alternative  to 
artists  who  were  willing  to  work  part-time  at  administra- 
tion was  a  full-time  manager,  but  it  was  hard  to  find  a 
nonartist  in  the  barrio  who  was  interested  in  getting  the 
training  to  do  this  kind  of  work  in  a  neighborhood  center. 
While  a  mural  workshop  might  get  by  with  a  knowledge- 


422  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

able  secretary,  and  a  gallery  obviously  required  trained 
management,  it  was  also  important  that  the  artists  asso- 
ciated with  both  workshop  and  gallery  take  responsibility 
for  setting  policy  and  involve  themselves  in  the  direction 
of  their  own  center. 

The  organizations  and  programs  described  in  this  sur- 
vey illustrate  a  spectrum  of  operations  with  varying 
amounts  of  autonomy  for  the  collaboration  of  muralists 
and  neighborhoods.  The  basic  contrast  is  between  this 
collective  self-determination  as  against  dependence  on 
remote  authorities.  On  the  one  hand  there  is  the  resident 
muraiist  or  local  community-arts  group  that  is  responsi- 
ble to  the  neighborhood,  particularly  its  organizations. 
Then  there  is  the  muralists'  group  that  may  operate  in  a 
number  of  neighborhoods  but  has  an  ongoing  relation- 
ship with  each  of  them.  At  the  other  end  of  the  sf>ectrum 
are  the  individual  artists,  who  may  not  necessarily  reside 
in  the  neighborhoods  where  they  do  murals,  and  who  are 
put  in  touch  with  them  by  city  government  or  a  public 
institution,  which  also  arranges  for  funding  and  perhaps 
assistants.  Even  though  these  artists  often  have  to  receive 
approval  of  their  designs  from  local  people,  the  relation 
between  them  is  often  formal  and  temporary,  and  all 
parties  are  dependent  on  a  central  authority  that  often 
has  priorities  different  from  theirs.  The  Wall  of  Respect 
done  in  Chicago  in  1967  established  the  grassroots  pat- 
tern of  work  done  by  an  organization  of  artists  together 
with  a  local  group,  while  a  year  later  Summerthing  in 
Boston  was  the  first  of  the  centralized  institutional  pro- 
grams. The  Philadelphia  Museum  of  Fine  Arts  DUO/ 
DCP  program  and  Baltimore's  city  hall  approach  are 
further  examples.  Some  of  the  leaders  of  the  RCAF  and 
its  Centro  de  Artistas  Chicanos  were  faculty  at  Sac- 
ramento State  University  who  took  their  students  into 
the  community  as  part  of  accredited  course  work,  an 
arrangement  that  left  them  relatively  independent  of  the 
school's  administration.  New  York's  Cityarts  Workshop, 
which  began  as  an  agency  of  city  government,  had  a 
permanent  staff  of  muralists  and  its  own  offices,  which 
made  it  possible  for  the  group  to  go  independent  as  a 
nonprofit  corporation  in  order  to  free  itself  from  censor- 
ship. In  spite  of  its  being  a  municipal  agency  of  Los 
Angeles,  Citywide  Murals  insured  the  responsibility  of 
its  artists  to  their  neighborhoods  by  requiring  local  sig- 
natures endorsing  particular  designs.  And  because  it  was 
a  working  group,  it  was  able  to  go  its  own  way  and 
incorporate  when  its  funding  was  jeopardized.  From  a 
solely  structural  point  of  view,  the  greatest  degree  of 
self-determination  for  painter  and  community  coopera- 
tion would  seem  to  be  found  when  resident  artists  are 
attached  to  local  institutions  like  Casa  Aztldn  and 
Chicano  Park  or  organized  themselves  like  the  Galeria  de 
la  Raza,  the  Kearny  Street  or  Public  Art  Workshops, 
and  Mechicano  Art  Center.  But  this  did  not  in  fact  insure 
greater  responsiveness  to  local  needs  than  nonresident 
artists  or  muralists'  groups  like  the  Chicago  Mural  Group 
might  provide.  However,  the  social  muralists  in  general 


seem  to  agree  that  it  is  important  for  them  to  be  actively 
involved  in  some  kind  of  organization  whether  of  artists 
or  residents  that  is  closely  in  touch  with  local  needs. 
While  partial  fund  raising  locally  is  important  for  people 
to  have  a  stake  in  their  public  art,  as  the  Chicago  Mural 
Group  believes,  neighborhood  money  at  present  is  sim- 
ply insufficient,  and  local  people  have  a  legitimate  claim 
to  government  support.  Whatever  the  sources  of  fund- 
ing, it  is  important  for  local  people  to  have  control  over 
its  use. 

FUNDING 

While  many  muralists  saw  public  wall  art  as  a  means  of 
rescuing  painting  from  the  condition  of  commodities 
subject  to  the  speculative  art  market,  they  nevertheless 
were  concerned  about  receiving  proper  remuneration  and 
protecting  their  rights  in  their  work.  There  was  no 
contradiction  in  their  efforts  to  free  creativity  from  ex- 
change values  largely  dependent  on  manipulated  prestige 
and  restore  it  to  values  based  on  the  labor  they  put  into 
their  art  and  its  authentic  uses.  Murals  on  neighborhood 
walls,  the  artists  pointed  out,  were  not  for  sale.  They 
could  not  be  treated  as  investments.  If  local  people 
wanted  a  mural,  the  only  present  way  of  determining  the 
artists'  compensation  was  to  pay  them  the  same  as  other 
professionals  with  comparable  training  and  experience 
who  worked  in  the  market  economy.  But  community 
muralists,  no  matter  how  great  their  skill  or  reputation, 
could  not  command  such  fees  because  they  painted  for 
audiences  of  modest  private  means  and  little  power  over 
public  patronage.  The  muralists  found  themselves  in  a 
very  difficult  situation  because  their  living  costs  were 
determined  by  the  marketplace  and  their  incomes  had  no 
fixed  basis.  Often,  especially  at  the  beginning,  they 
simply  volunteered  their  services.  In  some  areas,  par- 
ticularly Chicago,  neighborhood  residents  and  merchants 
contributed  the  cost  of  materials;  sometimes  large  corpo- 
rations with  local  branches  supported  murals,  particu- 
larly when  they  were  on  their  premises.  But  all  of  this 
was  insufficient.  Public  money  was  necessary  to  carry 
the  largest  share  of  the  costs  of  public  murals.  Funding 
from  municipalities,  counties,  states,  and  the  federal 
government  took  murals  out  of  the  marketplace  and 
treated  them  as  part  of  society's  investment  in  its  culture. 
But  here  again  compensation  had  no  relation  to  the  skill 
and  time  muralists  put  into  their  work.  It  tended  toward 
the  subsistence  wages  paid  to  all  those  on  public  relief. 

iMuralists  were  concerned  also  about  remuneration  for 
the  commercial  reproduction  of  their  work  on  TV  and  in 
books.  Many  of  them  felt  that  artists  and  minority  people 
had  been  exploited  by  the  system  and  that  now  they 
would  learn  its  rules  and  not  allow  themselves  to  be 
ripped  off  any  longer.  They  copyrighted  their  walls, 
filing  slides  with  the  Library  of  Congress  and  inscribing  a 
©  on  their  murals.  They  also  sought  to  negotiate  con- 
tracts with  the  owners  of  walls  where  they  painted. 


sometimes  renting  the  space  for  five  or  ten  years.  Or  they 
sought  at  least  to  be  warned  when  the  owner  intended  to 
destroy  their  work  so  that  they  might  seek  a  way  to 
preserve  it. 

NEA 

The  first  principal  federal  source  of  grants  earmarked 
for  neighborhood  murals  was  the  National  Endowment 
for  the  Arts.^®  It  began  dispensing  these  funds  in  fiscal 
year  1970  to  mural  groups  and  programs  and  required 
that  they  be  matched  by  equal  amounts  of  local  money. 
Fhe  NEA  distributed  grants  through  local  "responsible" 
conduits — foundations,  museums,  and  government 
agencies. 

The  following  table  has  been  compiled  from  the 
NEA's  chronological  listings  of  grants  made  by  two 
divisions  of  its  Visual  Arts  Program — Works  of  Art  in 
Public  Places  (WAPP)  and  the  Inner  City  Mural  Pro- 
gram. The  ICMP  operated  only  from  1970  to  1972.^^ 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  1 423 
The  chart  breaks  the  grants  for  murals  into  three 
groups — those  to  well-known  muralists  like  Romarc 
Beardon  and  the  late  Thomas  Hart  Benton  or  to  the 
renovation  of  older  murals  (column  6);  those  to  City 
Walls,  Inc.  (column  5),  which,  as  we  have  seen  is  a  firm 
of  also  well-known  artists  who  design  supergraphics;  and 
grants  to  groups  that  sponsor  people's  murals  and  some 
supergraphics.  This  last  pair  is  listed  in  column  2  as 
"Community  Murals,"  although  the  term  is  inexact.  The 
available  figures  make  it  impossible  to  distinguish  funds 
for  people's  murals  and  supergraphics  because  some  or- 
ganizations like  Boston's  Summerthing  and  the  Philadel- 
phia Museum  of  Art's  Urban  Outreach  did  both. 
.Moreover,  their  supergraphics  are  both  downtown  and  in 
the  communities.  Thus  the  figures  for  "community  mur- 
als" will  usually  be  in  excess  of  the  actual  amount  dis- 
pensed for  genuine  people's  art.  WAPP  funded  not  only 
well-known  muralists,  but  also  other  established  artists 
for  abstract  sculpture  and  environmental  objects.  Grants 
for  these  works  are  included  in  column  8. 


1 

2 

3 

4 

5 

6 

7 

8 

9 

Fiscal 

Community 

Murals 

Percent  of 

City 

Grants  to 

Total 

Total 

Total  NEA 

Year 

Dollar 

Number 

Total 

Walls 

Well-known 

Mural 

WAPP  and 

Appropriation 

Amount 

of 
Grants 

WAPP  and 
ICMP 

Dollars 

Grants 

Artists  or 
Institutions 

Grants 

ICMP 
Grants 

1970 

$9,000 

2 

10% 

— 

— 

$9,000 

$94,000 

$8,250,000 

1971 

29,000 

a 

25.6 

$10,000 

— 

39,000 

112,500 

15,090,000 

1972 

87,700 

11 

24 

10,000 

$18,000 

115,700 

357,400 

29,750,000 

1973 

105,940 

18 

51 

10,000 

12,000 

127,940 

206,940 

38,200,000 

1974 

99,000 

10 

14 

25,000 

40,000 

164,000 

626,435 

60,775,000 

1975 

67,500 

9 

10.5 

5,000 

— 

72,500 

639,076 

74,750,000 

1976 

44,500 

9 

6 

45,000 

65,000 

154,500 

737,160 

82,000,000 

Transition 

quarter,  1976* 

33,937,000 

1977 

20,000 

6 

2.5 

5,000 

20,000 

45,000 

780,275 

94,000,000 

1978 

11,150 

3 

1 

5,000 

50,000 

61,150 

758,340 

114,600,000 

*the  transitional  quarter  occurred  when  the  beginning  of  the  government's  fiscal  year  was  changed  from  July  1  to  October  I. 


The  table  shows  that  the  amount  of  money  allocated 
and  the  number  of  grants  for  community  murals  and 
their  proportion  to  other  WAPP  grants  peaked  in  fiscal 
year  1973.  From  fiscal  year  1974  they  began  to  decline, 
while  total  WAPP  grants  continued  to  rise. 

Brian  O'Doherty,  then  director  of  the  Visual  Arts 
Program,  of  which  WAPP  is  a  part,  throws  some  light  on 
why  his  agency  began  to  withdraw  support  from  com- 
munity murals.  Writing  in  Art  in  America  in  1974  he 
notes  that  the  Endowment  had  created  a  special  Inner 
City  Mural  division  in  1970,  but  absorbed  it  back  into  its 
parent  Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places  program  in  1973.  It 
was  at  this  point  that  funding  for  community  murals 
began  to  decline.  O'Doherty  explains: 

While  general  opinion  on  the  value  of  all  this  "as  art" 
(i.e.,  its  relation  to  the  area  of  privileged  taste)  has  not 


been  enthusiastic,  the  phenomenon  introduced  valu- 
able coefficients  into  the  dialogue  about  the  nature  of 
public  art,  and  the  relationship  between  the  artist  and 
community. ^^ 

O'Doherty's  uneasiness  about  taste  being  confined  to  the 
privileged,  but  his  lack  of  confidence  in  the  quality  and 
importance  of  community  murals  shows  through  his 
"cool"  technical  prose.  He  justifies  the  reduction  of  funds 
by  observing  that  "moods  are  less  radical  now,  and  the 
energies  of  the  wall  movement  diminished."  Fhus,  it  was 
apparently  the  criticism  that  the  NEA  came  under  from 
the  art  establishment  and  the  passing  of  the  riots  and 
militancy  that  explain  why  support  for  community  mur- 
als, which  had  accounted  for  more  than  half  of  WAPP 
funding  in  fiscal  year  1973,  began  to  fade.  O'Doherty's 
judgment  about  the  momentum  of  the  mural  movement 


424  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

was  simply  not  borne  out  by  the  remarkable  increase  of 
works  and  their  development  in  quality  since  1973.  His 
explanation  suggests  also  that  what  would  stimulate  gov- 
ernment spending  is  for  moods  to  become  more  radical 
again  and  a  return  of  "the  protests  of  the  sixties,"  which, 
as  he  says,  produced  "an  awakened  social  conscience" 
that  has  created  the  milieu  for  "a  viable  public  art."^" 
This  also  implies,  as  many  muralists  have  believed,  that 
the  principal  motive  for  federal  funding  for  inner-city 
arts  was  to  "cool  out"  ghetto  and  barrio  youth.  He 
polishes  the  murals  off  w  ith  the  memorial,  "the  move- 
ment served  its  role  by  introducing  the  idea  of  the 
community  as  the  conscience  of  a  work  of  public  art."^" 
The  kind  of  public  art  that  received  increasing  support 
from  the  Visual  Arts  Program  was  monumental  abstract 
sculpture  like  Alexander  Calder's  delightful  stabile  La 
Grande  Vitesse,  which  had  been  installed  in  downtown 
Grand  Rapids  in  1968.  Such  works  were  often  decorative 
and  amusing,  but  O'Doherty  implies  that  this  is  all  that 
public  art  should  be.  This  is  to  confine  it  to  meeting  "a 
wide  concern  for  the  restoration  and  recovery  of 
dow  ntown  areas  and  a  general  concern  for  environmental 
probity,"  as  he  says.  He  observes  that  Calder's  work  had 
educated  civic  taste  to  the  extent  that  Grand  Rapids  six 
years  later  commissioned  Robert  Morris  to  do  his  first 
earthwork  in  the  United  States,  which  in  O'Doherty's 
view  is  "the  most  exceptional  gesture  ever  made  in  this 
country  by  a  community  to  an  advanced  artist."^'  WAPP 
helped  out  by  providing  $30,000  in  matching  funds. 

By  1977  the  Chicago  Mural  Group  reported  that  its 
NEA  grants  had  been  denied  or  reduced  to  token 
amounts.  ^^  An  NEA  official  in  1979  said  that  the  de- 
cline of  its  funding  for  murals  was  due  to  the  falling  off  of 
applications. 

In  1978  the  C.VIG  turned  to  the  NEA's  Expansion  Arts 
Program  for  help  and  received  enough  to  do  only  three 
works. ^^  Expansion  Arts  had  in  fact  been  giving  some 
money  to  murals  since  its  founding  in  1971,  less  than 
WAPP  and  the  Inner-City  .Mural  Program,  but  precisely 
how  much  is  not  revealed  by  any  records  it  keeps. 
Expansion  Arts  had  been  the  NEA's  major  effort  to 
support 

professionally  directed,  community-based  arts  projects 
in  which  all  the  people  of  a  community  may  partici- 
pate, and  in  which  the  people  themselves  have  the 
opf)ortunity  to  help  determine  artistic  and  adminis- 
trative policies.  The  professional  who  runs  such  a 
project  IS  often  a  product  of  the  same  community;  he 
or  she  knows  its  traditions  and  works  to  advance  its 
cultural  expression.** 

While  Expansion  Arts  in  its  early  years  concentrated  on 
funding  local  art  centers,  workshops  in  institutions,  and 
summer  projects  in  deprived  areas,  some  of  this  money 
found  its  way  to  murals.  From  1971  to  1972  it  provided 
$8,000  to  Cityarts,  which  only  did  murals,  and  it 
awarded   $14,000  to   the   Mechicano   Art   Center   and 


$60,000  to  the  San  Erancisco  Neighborhood  Arts  Pro-  | 
gram,  both  of  which  devoted  some  of  their  effort  to  wall 
art.'^  During  these  or  following  years  Expansion  Arts 
also  provided  funds  to  other  programs  which  included 
murals,  such  as  Graffiti  Alternatives  Workshop,  the 
Communicative  Arts  Academy,  Black  Light  Explosion, 
the  Brockman  Gallery,  and  Saint  Elmo's  Village.*^  In 
fiscal  1979  Expansion  Arts  was  still  assisting  Cityarts;  the 
CMG  was  continued  for  a  second  year;  support  to  the 
Galena  de  la  Raza  included  help  for  its  billboards, 
smaller  storefront  decorations,  and  the  maintenance  of 
older  works;  and  the  funding  of  four  state  and  city  art 
councils  and  two  other  groups  specified  murals.*^  Taken 
together  with  the  support  the  Visual  Arts  Program  gave 
murals,  this  added  up  to  very  little,  considering  the 
quantity  of  work  that  was  being  done,  to  say  nothing  of 
what  could  be  undertaken  were  there  funding. 

While  Expansion  Arts  was  only  one  of  the  sources  of 
NEA  funds  for  community  arts  during  the  early  seven- 
ties, gradually  it  became  the  principal  program  support- 
ing culture  in  the  neighborhoods.**  To  gauge  the  in- 
volvement of  the  NEA  in  community  arts  during  these 
years,  1976  can  be  singled  out.  If  the  Expansion  Arts 
budget  of  $5,373  million  that  year  is  added  to  the  $99,500 
of  WAPP  funding  for  "community  murals,"  this  gives  an 
NEA  expenditure  of  $5,473  million  for  community  arts 
in  general.  Allowing  that  some  neighborhood  activities 
occurred  under  other  NEA  programs,  still  they  did  not 
augment  by  much  the  proportion  devoted  to  community 
arts.  This  came  to  approximately  6.7  percent  of  its  total 
appropriation,  while  "community  murals"  represented 
about  1 8  percent  of  the  community  arts  total  or  0. 1 
percent  of  the  full  budget.  In  1978  community  arts 
represented  5.5  percent  of  NEA  expenditure.  The 
budget  for  Expansion  Arts  grew  from  $1,137  million  in 
fiscal  1972  to  6.389  million  in  fiscal  1977.  This  implies 
more  rapid  growth  for  Expansion  Arts  than  for  the  NEA 
as  a  whole  whose  appropriation  rose  during  the  same 
years  from  $29.75  million  to  $94.0  million.  But  Expan- 
sion Arts  was  designed  for  that  part  of  the  population 
that  was  without  art  services,  a  far  greater  proportion 
than  those  who  enjoyed  them,  and  its  budget  increases 
hardly  began  to  catch  up  with  the  need. 

Not  only  was  the  amount  allocated  for  murals  and  the 
community  arts  in  general  minuscule,  it  implied  that  art 
generated  in  the  neighborhoods  was  not  taken  seriously  by 
the  decision  makers  in  the  NEA.  In  spite  of  the  rhetoric 
of  bringing  art  to  the  people  used  to  justify  the  Endow- 
ment, it  was  the  establishment  arts — museums,  sym- 
phony orchestras,  and  the  opera — patronized  by  a  small 
proportion  of  the  public  that  got  the  lion's  share  of 
federal  funding.*^  The  NEA  estimated  that  it  provided 
between  5  and  8  percent  of  the  total  budgets  of  major 
cultural  institutions.*"  Not  only  did  most  of  this  art 
permit  only  a  spectator  role  for  the  public;  in  many  cases, 
particularly  musical  events,  admission  charges  put  art 
beyond  the  means  of  the  majority  of  people  to  enjoy  on  a 
regular  basis.  It  was  not  for  the  democratic  support  of  the 


arts  that  working  people  were  being  taxed. 

Museum  and  government  art  policies  had  been  under 
attack  by  socially  conscious  critics  outside  the  establish- 
ment during  the  late  sixties  and  throughout  the  seventies — 
notably  the  community  muralists  and  the  Art  Workers 
Coalitions  in  New  York  and  San  Francisco,  as  well  as  the 
artist  authors  of  aw  anti-catalog,  which  criticized  the  racist 
and  sexist  bias  of  the  Bicentennial  Rockefeller  exhibition 
of  American  Art.  Even  professionals  within  the  estab- 
lishment by  1977  and  1978  were  beginning  to  criticize 
openly  the  elitism  of  government  support  for  the  arts. 
Dick  Netzer,  dean  of  New  York  University's  Graduate 
School  of  Public  Administration,  in  a  study  sp>onsored 
by  the  Twentieth  Century  Fund  estimated  that  total 
government  support  for  the  arts  amounted  to  $300  mil- 
lion annually  and  that  nearly  a  third  of  the  NEA's  $123.5 
million  allocation  for  1978  went  to  the  big  art  institu- 
tions."" He  charged  that  the  large  grants  to  these  institu- 
tions did  not  "foster  creativity  or  increase  availability  of 
the  arts,"  in  contrast  to  what  could  be  achieved  by  more 
support  for  smaller  "amateur"  groups. 

By  the  summer  of  1978  Art  in  America  reported  that 
there  was  a  debate  brewing  between  "elitist"  and 
"populist"  factions  in  Washington  about  further  federal 
involvement  in  the  arts.^^  James  Melchert,  the  new 
director  of  the  Visual  Arts  Program,  was  quoted  as 
saying,  "  'Some  of  the  most  exciting  work  of  late  has 
come  from  women,  and  from  street  art — I  don't  mean 
necessarily  political  statements — but  by  way  of  reaching 
new  audiences.'  "^^  The  disclaimer  suggested  the  con- 
tinuing embarrassment  that  professionals  felt  about  art 
that  made  social  and  political  statements.  The  article 
observed  that  "many  cultural  officials"  were  concerned 
that  "the  Carter  Administration's  Endowment  is  bent  on 
sprinkling  sparse  NEA  funds  far  and  wide  to  prop  up 
unprofessional  arts  activities  and  stroke  backwater  con- 
gressmen by  funding  their  pet  projects."  In  response  to 
such  concerns,  the  new  chairman  of  the  NEA, 
Livingston  Biddle,  Jr.,  said,  "  'If  elitist  means  the  best 
and  populism  means  access  then  what  we  want  is  access 
to  the  best.'  "**  Biddle  was  skirting  the  crux  of  the 
matter — the  meaning  of  quality  and  professionalism.  If 
the  debate  between  the  elitist  and  populist  arts  was  to  be 
more  than  a  drawing  of  firm  lines  between  mutually 
exclusive  positions,  it  would  have  to  consider  whether 
the  arts  were  to  be  democratized  mainly  by  increasing 
the  masses'  "appreciation"  of  mainstream  high  culture  or 
developing  a  culture  out  of  the  needs,  perceptions,  and 
practice  of  all  people. 

The  debate  was  already  underway  in  1977  when  the 
New  York  Times's  influential  critic  Hilton  Kramer  wrote 
"A  specter  is  haunting  the  arts  and  the  humanities  in  the 
United  States  today — the  specter  of  a  catastrophic  shift 
of  government  policy  in  cultural  affairs.'"**  The  allusion 
to  the  Communist  Manifesto  was  not  merely  a  continuation 
of  the  Cold  War  McCarthyite  identification  of  socially 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  425 
conscious  art  with  subversion,  but  an  extension  of  that 
identification  to  include  all  efforts  to  broaden  support  for 
artists  out  of  the  mainstream  of  high  culture.  What 
Kramer  was  warning  about  was  "an  aggressive  politici- 
zation  of  federal  cultural  policy"  that  "few  knowledge- 
able people  doubt  ...  is  now  imminent.'"*^  Kramer 
lamented  that  ".  .  .  numbers — rather  than  quality, 
knowledge  or  distinction — are  now  to  be  the  touchstone 
of  achievement."  His  dragging  the  old  red  herring  into 
the  debate  could  be  expected  since  the  establishment  arts 
had  come  increasingly  under  attack  during  the  past  ten 
years  by  proponents  of  a  socially  conscious  art,  but  to 
identify  them  with  Carter  populism  was  stretching.  On 
the  other  hand,  this  pointed  out  the  possibility  of  some 
receptiveness  by  the  new  leadership  of  the  Endowment 
to  efforts  to  advance  community-based  art.  A  special 
opportunity  was  offered  by  the  impending  White  House 
Conference  on  the  Arts  and  Humanities  scheduled  for 
late  1979,  which  was  to  be  preceded  by  similar  meetings 
at  the  state  level.  But  when  funds  were  not  budgeted  for 
it,  preparations  were  suspended. 

Problems  with  the  support  of  community  arts  by  the 
NEA  prompted  it  to  create  a  Task  Force  on  Community 
Program  Planning,  which  held  its  first  meeting  in  De- 
cember 1978.  The  fourteen-member  group  was  created 
to  review  the  NEA's  overall  relationship  with  public  and 
private  agencies  at  the  city  and  county  level  and  to 
produce  a  "comprehensive  policy  on  community  arts"  for 
the  next  fifteen  years. ""^  Its  intention  was  to  hold  hearings 
around  the  country  and  come  up  with  a  recommendation 
for  a  "new  delivery  system."**  The  Task  Force  was 
careful  to  insist  that  its  mission  was  not  to  revise  Expan- 
sion Arts,  but  some  neighborhood  arts  groups  were 
anxious  that  what  was  in  the  wind  was  a  "decentraliza- 
tion" of  federal  funding  for  them  with  block  grants  being 
assigned  to  local  agencies  in  the  manner  of  revenue 
sharing.^'  The  forces  moving  the  NEA  toward  this  were 
first  the  increased  demand  from  the  grassroots  for  suf>- 
port  and  the  desire  of  the  "populist"  liberal  Democratic 
leadership  of  NEA  and  the  administration  to  conciliate 
them.  But  there  were  also  efforts  from  within  and  outside 
the  NEA  to  make  community  arts  dependent  on  local 
agencies  where  the  arts  establishment  was  more  power- 
ful. 

Some  muralists  like  Eva  Cockcroft  and  John  Weber 
believed  that  "decentralization"  of  federal  arts  funding 
should  be  opposed  because  it  made  it  vulnerable  to  local 
manipulation.  Already,  they  said,  experience  with 
CETA  and  other  city  hall  administered  art  programs  had 
taught  that  given  the  present  local  power  structure, 
funding  would  be  subject  to  conservative  and  bureau- 
cratic pressures.  Weber  pointed  to  the  decision  in  1979  of 
the  public  panel  administering  the  Expansion  Arts'  pilot 
"City  Arts"  block  grant  in  Chicago  not  to  give  funds  to 
muralists.  Pressure  had  been  brought,  Weber  charged, 
on  the  panel  by  "Lake  Shore  liberals"  embarrassed  by  the 
art  of  the  sixties  with  which  they  identified  murals.  On 


426  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

the  other  hand,  Weber  and  Cockcroft  said,  when  com- 
munity arts  groups  appHed  directly  to  Washington  for 
grants,  there  was  relatively  little  vulnerability  to  censor- 
ship, and  criticism  of  the  local  status  quo  by  murals  was 
easier. 

However,  one  of  the  functions  of  murals,  Weber  and 
Cockcroft  would  insist,  is  to  build  power  within  local 
institutions  for  community  people.  The  problem  is  to 
organize  in  the  neighborhoods  and  citywide  to  get  fair 
representation  on  the  panels,  art  commissions,  city  coun- 
cils, and  redevelopment  authorities  rather  than  permit 
power  to  remain  in  either  unresponsive  or  remote  hands. 
It  seems  that  the  empowerment  of  neighborhood  people 
is  more  likely  to  be  advanced  by  their  organizing  to  gain 
control  of  local  agencies,  including  those  that  dispense 
funds  for  murals.  That  would  mean  even  greater  efforts 
by  muralists  to  do  political  work  in  their  communities. 
There  is  a  considerable  difference  between  this  kind  of 
decentralizing  and  revenue  sharing.  To  depend  on 
Washington  for  more  democratic  administration  than  can 
be  had  locally  is  itself  a  liberal  approach  that  can  at  best 
result  in  short-term  gains  and  puts  off  the  building  of 
local  power. 

In  August  1979,  the  Task  Force  made  its  report  to  a 
new  NEA  Office  of  Partnership  which  was  organized  to 
formulate  a  policy  for  federal  support  for  community  arts 
and  create  a  program  coordinated  with  state  and  local 
agencies,  both  public  and  private.  The  proposal  called 
for  cooperative  long-range  planning  and  grants.  The 
Task  Force  recommended  primary  federal  interaction 
with  each  state  art  commission  that  would  develop  a  plan 
arrived  at  with  local  groups  and  requiring  approval  by 
the  NEA  before  grants  could  be  made  to  the  states  for 
distribution  to  community  arts.  A  Local  Arts  Program 
would  also  be  formed  within  the  Partnership  Office  to 
provide  apparently  lesser  funds  more  directly  to  county 
and  city  agencies  and  community  art  groups.  There 
would  be  special  emphasis  on  collaborating  with  net- 
works serving  minority  and  previously  "disenfranchised 
groups."  All  of  this  was  contingent  on  the  Task  Force's 
report  being  adopted  by  the  NEA  and  funds  being 
available  for  its  implementation.^"  Clearly  the  type  of 
decentralization  the  Task  Force  supported  would  give 
new  power  to  existing  agencies  at  the  state  and  local 
levels.  The  challenge  for  community  people  would  be  to 
make  them  work  for  them. 

At  the  same  time  as  there  were  strong  efforts  to  push 
community  arts  funding  outside  the  NEA  altogether, 
there  were  other  attempts  to  ease  its  burden  on  the 
Endowment  budget  by  sharing  the  costs  with  other 
federal  agencies.  One  such  program  was  Liveable 
Cities,  a  joint  venture  with  the  Department  of  Housing 
and  Urban  Development.*'  This  program,  which  was 
designed  to  revitalize  moderate-  and  low-income 
neighborhoods  by  encouraging  cultural  activities  through 
matching  grants  to  nonprofit  organizations,  could  sup- 
port murals.  But  funds  for  it  were  slashed  by  Congress, 


and  when  it  was  to  come  up  for  final  appropriation 
hearings  in  1979,  the  administration  might  not  support  it 
because  of  its  antiinflation  commitment  to  initiate  no  new 
programs. 

CETA  Funding 

By  1978  the  Department  of  Labor  became  the  leading 
federal  source  of  funding  for  artists.  While  the  NEA  gave 
$120  million.  Labor  was  providing  five  million  more.*^ 
Although  artists  as  a  group  had  not  been  singled  out  by 
Congress  to  be  recipients  of  this  money,  their  becoming 
beneficiaries  was  an  after-the-fact  demonstration  that  art 
is  after  all  a  form  of  ordinary  labor.  *^  The  vehicle  was  the 
Comprehensive  Employment  and  Training  Act  passed 
by  Congress  in  1973.  The  pioneering  work  to  apply 
CETA  funds  for  the  arts  and  particularly  murals  was 
done  in  San  Francisco  by  Rene  Yanez  with  the  later 
assistance  of  John  Kreidler,  who  was  then  working  with 
that  city's  Neighborhood  Arts  Program.  Both  had  re- 
searched and  pressed  for  the  use  of  federal  manpower 
funds  for  years.  Yanez  already  in  1971  had  found  a  way 
to  use  federal  money  from  STEP  (Supplemental  Train- 
ing and  Employment  Program)  to  create  positions  for  the 
doing  of  the  first  Latino  murals  in  San  Francisco.  CETA 
had  been  enacted  as  an  on-the-job  training  program 
intended  to  prepare  workers  for  permanent  positions 
within  a  year.  When  unemployment  rose  to  crisis  pro- 
portions as  the  result  of  the  1974—75  recession,  CETA 
was  also  used  as  a  means  of  creating  public-service  jobs, 
and  it  was  in  this  capacity  mainly  that  it  employed 
artists.  Artists  had  been  hit  by  unemployment  more 
seriously  than  other  working  people.  One  reason  was 
that  the  number  completing  art  training  between  1970 
and  1975  increased  much  more  rapidly  than  jobs.  While 
the  unemployment  of  professionals  in  general  during 
those  years  increased  1.4  percent,  the  proportion  of 
jobless  artists  increased  3  percent.** 

As  of  1975  Congress  had  appropriated  enough  money 
to  fund  300,000  positions  around  the  country,**  less  than 
4  percent  of  the  unemployed.  By  July  of  that  year  more 
than  900  jobs  for  visual,  performing,  and  literary  artists 
and  staff  for  cultural  institutions  had  been  funded 
through  CETA.*«  By  1978  the  figure  rose  to  some  10,000 
at  an  annual  cost  of  $125  million.*^  This  made  CETA  the 
largest  federal  project  for  unemployed  artists  since  the 
Depression.  In  San  Francisco,  for  instance,  1 13  had  been 
hired  in  1975  for  the  first  six  months,  more  than  any- 
where else  in  the  country.**  By  mid-1978  there  were  397 
CETA  positions  in  the  arts,  mostly  in  schools,  museums, 
and  disadvantaged  neighborhoods. 

In  contrast  to  the  New  Deal  art  projects  that  were 
operated  by  local  federal  offices,  CETA  funds  were 
distributed  to  state  and  local  governments  because  it  was 
believed  they  could  more  accurately  assess  needs.  These 
authorities  had  wide  discretion  in  the  way  the  money  was 
used.  In  San  Francisco  funds  were  administered  through 


the  Mayor's  Office  of  Employment  and  Training.  In 
1978  about  half  of  the  CETA  artists  were  employed  by 
city  agencies  and  half  by  private  nonprofit  social-service 
organizations.  The  money  allocated  for  the  arts  was 
controlled  by  the  Art  Commission,  and  its  Neighbor- 
hood Arts  Program  provided  assistance  like  securing 
materials.  Since  the  Galeria  de  la  Raza  had  worked  with 
NAP  before  CETA,  it  became  a  mural  center  under  the 
new  program  and  Yaiiez  served  briefly  as  citywide  coor- 
dinator of  murals.  Although  in  1976  he  and  the  Galeria 
withdrew,  muralists  associated  with  the  Galeria  along 
with  other  San  Francisco  painters  continued  to  be  hired 
by  CETA  as  independents. 

Federal  guidelines  required  that  80  to  90  percent  of 
CETA  expenditure  for  art  go  to  salaries  for  unemployed 
artists;  the  remainder  could  be  used  for  supplies  and 
overhead.  San  Francisco  used  all  of  the  funds  for 
wages. ^^  About  a  dozen  muralists  there  were  being  sup- 
ported full-time  by  CETA  in  1975;  in  1977  the  number 
was  down  to  eight.  In  1978  there  were  nine-active  CETA 
muralists  there.  Part-time  CETA  positions  were  avail- 
able in  some  cities.  Although  the  program  in  1975  set 
$10,000  as  the  top  salary  allowable  and  sought  a  national 
average  of  $7,800,*°  the  take-home  pay  of  the  San  Fran- 
cisco muralists  was  $540  a  month,  or  $6,480  annually.®' 
This  meant  a  gross  income  of  $7,200  in  1975-76,  what 
the  Bureau  of  Labor  Statistics  described  as  "deprived." 
Under  Title  VI  of  CETA  only  those  who  were  un- 
employed for  fifteen  weeks  or  were  receiving  Aid  to 
Families  with  Dependent  Children  were  eligible.  These 
were  clearly  relief  wages  and  were  not  comparable  to  the 
fee  a  professional  artist  would  expect  in  the  private 
sector.  Timothy  Jenks  was  receiving  at  the  same  time 
$15,000  apiece  for  decorative  murals  on  the  garden  walls 
of  fashionable  San  Francisco  homes. *^  The  public  sector 
was  paying  about  the  same  for  well-known  muralists.  For 
instance,  Romare  Beardon  received  $8,000  from  the 
NEA  to  match  a  like  amount  from  Berkeley  to  do  a  mural 
in  its  city  council  chamber  in  1972.**  CETA  artists,  like 
those  on  federal  art  projects  in  the  thirties,  were  being 
paid  "work  support"  wages  so  as  not  to  discourage  job 
placement  in  the  private  sector.  The  problem  was  that 
there  were  few  opportunities  for  community  murals 
there.  What  was  required  was  legitimate  remuneration 
for  professional  public  service. 

The  insecurity  of  CETA  funding  was  experienced  by 
the  Chicago  .Mural  Group  when  it  was  not  able  to  qualify 
any  of  its  veteran  artists  during  most  of  1977  with  the 
result  that  it  completed  only  three  murals  where  it  had 
done  seven  or  eight  each  year  between  1972  and  1976.** 
SPARC  ran  up  against  the  same  difficulties,  and  Judy 
Baca  complained  that  the  requirement  that  a  person  must 
be  unemployed  for  fifteen  weeks  prior  to  application  and 
earn  under  $3,000  during  the  preceding  year  limited  the 
rehiring  of  artists.  As  a  result  of  these  restrictive  regula- 
tions, little  CETA  funding  was  going  to  artists  who  had 
already  worked  in  the  neighborhoods,  she  said,  and  she 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  I  ^11 

was  forced  to  hire  some  who  had  no  understanding  or 
interest  in  community  art.  PAW  in  Chicago  had  cut  its 
ties  with  CETA  for  similar  reasons. 

In  response  to  the  growing  tax  revolt,  new  legislation 
in  1978  limited  the  length  of  tenure  in  CE  lA  public 
service  positions  to  eighteen  months  with  no  possibility 
of  renewal  within  a  five-year  period.  While  workers  had 
been  able  to  remain  on  CETA  payrolls  since  1975, 
continuing  employment  was  now  in  jeopardy.  Ihe  new 
emphasis  of  CETA  was  to  be  intensive  youth  career 
training  for  existing  positions  which  would  further 
restrict  opportunities  for  muralists.  Average  wages  in  an 

a  were  not  to  exceed  $7,200  and  there  was  to  be  a 
serious  reduction  in  the  number  of  positions  nationally 
from  725,000  to  625,000  by  the  end  of  fiscal  1979.  For 
the  following  year  the  administration  was  seeking  a 
maximum  of  461,000.**  And  CETA  was  the  only  public 
jobs  program  trying  to  come  to  grips  with  the  nine  to  ten 
million  unemployed  in  1979. 

Baca  was  also  critical  of  CETA  permitting  only  20 
percent  of  its  funds  to  be  used  for  materials  and  adminis- 
tration, which  forced  artists  and  the  agencies  that 
employed  them  to  scrounge  for  paints  and  scaffolding 
when  they  had  not  been  previously  budgeted.  She  also 
felt  it  was  improper  for  the  city  of  Los  Angeles  to  take 
possession  of  the  copyrights  to  all  work  that  CETA 
artists  created  there,  which  meant  that  it  could  collect 
royalties  on  their  reproduction  in  books  and  IV.  Like 
most  muralists,  she  wanted  the  federal  government  to 
expand  career  opportunities  for  muralists  and  other  art- 
ists. She  would  like  to  see  them  integrated  into  all 
government  agencies  in  regular  rather  than  emergency 
employment  and  supported  by  the  agency  budget.  In 
particular  she  hoped  for  art  centers  in  all  neighborhoods 
and  parks,  rather  than  the  few  existing  centralized  ones. 

Although  a  number  of  mural  organizations  like 
SPARC  and  Commonarts  secured  CETA  positons  for 
their  members,  the  centralizing  of  CETA  hiring  in  mu- 
nicipal offices  made  it  easier  for  muralists  not  to  take  on 
the  difficulties  of  forming  their  own  groups.  For  the 
CETA  agency  in  city  hall  could  like  Summerthing 
handle  many  of  the  arrangements.  Socially  committed 
muralists,  on  the  other  hand,  believed  it  was  important 
for  them  to  organize  themselves  and  establish  lasting 
relations  with  communities.  The  tendency  of  CETA  to 
bureaucratize  the  relationship  of  the  artist  and  commu- 
nity may  explain  the  lack  of  involvement  that  both  Rene 
Yaiiez  and  Salvador  Torres  have  found  in  murals  done 
under  it. 

Besides  the  NEA  and  CETA  there  were  other  federal 
programs  in  1979  which  muralists  had  taken  advantage 
of.  The  Office  of  Economic  Development  was  support- 
ing Goez  Gallery's  Institute  of  Murals  in  Los  Angeles  in 
1978,**  and  the  Department  of  Transportation  awarded  a 
pilot  grant  that  year  to  the  Massachusetts  Bay  Transit 
Authority  for  "Art  On  the  Line,"  a  project  to  use  the 
skills  of  local  artists  for  the  Cambridge  Line.*'  Here 


428  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Lilli  Anne  Rosenberg  did  impressive  murals.  Federal 
juvenile  justice  funds  from  the  Law  Enforcement  Assist- 
ance Administration  had  contributed  substantially  to  the 
Tujunga  Wash  murals  in  the  San  Fernando  Valley,  and 
the  Army  Corps  of  Engineers  offered  $8,000  toward 
extending  them  in  1979. 

In  evaluating  federal  funding  for  community  murals,  it 
must  be  emphasized  that  they  have  not  received  anything 
like  the  degree  of  government  support  that  previous 
programs  for  public  art,  such  as  the  Mexican  and  New 
Deal  mural  movements,  enjoyed.**  The  reason  is  that  the 
current  murals  and  their  painters  have  not  had  the  official 
status  and  connections  that  their  predecessors  did.  These 
murals  have  been  from  the  start  unique  as  grass-roots 
efforts.  Nowhere  before  in  modern  societies  has  so  much 
public  art  been  done  without  government  initiative.*^ 

The  .Mexican  murals  grew  out  of  the  effort  of  Jose 
Vasconcelos,  the  minister  of  education,  to  bring  to  his 
countrymen  an  art  expressing  the  ideals  of  the  new 
revolutionary  government.^**  He  hired  Rivera,  Orozco, 
Siqueiros,  and  others  who  already  had  established  repu- 
tations and  were  well  connected  to  paint  at  the  prestig- 
ious National  Preparatory  School,  the  Education  Minis- 
try and  National  Palace,  and  an  agricultural  college  near 
the  capital.  Hence  the  audience  of  these  first  works 
included  middle-class  students,  administrators,  and 
professional  people.  Only  gradually  were  similar  murals 
done  in  outlying  areas,  in  labor  unions,  schools,  and 
market  places;  later  also  painters  without  professional  art 
training  were  involved.  The  New  Deal  art  projects  also 
were  initiated  at  the  top  by  intimates  of  President 
Roosevelt — George  Biddle  and  Harry  Hopkins,  who 
persuaded  him  to  create  public-service  programs  that 
could  utilize  the  talents  of  artists  thrown  out  of  work  by 
the  Depression.^'  With  the  model  of  the  .Mexican  experi- 
ence, it  was  primarily  established  artists  who  were  first 
commissioned  to  do  murals  for  important  public  build- 
ings and  only  later,  especially  under  the  Federal  Art 
Project  of  the  Works  Progress  Administration  that  less 
known  painters  were  employed  and  local  post  offices, 
schools,  and  libraries  became  sites  of  wall  art.  In  con- 
trast, the  community  murals  of  the  sixties  and  seventies 
began  among  the  racial  underclass  who  painted  the  brick 
and  wood  siding  of  dilapidated  tenements,  garages  and 
shops,  some  neighborhood  churches,  schools,  and  service 
centers.  By  1980  the  only  buildings  of  some  prestige  that 
bore  this  art  were  a  few  universities.  Although  there 
were  a  few  painters  with  reputations  among  the  early 
muralists,  the  bulk  still  remains  artists  in  their  twenties 
and  thirties  without  mainstream  reputations.  And  then 
there  are  the  great  number  of  untrained  young  people 
and  some  seniors. 

The  government's  aim  to  relieve  joblessness  and  pro- 
vide for  public  service  employment  links  CETA  and  to 
some  extent  NEA  funding  to  the  New  Deal  art  projects. 
But  in  contrast  to  them  the  grassroots  activity  of  the 
community    muralists   preceded   and   always   exceeded 


what  they  received  in  federal  funding.  For  the  commu- 
nity murals  have  depended  in  large  part  on  neighborhood 
contributions  of  money,  materials  and  the  unremuner- 
ated  or  under-compensated  labor  of  artists.  It  was  not 
understood  in  the  thirties  as  it  has  not  been  in  the 
seventies  that  art  in  the  public  interest,  like  education, 
will  always  require  public  support  and  that  muralists 
deserve  more  than  subprofessional  wages.  In  a  sense  it  is 
not  fair  to  criticize  CETA  for  its  inadequacies.  It  was 
never  intended  to  serve  artists  and  was  an  expedient  they 
seized  on  when  the  NEA  failed  them.  It  is  public  funding 
designed  specifically  for  a  genuinely  democratic  culture 
that  is  needed. 

City  Support 

While  most  of  the  community  murals  have  been 
painted  in  urban  areas,  municipal  government  has  in- 
vested relatively  little  in  their  funding.  New  York  and 
Los  Angeles  were  unique  in  the  amount  of  money  given 
by  municipalities  to  muralists,  but  Cityarts  gave  up  this 
money  to  escape  censorship  in  1972  and  City  wide  was 
cut  off  in  1978.  On  the  other  hand,  city  agencies  regu- 
larly have  served  as  conduits  through  which  federal, 
state,  and  corporate  funding  has  passed  to  muralists. 
Summerthing  was  located  in  the  Boston  mayor's  Cultural 
Affairs  Office,  and  except  for  the  salaries  of  its  adminis- 
trative staff,  it  received  no  municipal  funding.  CETA 
money  for  murals  usually  flows  through  municipal  man- 
power offices,  but  local  housing  and  community  de- 
velopment offices  may  also  provide  some  support,  some 
of  which  may  also  come  from  federal  funding. 

Around  the  country  murals  have  been  bound  up 
closely  with  the  fortunes  of  community  arts  in  general. 
The  experience  of  San  Francisco  is  a  useful  example.  A 
1974  study  showed  that  community  arts  organizations  in 
California  could  depend  on  cities  and  counties  for  almost 
57  percent  of  their  budgets  while  those  in  the  rest  of  the 
country  received  only  6  percent  from  these  sources.  ^^  In 
San  Francisco  the  Neighborhood  Arts  Program,  an 
agency  of  the  Arts  Commission,  has  served  as  the  princi- 
pal conduit  of  funds,  primarily  from  the  NEA,  before 
CETA.  It  still  helps  muralists  find  materials,  often  from 
other  city  agencies.  Since  1975,  a  CETA  coordinator  of 
artists  and  gardeners  and  her  small  staff  employed  by  the 
Art  Commission  preside  over  community  murals  and  get 
assistance  from  the  Neighborhood  Arts  Program.  The 
NAP  has  been  one  of  the  pioneering  efforts  in  publicly 
sponsored  community  arts  for  the  current  generation, 
and  it  became  a  model  for  similar  ventures  around  the 
country.  But  from  its  inception  it  has  been  embroiled  in 
the  politics  of  art.  It  was  created  in  1967  as  a  concession 
to  the  neighborhoods  to  buy  public  support  for  a  Per- 
forming Arts  Center  which  was  to  supplement  the  opera 
house  and  round  out  a  "Lincoln  Center"  for  the  city  ''^ 
Promoted  by  downtown  business  interests,  the  center 
was  seen  by  many  neighborhood  artists  and  residents  as 


an  enterprise  that  would  use  tax  dollars  to  bring  world- 
famous  stars  to  San  Francisco  for  audiences  composed 
primarily  of  the  city  and  suburbs'  well-to-do  in  addition 
to  tourists.  A  public  arts  program  should  serve  the  whole 
city,  it  was  argued.  A  bond  issue  for  the  center  had  been 
voted  down  in  1965,  and  two  years  later,  partly  as  a  ploy 
of  downtown  to  turn  voters  around  and  partly  as  the 
result  of  the  efforts  of  local  artists  and  San  Francisco 
State  College  students  and  professors  who  wanted  to 
bring  art  and  drama  to  the  community,  the  Neighbor- 
hood Arts  Program  was  created.  The  Zellerbach  family, 
the  paper  manufacturers,  gave  yearly  stipends  of  $30,000 
to  the  NAP  at  the  same  time  as  it  pressed  for  the 
Performing  Arts  Center,  more  downtown  highrises  and 
redevelopment.^*  Since  1948  Harold  Zellerbach  had 
been  president  of  the  Art  Commission  which  controlled 
the  NAP;  he  finally  retired  after  his  twenty-seventh  year 
in  that  post  in  1976. 

In  1972  the  Zellerbachs  and  other  downtown  interests 
urged  the  use  of  federal  revenue  sharing  money  for  the 
Performing  Arts  Center  and  city  government  accommo- 
dated them.  The  Board  of  Supervisors  earmarked  $5 
million  of  revenue  sharing  for  the  center  and  undertook 
city  obligations  without  citizens'  being  given  a  chance  to 
approve  a  bond  issue.  When  the  bonds  are  paid  off,  the 
total  cost  to  the  public  will  be  $50  million."  In 
response  neighborhood  artists  and  people  mobilized,  and 
$2.5  million  was  set  aside  for  the  building  of  five  local  art 
centers — one-twentieth  of  the  cost  of  the  Performing 
Arts  Center.  However,  there  were  long  delays,  and 
finally  the  mayor's  allocation  for  CETA  for  1977  funded 
positions  for  artist  consultants  and  construction  workers 
to  transform  four  buildings  recently  purchased  by  the 
Art  Commission  into  community  cultural  centers. 
Among  these,  an  old  department  store  became  the  Mis- 
sion Cultural  Center  and  a  brewery,  the  Western  Addi- 
tion Center.  While  downtown  sought  to  control  these 
centers  and  programs  by  dominating  the  Art  Commis- 
sion and  NAP,  art  groups  in  the  neighborhoods  tried  to 
direct  their  local  undertakings.  Both  the  NAP  and  tjbe 
local  groups  sought  independent  foundation  funding, 
and  there  was  talk  of  creating  neighborhood  arts  councils 
through  which  residents  could  promote  and  coordinate 
local  programs  and  gain  control  over  funds  for  commu- 
nity arts.^® 

The  funding  of  the  Neighborhood  Arts  Program  has 
always  been  constrained.  A  major  source  has  been  the 
city's  6  percent  hotel  tax,  half  of  which  NAP  divided  up 
with  a  host  of  other  cultural  groups,  including  the 
museums,  symphony,  and  opera.  (The  other  half  goes  to 
the  promotional  activities  of  the  Convention  and  Visitors' 
Bureau.)  Since  1974  NAP  has  moved  away  from  pro- 
viding financial  assistance  to  neighborliood  groups  and 
has  concentrated  on  loaning  them  equipment,  providing 
consultation  and  serving  as  conduit  for  funding  they 
write  proposals  for.  However,  local  groups,  like  the 
Galeria  de  la  Raza,  had  by  then  become  well  organized 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  1 429 

and  needed  money  rather  than  outside  advice. ^^  In  1978 
the  statewide  tax  revolt  forced  the  halving  of  the  hotel  tax 
revenues  allocated  for  the  arts,  but  lobbying  by  an 
alliance  of  community  and  establishment  arts  groups 
restored  a  large  part. 

While  the  mural  movement  and  other  forms  of  com- 
munity art  were  developing  rapidly  during  the  late  sixties 
and  seventies,  there  was  an  enormous  expansion  of  es- 
tablishment public  art,  particularly  in  connection  with 
urban  renewal  and  the  growth  of  downtowns — the 
emergence  of  the  "postindustrial  city."  The  U.S.  Con- 
ference of  .Mayors  in  1974  adopted  a  resolution  recog- 
nizing "the  arts  as  an  essential  service,  equal  in  im- 
portance to  other  essential  services,"  and  that  no  citizen 
should  be  "deprived  of  .  .  .  the  beauty  in  life  by  barrier 
of  circumstance,  income,  background,  remoteness  or 
race.'*  Observing  that  the  growing  interest  of  the  public 
in  the  arts  could  "no  longer  be  sustained  by  traditional 
support  resources,"  the  mayors  urged  that  a  percentage 
of  the  budget  of  municipal  construction  projects  be  set 
aside  for  works  of  art.  Already  some  cities  like  Boston, 
Seattle,  and  San  Francisco  had  initiated  such  policies, 
but  whether  any  part  of  this  was  to  be  allocated  for  social 
and  community-based  murals  remained  to  be  seen.'®  In 
1978  Chicago  joined  them.  But  in  Baltimore  when 
$600,000  was  to  be  awarded  to  decorate  the  subway 
under  a  similar  1  percent  ordinance,  the  selection  panel 
chose  artists  from  out  of  state  to  avoid  a  conflict  it  feared 
would  erupt  when  some  local  artists  were  chosen  over 
others. 

State  Funding 

Another  source  of  funding  for  murals  is  state  govern- 
ment. Boston's  Summerthing  got  underway  in  1968  with 
a  grant  from  the  .Massachusetts  Council  of  Arts  and 
Humanities.  The  New  York  State  Council  on  the  Arts, 
which  administered  an  extraordinary  $34.6  million 
budget  in  1975,  has  helped  fund  the  Cityarts  Workshop. 
In  1974,  for  instance,  it  received  $20,000  from  the  state 
as  against  $15,000  from  the  NEA.*°  In  California  under 
the  administration  of  Edmund  G.  (Jerry)  Brown,  Jr.,  it 
appeared  for  a  while  that  murals  and  the  community  arts 
would  get  increasing  support.  Brown  had  a  reputation 
for  a  love  of  the  arts.  During  1975,.  his  first  year  as 
governor,  he  provided  space  in  his  offices  for  exhibitions 
of  ethnic  art,  and  he  consulted  with  the  state  coalition  of 
Raza  artists  and  cultural  centers  with  which  muralists 
were  closely  associated. 

As  a  result  of  that  meeting,  Rene  Yafiez  prepared  and 
sent  to  the  governor  "A  Mandate  for  State  Involvement." 
It  called  for  state  contracting  with  small  business  ven- 
tures of  artists  and  employment  opportunities  within 
government,  education,  and  trade  unions.  It  also  proj- 
ected the  development  of  local  programs  at  college  level 
to  train  teams  of  muralists,  architects,  and  carpenters  to 
beautify  public  facilities  and  involve  their  users  in  the 


430  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

planning  process.  It  outlined  the  training  of  educators 
and  arts  management  personnel  for  community  art  cen- 
ters and  satellite  museums.  The  "Mandate"  also  asked  for 
state  legislation  to  protect  the  originality  of  artistic  ex- 
pression, to  provide  access  to  specialized  legal  counsel, 
and  to  regulate  unionization.  This  was  a  very  important 
proposal  that  sought  solid  institutional  backup  for  the 
professionalism  of  artists,  including  muraiists.  A  number 
of  its  proposals  were  later  reflected  in  legislation  and 
programs,  and  the  artists'  groups  formed  the  statewide 
Concilio  de  Arte  Popular  in  1977  to  work  for  expanded 
cultural  opportunities. 

Announcing  his  intention  of  restructuring  the  state's 
involvement  in  the  arts.  Brown  at  the  beginning  of  1976 
replaced  the  old  Art  Commission,  which  had  been  made 
up  of  wealthy  patrons,  with  an  Arts  Council  with  a 
majority  of  practicing  artists.**'  Among  these  were  some 
who  had  been  deeply  involved  with  community  arts: 
Ruth  Asawa,  who  helped  introduce  artists  into  San 
Francisco  schools  and  establish  a  national  model,  and 
Luis  Valdez,  founder  of  the  farm  workers'  Teatro  Cam- 
pesino.  There  were  also  poet  Gary  Snyder,  theater  artist 
Peter  Coyote,  and  director  of  the  Sufi  Choir  Allaudin 
Mathieu.  Brown  and  his  new  Arts  Council  shifted  the 
orientation  of  state  support  from  large  matching  grants  to 
established  artists  and  institutions  of  high  culture — the 
museums,  symphony  orchestras,  and  opera  of  Los 
Angeles  and  San  Francisco — to  programs  that  would 
serve  many  artists  who  had  never  before  had  had  the 
benefit  of  public  support  and  provide  many  people, 
especially  the  young,  with  practical  experience  in  the 
arts.  Now  the  symphonies  of  Fresno  and  other  outlying 
cities  would  receive  state  support.  The  idea  also  was  to 
build  large  cultivated  audiences.  In  its  first  months  the 
Art  Council  established  a  variety  of  pilot  programs  that 
provided  in-residence  positions  for  artists  to  teach  and 
train  apprentices  in  the  schools,  neighborhoods,  farm 
labor  camps,  hospitals,  mental  health  centers,  and  pris- 
ons. Since  the  number  of  positions  was  initially  modest 
and  all  of  these  programs  were  open  to  practitioners  of 
the  literary,  dramatic,  and  musical  as  well  as  visual  arts, 
the  opportunities  for  muraiists  were  limited.*^ 

The  state's  shift  of  emphasis  was  dramatic.  In  fiscal 
1976  these  new  programs  for  artists  in  the  schools  and 
other  social  institutions  were  budgeted  for  $809,000, 
while  $207,000  was  given  to  major  museums,  sym- 
phonies and  operas  that  had  regularly  received  the  lion's 
share  of  state  arts  funding."^  .Moreover,  this  new  orien- 
tation was  not  merely  the  decision  of  the  council;  the 
state  legislature  had  fixed  the  limit  of  any  single  grant  at 
$8,000.  This  rankled  the  large  art  organizations  even 
though  there  were  loopholes  which  permitted  the  San 
Francisco  Opera  to  receive  three  such  grants  for  its 
different  divisions  in  1977.'*''  But  the  new  slant  of  the 
Arts  Council  set  off  a  major  debate  between  the  suppor- 
ters of  "elite"  and  "populist"  arts.  The  council  was 
criticized  for  "attempting  to  do  'social  work  through  the 


arts.'  "^^  Increasingly  it  came  under  fire  because  of  grants 
to  unorthodox  projects,  but  the  few  far-out  ones  received 
publicity  out  of  proportion  to  their  size  and  number.*^ 

The  shift  in  funding,  as  Peter  Coyote,  the  Arts  Coun- 
cil chairman,  saw  it  in  1978,  was  not  from  the  privileged 
to  the  neighborhood  arts  but  to  diversity,  to  trying  to 
meet  the  needs  of  the  highly  varied  art  constituencies  in 
the  state.  He  regarded  this  change  as  not  only  desirable 
but  also  a  matter  of  political  realism.  In  this  time  when 
the  public  was  being  very  critical  of  the  use  of  its  taxes, 
he  said,  the  council  and  the  legislature  were  going  to 
have  to  be  responsive  to  the  votes  rather  than  support  the 
favorite  projects  of  a  relatively  small  number  of  people, 
such  as  the  big-city  arts  establishment.  What  impressed 
him  was  the  organizing,  letter  writing,  and  lobbying  for 
the  arts  that  was  occurring  at  the  grass  roots.  It  was 
community  arts  groups  that  were  the  emerging  power  in 
the  arts  and  they  had  the  votes,  he  said. 

The  issues  that  the  new  Arts  Council  raised  were  not 
only  the  state's  recognition  of  the  legitimacy  of  funding 
community  and  unorthodox  art  projects,  but  also  the 
smallness  of  the  state's  art  budget.  Compared  with  the 
New  York  allocation,  it  was  a  very  small  pie  indeed  that 
the  antagonists  were  fighting  over  for  a  state  with  an  even 
larger  population.  The  New  York  art  budget  was  ten 
times  California's.  For  fiscal  year  1977-78  the  council 
requested  $4.7  million  and  received  $3.4  million.  Asked 
what  it  would  take  to  do  the  job  the  California  Arts 
Council  should  do,  its  chairman  said  $50  million.  Al- 
though the  Arts  Council  showed  imagination,  the  fund- 
ing it  had  to  operate  with  severely  restricted  the  size  and 
number  of  pilot  programs  it  could  underwrite.  In  fact, 
there  was  a  question  whether  "pilot  program"  was  not  a 
euphemism  for  tokenism. 

Governor  Brown  was  building  a  reputation  for  par- 
simony based  on  the  view  that  expectations  of  what 
government  could  achieve  in  public  service  had  gotten 
out  of  hand.  This  new  austerity  was  a  response  to 
disenchantment  with  top-down  centralized  social  welfare 
programs  and  public  pressure  for  tax  reform.  Brown's 
strictures  on  behalf  of  government  retrenchment  had 
made  him  a  national  figure,  for  California's  problems 
were  nationwide.  The  state's  regressive  property  taxes 
provoked  the  Jarvis-Gann  Initiative,  Proposition  13, 
which  Brown  opposed  as  a  shotgun  approach,  but  which 
voters  carried  by  a  two-to-one  margin  in  June  1978.*^ 

The  impact  of  the  property  tax  revolt  on  art  programs 
sponsored  by  state  and  l(Kal  government  was  two  to 
three  times  as  great  as  those  on  other  human  services.** 
The  Arts  Council  budget  for  1978-79  was  slashed  60 
percent  from  a  proposed  $3.5  million  to  $1.4  million. 
This  left  California  ranking  forty-ninth  among  the  states 
for  per  capita  spending  on  the  arts.  One  result  of  the  cut 
was  to  eliminate  funding  for  the  council's  Artists  in 
Schools  and  Community  Program,  which  had  provided 
112  positions  in  1977-78.**  The  following  year  the  pro- 
gram was  suspended.  Another  loss  was  a  cutback  in  Art 


i 


in  Public  Buildings  that  had  been  legislated  in  1976.  This 
program  had  grown  out  of  efforts  of  muralists  and  other 
artists  to  secure  state  commissions  and  their  initial  suc- 
cess when  the  Department  of  Motor  Vehicles  hired  them 
to  use  a  portion  of  its  budget  for  repainting  its  147 
statewide  offices.  Under  the  new  program  $700,000  was 
appropriated  for  1977-78.  Artists  were  to  be  brought 
together  with  building  users  and  the  public  in  town 
meetings  to  discuss  proposals.  They  were  also  to  be 
involved  in  the  design  of  future  buildings  so  that  murals 
and  other  works  could  be  part  of  the  building  budget.^" 
One  of  the  casualties  of  Proposition  1 3  was  the  canceling 
of  $100,000  of  those  funds  for  a  commission  to  Terry 
Schoonhoven  of  the  Los  Angeles  Fine  Arts  Squad  to  do  a 
mural  in  the  State  Personnel  Building  in  Sacramento. 

The  most  crushing  effect  of  Jarvis-Gann  on  commu- 
nity public  art  was  the  ending  of  Citywide  Murals' 
subsidy  by  Los  Angeles.  It  was  also  to  be  expected  that 
further  cuts  in  spending  for  the  arts  would  result  from 
the  diversion  of  funds  to  "higher  priority  needs"  and  the 
eventual  drying  up  of  the  state's  surplus.  Brown  and  the 
Democratic  legislature  had  succeeded  in  adopting  the  tax 
revolt  as  their  own  issue  for  the  elections  of  fall  1978,  and 
new  efforts  at  austerity  were  in  the  offing.  CETA  fund- 
ing of  murals  in  California  was  not  immediately  affected. 
But  it  was  likely  that  local  governments  would  attempt  to 
use  their  CETA  positions  for  what  they  regarded  as 
essential  services  rather  than  "frills"  and  that  oppor- 
tunities for  artists  would  be  reduced.  The  long-term 
effect  of  Proposition  1 3  in  the  state  would  at  least  cripple 
the  renaissance  that  had  been  building  since  the  late 
sixties  with  its  neighborhood  arts  programs  and  murals. 
The  tax  revolt  quickly  spread  across  the  country  and  had 
an  impact  on  the  federal  budget  and  new  restrictive 
CETA  legislation.^'  A  major  effect  was  to  shift  the  local 
and  national  pressure  that  had  been  building  during 
recent  years  for  progressive  tax  reform  to  demands  for 
tax  relief;  instead  of  a  revenue  system  scaled  to  ability  to 
pay,  a  more  regressive  system  resulted  with  the  real 
estate  interests  and  big  business  as  the  principal 
beneficiaries.  Some  saw  the  revolt  as  a  decisive  step  in  the 
scuttling  of  welfare  state  liberalism  not  only  by  oppo- 
nents but  also  former  supporters. ^^  However,  the  effort 
to  reduce  regressive  taxes  did  not  point  to  a  thoroughgo- 
ing antigovernment  mood  sweeping  the  country.  Within 
a  year  of  the  passage  of  Proposition  1 3  the  failure  of  most 
landlords  to  pass  their  tax  savings  on  to  tenants  and  the 
continuing  increase  of  rents  produced  public  pressure  for 
rent  control,  which  was  adopted  in  Los  Angeles, 'Santa 
Monica,  Berkeley,  and  San  Francisco.  And  citizens  who 
benefited  from  threatened  government  services  mounted 
efforts  to  maintain  them. 

The  challenge  for  most  Americans  was  to  gain  control 
of  the  wealth  they  did  or  could  produce  in  order  to 
allocate  taxes  and  public  services  to  meet  their  needs 
equitably.  This  issue  was  most  acute  in  the  communities 
that  had  used  murals  before  to  express  their  concerns. 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  I  43 1 

but  a  major  effort  at  self-education  was  also  necessary 
among  the  middle-income  public,  which  had  little  previ- 
ous experience  of  murals.  The  mural  process  provided  a 
vehicle  for  local  people  to  discuss  and  project  their  views 
on  the  new  crisis.  The  issues  of  taxation  and  public 
services  might  seem  abstract  but  their  consequences  were 
very  concrete.  The  problem  for  muralists  was  to  come  to 
grips  with  them  and  to  translate  ideas  into  imagery. 

CENSORSHIP 

Kristan  Wainwright,  the  director  of  Boston's  Sum- 
merthing,  said  in  1974  that  corporate  money  that  came  to 
her  program  was  partly  motivated  by  the  racial  distur- 
bances of  the  sixties.  One  of  the  first  murals  sponsored 
by  Summerthing,  the  1968  work  that  showed  Stokely 
Carmichael  and  "Rap"  Brown,  ignited  public  con- 
troversy and  shook  up  the  staff.  From  then  until  1971, 
only  3  percent  of  Summerthing's  murals,  Wainwright 
said,  had  political  or  social  content  because  the  city  had 
just  begun  the  program  and  the  office  personnel  were 
anxious  to  keep  the  flow  of  private  and  public  money 
coming.  After  1971  the  proportion  of  socially  conscious 
murals  declined  further.  Summerthing's  reluctance  to  do 
political  murals  because  of  its  fear  of  offending  the 
sources  of  its  funds  exemplifies  how  censorship  may  arise 
not  only  at  the  top  of  the  power  structure  but  also  from 
people  in  its  bureaucracy  who  may  think  of  themselves  as 
serving  ghetto  residents  and  therefore  want  their  pro- 
gram to  survive.  And  of  course  it  is  also  difficult  not  to 
think  of  the  threat  to  your  own  job. 

Cityarts  Workshop  in  New  York,  as  we  saw,  trans- 
formed itself  in  1972  from  a  government  agency  into  an 
independent  public  service  corporation  in  order  to  escape 
censorship. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  are  instances  where  govern- 
ment has  protected  muralists  against  censorship.  The 
"Stop  the  Pig"  caption  was  the  pretext  of  a  campaign  by 
the  Venice-Marina  Women's  Chamber  of  Commerce 
against  the  Jaya  Collective's  mural  attacking  redevelop- 
ment that  threatened  local  low-rent  housing.  The  defen- 
ders of  respectability  picketed  the  mural's  dedication  and 
complained  to  the  Los  Angeles  Parks  and  Recreation 
Department,  but  it  upheld  the  right  of  the  muralists  to 
make  their  statement. 

Jose  Gonzalez,  looking  back  in  1979  over  ten  years  of 
work,  said  that  he  and  other  Goez  Gallery  artists  had  not 
been  as  politically  outspoken  as  they  would  have  liked  to 
have  been.  He  believed  that  they  could  not  have  survived 
as  a  business  had  they  said  on  their  walls  what  they 
wanted  to.  He  felt  that,  because  they  were  dependent  on 
local  merchants  like  the  First  Str/set  Store  or  the  Crocker 
Bank,  institutions  such  as  the  parochial  Silesian  High 
School,  and  local  government  for  commissions,  they  had 
to  temf)er  their  expression.  He  contrasted  this  to  the 
work  of  other  muralists  who  received  funding  from  more 
remote  public  sources  like  the  NEA.  He  told  of  how  a 


432  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

monsignor  in  the  chancery  of  the  Los  Angeles  archdio- 
cese had  made  it  clear  to  him  that  were  a  farmworkers' 
banner  not  removed  from  the  mural  at  Silesian,  the 
church  restoration  work  that  Goez  could  reasonably 
expect  to  get  would  not  be  forthcoming.  The  thunder- 
bird  was  not  painted  out,  and  Goez  bids  for  work  were 
not  even  responded  to  by  the  Church.  Gonzalez  said  that 
he  went  to  mass  every  Sunday,  but  he  understood  that 
ecclesiastical  authorities  had  their  frailties  like  everyone 
else. 

In  Blue  Island,  a  suburb  of  Chicago,  Jose  Nario,  a 
machinist  and  amateur  artist,  conceived  the  idea  of  a 
mural  that  would  express  the  experience  of  the  town's 
Chicanos  and  celebrate  both  the  Bicentennial  and  Mexi- 
can Independence  Day.^^  He  won  the  cooperation  of  the 
local  Latin  American  Advisory  Council,  MARCH 
(Movimiento  Artistico  Chicano),  the  Illinois  Labor  His- 
tory Society  and  the  state  Arts  Council,  which  rriade  a 
grant  of  $2,000.  Experienced  muralists  Ray  Patlan  and 
Vincente  Mendoza  were  to  join  Nario  on  the  side  of  one 
of  the  Chicano  shops  which  down  by  the  river  lay 
beneath  a  bridge  carrying  the  town's  main  traffic.  The 
fifty-foot  mural  was  to  picture  farm  workers  beneath 
their  thunderbird,  Chicanos  working  on  a  rail  bed  and  in 
the  steel  industry,  in  meat  packing,  and  in  medicine.  In 
their  midst  were  the  words  of  Lincoln  declaring  the 
strength  of  sympathy  among  working  people  all  over  the 
world,  and  of  Jose  Vasconcelos,  the  Mexican  minister  of 
education  who  sponsored  the  first  murals  of  the  Revolu- 
tion, calling  on  his  countrymen  to  maintain  their  interest 
in  their  homeland.  The  artists  titled  it  the  History  of 
Mexican  American  Workers.  In  September  1974,  the  Blue 
Island  city  council  refused  a  permit,  claiming  the  mural 
would  be  a  violation  of  a  local  sign  ordinance  because  of 


the  farm  workers'  symbol.  A  building  commissioner  said 
that  "We  have  a  great  deal  more  non-Spanish-speaking 
people  than  Spanish-speaking.  The  Italian  people,  the 
Polish,  the  German,  they  seem  a  little  unhappy  about 
jj  "94  Xhere  were  in  fact  two  thousand  Spanish-speaking 
people  in  the  city  of  twenty-five  thousand.  Without  a 
permit  the  artists  went  ahead  with  the  painting  and 
turned  to  the  American  Civil  Liberties  Union,  which 
filed  a  brief  in  U.S.  district  court.  Nario  received 
threatening  phone  calls  and  his  home  was  vandalized.** 
But  local  people,  including  Anglos,  came  to  the  painters' 
assistance,  providing  additional  hands,  lending  scaffold- 
ing, and  offering  food.  Chicago  muralists  came  down  to 
help.  The  mural  was  nearly  completed  when  the  Court 
asked  that  work  cease  pending  a  decision. 

The  ACLU  argued  that  the  Supreme  Court  had  previ- 
ously extended  the  First  Amendment  of  the  Constitution 
to  a  political  cartoon  because  a  pictorial  means  of  com- 
munication was  equivalent  to  a  written  work.  A  mural 
should  be  similarly  protected,  the  ACLU  said.  Judge 
Richard  B.  Austen,  holding  that  a  mural  is  not  an 
"advertising"  or  "business  sign,"  ruled  that 

The  Blue  Island  Ordinances  regulating  signs  do  not 
cover  this  situation.  The  Plaintiffs'  mural  does  not 
"direct  attention  to  a  product,  place,  activity,  person 
or  institution"  ;  it  seeks  to  portray  an  idea  and  it  is 
exactly  this  kind  of  expression  which  the  First 
Amendment  protects  from  government  interference.®® 

The  ACLU  regards  this  as  one  of  the  most  important  art 
cases  in  constitutional  law.®^ 


Jose  Nario,  Ray  Patlan,  and  Vincente  Mendoza:  History 
of  Mexican  American  Workers,  1974-75,  Blue  Is- 
land, Illinois. 


However,  the  ruling  did  not  entirely  clarify  the  situa- 
tion, according  to  Hamish  Sandison  of  the  Bay  Area 
Lawyers  for  the  Arts.  He  said  that  under  its  police 
jx)wers,  a  municipality  could  attempt  to  regulate  the 
quality,  if  not  the  content,  of  a  mural.  For  instance,  it 
could  seek  to  prohibit  "incompetent"  painting  or  forbid 
all  pictorial  work  in  order  to  preserve  the  environmental 
quality  of  an  area.  What  "competent"  work  was,  par- 
ticularly in  the  case  of  murals,  was  open  to  dispute.  And 
there  was  a  good  deal  of  overlap  between  content  and 
quality,  so  that  a  governmental  agency  might  seek  to 
prohibit  a  politically  controversial  mural  on  grounds  of 
quality.  Whether  muralists'  First  Amendment  right  to 
freedom  of  speech  took  precedence  in  such  cases  might 
have  to  be  tested  in  the  courts. 

With  the  court  decision  won,  the  Blue  Island  painters 
waited  for  the  warm  weather  to  return  to  finish  their 
work;  when  it  was  almost  completed,  it  was  defaced  with 
paint  splattered  across  it.  But  the  mural  was  restored  and 
dedicated  during  the  summer. 

The  Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front  was  unaware  of  the 
federal  court  decision  when  Esteban  Villa  and  Jose 
Montoya  returned  to  their  teaching  at  Sacramento  State 
University  after  summer  vacation  in  1976  and  found  that 
seventy  student  murals  on  campus  had  been 
whitewashed.  The  order  had  come  from  the  Chancellor 
of  the  State  University  System,  Glenn  Dumke,  they 
were  told,  as  the  result  of  an  "offensive"  mural  done  by 
Black  students  at  Long  Beach  State.  Executive  Order  1 1 3 
required  the  removing  of  murals  on  all  state  campuses 
and  established  a  moratorium  on  wall  art.  When  Villa 
discovered  what  had  happened,  he  flew  into  a  rage  and 
began  painting  an  impromptu  mural  until  restrained  by 
security  personnel.  The  mural  survived  forty-five  min- 
utes, he  says,  and  Villa  himself  hardly  lasted  longer, 
since  efforts  were  made  to  fire  him  for  defacing  public 
property.  Charges  were  finally  dropped  after  Montoya 
had  to  argue  with  authorities  that  Villa  had  been  upset. 
He  says  that  murals  on  other  state  campuses  were  also 
whitewashed;  however,  wall  art  at  San  Jose  and  San 
Francisco  State  was  not  touched.  The  state  chancellor's 
office  in  1979  had  no  recall  of  these  events  but  pointed 
out  that  it  had  retained  the  authority  to  approve  all 
exterior  art  on  campuses  between  1973  and  1977  when 
it  delegated  this  responsibility  to  the  presidents  of  the 
individual  universities  and  colleges.'*  While  the  facts 
thus  are  in  dispute,  the  questions  of  free  expression 
in  a  public  institution  and  the  ability  of  students  and 
faculty  to  pursue  regular  curricula  without  administrators' 
interference  remain  at  issue. 

Censorship  need  not  be  direct.  In  1977  the  Illinois  Arts 
Council  refused  to  fund  the  Chicago  Mural  Group  or  any 
mural  projects  on  the  grounds  that  "social  action"  was 
incompatible  with  art."^*  However,  it  did  decide  to 
re-fund  the  CMG  the  following  year. 

In  contrast  to  the  New  Deal  art  projects  that  directly 
hired  artists,  wide  discretion  has  been  given  to  the  mu- 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  43} 

nicipal  authorities  that  distribute  CETA  positions  and 
the  few  that  control  NEA  money  for  muralists.  While 
the  federal  government  in  the  thirties  and  forties  super- 
vised content  of  murals  in  varying  degrees  and  often 
came  under  pressure  by  congressmen  and  other  watch- 
dogs of  public  taste  and  safety,  it  has  been  local  con- 
straints that  community  muralists  are  most  exposed  to. 
City  officials  and  public  bodies  are  often  conservative 
themselves  or  subject  to  the  pressure  of  the  local  estab- 
lishment. 

John  Weber  reports  that  his  fellow  CMG  muralist, 
Mitchell  Caton,  who  had  served  as  a  CETA  artist  during 
1977/78  was  not  renewed  because  he  ran  into  trouble 
with  the  director  of  the  Board  of  Health  clinic  w  here  he 
had  been  assigned  as  artist  in  residence.  The  director  had 
disapproved  of  the  open  beaks  of  the  birds  Caton  painted 
because  they  were  "phallic-aggressive."  Lynn  Tekata, 
another  CMG  muralist,  got  into  similar  difficulty  during 
her  CETA  assignment  at  a  child-care  center  when  a 
commissioner  of  the  Department  of  Human  Services 
wanted  her  to  change  a  crying  child  in  her  mural.  She 
refused  and  received  the  support  of  the  parents  and  at 
first  the  director  of  the  center,  until  pressure  was  brought 
and  she  was  dropped  from  the  program.  Weber  says  that 
CETA  muralists  sometimes  were  sent  to  agencies  that 
had  not  requested  them  and  that  frequently  the  artists 
were  expected  to  do  the  routine  work  of  the  agency, 
when  in  fact  law  required  that  they  not  replace  regular 
personnel  but  provide  special  services  not  budgeted  by 
the  agency. 

CETA  funding  in  San  Francisco  in  1977,  that 
amounted  to  $39.3  million,  was  to  be  made  available  not 
only  to  government  agencies  but  also  to  private  nonprofit 
organizations  that  were  undertaking  public  service  proj- 
ects.'"^  Three-quarters  of  the  applicants  that  the  city 
Manpower  Planning  Council  selected  and  were  approved 
by  the  mayor  were  nonprofit  groups,  and  the  Board  of 
Supervisors  (the  city  and  county  legislative  body),  which 
was  dominated  by  downtown  interests,  held  up  approval 
of  the  grants,  charging  that  the  mayor  had  selected 
organizations  that  he  wanted  to  work  for  him  in  the 
upcoming  election.  A  compromise  required  adding 
twenty-five  CETA  positions  to  monitor  the  959  others  to 
insure  that  they  were  nonpolitical.  In  addition  a  panel 
made  up  of  a  supervisor  and  other  officials  would  review 
each  of  the  proposals.  The  politics  and  bureaucracy  were 
not  likely  to  encourage  outspoken  murals. 

CETA  and  other  federal  and  state  funding  for  the  arts 
were  vulnerable  to  other  abuses  at  the  local  level.  In 
San  Francisco  the  Art  Commission,  on  which  busi- 
ness and  the  establishment  arts  were  strongly  repre- 
sented, insisted  since  1975  on  the  review  of  works 
going  up  on  neighborhood  walls  with  money  for  which 
it  functioned  as  conduit,  although  the  Commission's 
staff  said  it  was  only  to  insure  quality.  Wall  paintings 
were  to  avoid  both  political  and  religious  subjects, 
but    these   guidelines    have    not   been    legally    tested. 


434  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

These  regulations,  Rene  Yanez  said,  were  the  first  official 
prior  censorship  that  had  been  exercised  on  a  large  scale 
over  murals  in  the  city.  This,  too,  could  not  but  chill  the 
frankness  of  artists. 

Many  muralists  recognized  that  regulations  which  for- 
bade political  content  in  public  art  neglected  conve- 
niently that  patriotic  sentiments  were  not  censored. 
They  learned  that  it  was  only  when  conformity  was 
questioned  that  objections  were  raised  about  the  political 
content  of  art.  The  socially  conscious  understood  that  all 
art  was  in  fact  political.  By  a  work's  silence  on  its  social 
context  as  much  as  by  any  explicit  statement  it  made,  it 
was  partisan. 

Judy  Baca  in  1978  said  that  the  councilman  for  East 
Los  Angeles,  Arthur  Snyder,  was  forcing  muralists  to 
get  approval  of  their  designs  by  the  authorities.  This  was 
being  unofficially  enforced  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  regu- 
lations only  required  that  painters  collect  signatures  of 
approval  from  local  residents.  In  response  muralists 
mounted  a  petition  campaign  in  the  neighborhoods  to 
end  this  censorship.  Baca  also  said  that  since  CETA 
funding  began  in  Los  Angeles  in  1977,  there  were  only 
twenty-three  Chicanos  out  of  the  five  hundred  artists 
hired  under  the  program  in  a  city  where  well  over  half 
the  population  was  Chicano. 

In  1978  San  Diego  adopted  an  ordinance  that  required 
that  muralists  working  on  publicly  owned  walls  get 
approval  from  five  different  bodies  and  guarantee  main- 
taining their  work  for  seven  years.  This  seemed  to  be 
particularly  aimed  at  obstructing  the  muralists  who 
worked  on  the  pylons  of  Chicano  Park.""  The  response 
of  the  muralists  was  to  go  on  painting  as  before.*"* 

Other  cities  like  Madison,  Wisconsin,  have  gone 
further  and  claimed  the  right  to  censor  not  only  murals 
on  public  property  but  also  works  in  public  view.'°^ 

It  is  understandable  why  some  muralists  have  resorted 
to  not  very  noble  expedients  to  say  what  they  have 
wanted  to  say.  They  describe  how  they  sometimes  feel 
obliged  to  leave  out  details  in  their  presentation  drawings 
that  they  fear  the  agencies  or  patrons  that  screen  them 
will  not  approve;  later  at  the  wall  these  details  are  painted 
in.  Or  the  artists  ignore  requests  that  details  be  altered. 
This  risks  repercussions,  but  once  the  offending  image  is 
before  the  public,  it  is  often  hard  to  have  it  changed. 

Censorship  of  content  has  not  been  the  only  way  that 
government  had  exercised  arbitrary  control.  In  1975 
Susan  Cervantes,  a  San  Francisco  .Mission  District 
muralist,  was  doing  two-story-high  paintings  on  the 
outside  walls  of  the  Bernal  Heights  public  housing  proj- 
ect with  the  enthusiastic  cooperation  of  the  residents. 
She  was  bitter  that  the  city  Housing  Authority  had  cut 
back  on  the  number  of  murals  it  had  agreed  to  fund  and 
also  that  it  insisted  that  the  two  yet  to  be  done  were  to 
face  a  major  traffic  artery,  where  drivers  would  see  them, 
rather  than  the  play  areas  and  park  where  the  children 
and  tenants'  union  wanted  them.  Moreover,  tenants  at 
public  housing  sites  began  complaining  that  their  most 


urgent  need  was  for  repairs  of  plumbing  and  windows, 
not  murals.  The  muralists  found  themselves  being  used 
to  "paper  over"  serious  neglect  by  the  Housing  Author- 
ity, and  they  insisted  that  they  would  do  no  murals  until 
it  made  a  commitment  to  carry  through  the  necessary 
repairs. 

In  1979  the  survival  of  the  joyous  mosaic  benches 
around  Grant's  Tomb  in  New  York  that  had  been  cre- 
ated earlier  in  the  decade  by  Pedro  Silva  and  hundreds 
of  local  people  was  challenged  by  descendants  of  the 
president  and  traditionalists  who  pressed  the  National 
Park  Service  to  remove  the  mosaics.  Community  artists 
and  people  mounted  a  Citizens  Committee  to  Save  the 
Benches,  and  the  NPS  undertook  a  study  which  yielded 
an  elaborate  "Analysis  of  Management  Alternatives"  that 
included  options  to  relocate  or  demolish  the  benches. 
By  early  1981  one  more  struggle  between  the  establish- 
ment and  people's  art  was  still  dragging  on. 

COOL-OUT  AND  CO-OPTATION 

Muralists  have  frequently  pointed  with  pride  to  the 
support  that  they  have  received  from  small  business 
people.  Shopowners  and  local  industry  have  offered 
them  walls  and  contributed  money  and  supplies  because 
they  have  recognized  the  murals  as  assets  to  the  commu- 
nity. The  muralists'  feelings  about  the  support  they  have 
received  from  big  business  with  local  branches  is  mixed, 
and  this  is  true  about  the  government  funding  they  have 
received  as  well.  The  painters  are  aware  that  corporate 
and  public  money  was  pumped  into  the  ghettos  and 
barrios  as  a  result  of  the  urban  riots  and  that  some  of  this 
funded  art  programs  like  Boston's  Summerthing.  As 
Brian  O'Doherty,  the  director  of  the  National  Endow- 
ment for  the  Arts  program  that  financed  inner-city  mur- 
als, acknowledged,  when  the  "radical  mood"  passed,  the 
funding  faded.  Among  the  large  corporate  donors  was 
Exxon,  which  has  made  grants  to  Cityarts  Workshop. 
Also  the  publication  it  sends  to  its  stockholders,  Exxon 
USA,  did  articles  in  1973  and  1974  on  the  mural 
movement — tactfully  in  two  issues,  one  on  Black,  the 
other  on  Chicano  wall  painting.'"'*  They  were  illustrated 
in  color  and  written  by  leading  Black  and  Chicano  schol- 
ars. Such  undertakings  projected  the  image  of  one  of  the 
largest  corporations  in  the  world  as  a  firm  that  neverthe- 
less was  concerned  about  ordinary  people  and  the  up- 
lifting of  community  life.  It  was  difficult  not  to  interpret 
this  as  its  using  the  mural  movement  to  legitimize  its 
power.  Philanthropy  and  the  advertising  of  civic- 
mindedness  were  common  enough  among  the  business 
giants  as  a  means  of  diffusing  public  criticism  of  their 
operations. 

The  issue  of  co-optation  has  arisen  when  the  artists 
have  had  to  decide  whether  to  accept  the  sponsorship  of 
firms  that  they  knew  were  exploiting  people,  particularly 
the  local  community  (although  personnel  might  be 
friendly  enough  and  recruited  from  residents).    This 


question  occurred  in  1974  when  the  Bank  of  America 
commissioned  a  group  of  Raza  artists  under  the  direction 
of  Jesus  Campusano  to  do  a  ninety-foot  mural  above  the 
tellers'  cages  in  a  branch  bank  in  San  Francisco's  Mission 
District.  The  offer  presented  a  serious  problem  to  the 
artists  because  the  Bank  of  America  was  one  of  the  pillars 
of  California  agribusiness  that  had  been  oppressing 
Latino  farm  workers  for  decades.  The  artists  understood 
that  to  the  Bank  of  America  a  mural  done  by  local 
painters  was  good  fire  insurance,  for  its  Isia  Vista  branch 
in  Santa  Barbara  had  been  burned  down  by  demon- 
strators and  its  Berkeley  branch  had  been  trashed.  But 
the  artists  decided  to  go  ahead  with  the  work  and  chose  to 
be  outspoken.  Campusano  says  that  the  only  modifica- 
tion the  bank  required  was  the  removal  of  the  symbol  of 
the  Symbionese  Liberation  Army,  which  he  adds  was  an 
afterthought  on  the  part  of  one  of  the  painters  and  not 
necessary  to  their  intentions.  However,  the  central  sec- 
tion of  the  mural,  as  we  saw,  shows  a  young  laborer 
nailed  to  a  cross  on  the  ground  and  another  figure 
thrusting  up  a  book  with  the  words  of  Cesar  Chavez 
clearly  inscribed:  "Our  sweat  and  our  blood  have  fallen 
on  this  land  to  make  other  men  rich."  Elsewhere  the 
mural  stresses  militant  struggle  as  one  of  the  means 
necessary  for  the  community  to  come  into  its  own. 

It  is  at  first  glance  surprising  that  bank  officials  did  not 
require  further  changes.  They  never  questioned  Chavez's 
words  or  the  image  of  the  Zapatalike  fighter.  Campusano 
thinks  they  did  not  understand  them.  Once  they  were  on 
the  wall,  however,  it  is  unlikely  that  the  bank  would  have 
risked  the  certain  scandal  that  asking  to  have  them  re- 
moved would  have  produced.  Some  local  Latinos  were 
not  surprised  at  the  bank's  indulgence.  They  questioned 
whether  the  thrust  of  the  mural's  message  might  not  be 
lost  on  ordinary  depositors  who  would  think  how  nice 
that  the  Bank  of  America  honored  La  Raza.  Perhaps 
what  they  had  been  told  of  its  activities  in  the  farm 
country  was  exaggerated.  The  dissenting  activists  distri- 
buted leaflets  at  the  dedication  and  captured  the  mike  to 
remind  the  bank's  patrons. 

Other  artists  around  the  country  when  they  learned  of 
the  mural  agreed  with  its  painters'  decision.  Alan  Okada, 
then  codirector  of  the  Cityarts  Workshop  in  New  York, 
spoke  for  most  when  he  observed  that  muralists  needed 
walls  in  public  places  and  that  many  of  those  walls  were 
owned  by  corporations  that  were  concerned  more  about 
profits  than  people.  As  long  as  business  did  not  interfere 
with  the  message  painters  wanted  to  project,  he  believed 
that  muralists  should  go  ahead  and  paint.  Campusano 
pointed  out  that  Rivera  after  all  did  not  turn  down  such 
commissions,  though  he  risked  having  his  murals  de- 
stroyed. Other  muralists  spoke  of  the  need  to  remind  the 
community  repeatedly  about  the  significance  of  a  mural 
through  leafleting  and  articles  so  that  its  meaning  was 
kept  alive. 

In  1975  Time  magazine  reported: 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  /  435 

"East  Los"  also  has  more  than  its  share  of  vandalism, 
burglary  and  car  thefts,  in  large  part  committed  by 
tough  Chicano  gangs  that  mark  their  territory  w  ith 
special  graffiti  caWca  placas.  Yet  in  the  past  two  years, 
there  has  been  a  remarkable  change  in  the  barrio. 
Reports  Los  Angeles  Police  Captain  George  Morrison: 
"Officers  on  foot  patrol  say  that  they  notice  an  increase 
in  community  pride,  a  new  awareness  of  self  worth." 
.  .  .  What  has  made  most  of  the  difference  is  some  200 
huge  murals  on  the  sides  of  once  drab  buildings.'"* 

There  can  be  no  complaint  about  the  desirability  of  these 
effects.  However,  many  muralists  knew  that  their  work 
was  regarded  by  the  police  and  the  establishment  as 
means  of  cooling  long  hot  summers.  It  w  as  much  cheaper 
to  provide  a  few  thousand  dollars  here  and  there  for  w  all 
paintings,  dollars  that  government  could  divert  and  big 
business  could  w  rite  off  as  tax  deductions,  than  to  deal 
with  the  real  causes  of  delinquency  and  crime — 
unemployment,  tracking  ghetto  youngsters  in  school  for 
menial  dead-end  jobs,  and  police  harassment.  Street 
crime  threatened  the  plans  of  real  estate  and  corporate 
interests  and  increased  taxes  for  police  protection.  Rob- 
beries and  muggings  kept  shoppers  and  tourists  away 
from  downtown  and  interfered  with  efforts  to  bring 
office  personnel  from  the  suburbs  back  to  new  high  rises 
and  tow  n  houses  in  the  inner  city  to  restore  business  and 
the  urban  tax  base.  Murals  were  not  only  ways  of 
keeping  idle  hands  busy  and  placating  ethnic  working 
class  neighborhoods;  they  could  also  contribute  to  the 
picturesqueness  of  the  city  and  attract  visitors. 

Both  the  establishment  and  muralists  knew  that  w  all 
paintings  redirected  the  hostilities  of  the  young.  But  Time 
magazine  did  not  altogether  understand  why  delin- 
quency often  declined  in  the  barrios  w here  murals  were 
done,  or  it  would  not  speak  of  them  in  such  glow  ing 
terms.  For  the  paintings  often  identified  the  real  source  of 
young  people's  frustrations  that  led  to  violence  and  van- 
dalism, and  helped  to  build  local  self-reliance  and  politi- 
cal power  that  threatened  the  grip  of  the  establishment. 
The  only  w  ay  the  muralists  could  avoid  being  co-opted 
was  by  helping  community  people  understand  their 
problems  and  encouraging  them  to  organize. 

There  was  a  contradiction  central  to  the  funding  of  the 
mural  movement.  While  on  the  one  hand  big  business 
and  government  were  seeking  to  use  the  murals  to  serve 
their  special  interests,  many  of  the  artists  w  anted  to  use 
art  as  a  means  of  combating  the  establishment.  While  this 
might  be  seen  as  a  struggle  of  w  ho  would  co-opt  w  hom, 
the  muralists  and  their  communities  w  ere  trying  to  make 
at  least  the  government,  presumably  their  agents,  re- 
sponsive. At  the  same  time,  there  were  disagreements 
among  muralists  about  the  degree  of  their  cooperation 
with  the  establishment  to  secure  funding.  Alonso  Davis, 
a  studio  artist  as  w  ell  as  a  member  of  Street  Graphics,  the 
Los  Angeles  group  of  Black  muralists,  said  at  a  murals 


436  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

conference  there  in  1976  that  he  wanted  to  make  a  Hving 
vsage  from  his  art  and  that  it  w as  necessary  therefore  to 
compromise  w  ith  the  system.  But  he  added  that  you  have 
to  take  advantage  of  it,  move  around  and  through  it. 
Judith  Hernandez,  an  East  Los  Angeles  muraiist,  re- 
sponded that  there  must  be  no  more  compromise,  that  it 
w  as  necessary  to  fight  oppression  and  maintain  a  guerrilla 
attitude  toward  it,  using  government  money  against  it.  It 
therefore  seemed  especially  important  to  ^  her  that 
muralists  "get  together  to  run  their  own  show."  Al- 
though both  wanted  muralists  to  use  public  funding, 
there  was  a  decided  difference  in  the  tactics  each  had  in 
mind.  It  was  widely  agreed  among  the  socially  conscious 
muralists  that  all  of  them  were  engaged  in  a  struggle  with 
the  establishment  and  that  they  wanted  to  use  its  own 
resources  against  it,  as  long  as  no  restraints  were  placed 
on  their  freedom  of  expression.  They  also  understood 
that  those  resources,  whether  from  government  or  busi- 
ness, ultimately  came  from  the  work  of  ordinary  people. 
Malaquias  Montoya  is  one  of  the  Bay  Area  Chicano 
artists  most  concerned  about  the  co-optation  of  muralists 
by  the  system.  He  has  done  a  number  of  murals  in  San 
Jose  and  Oakland  but  is  best  known  for  his  highly 
accomplished  graphic  art.  He  resigned  as  director  of  the 
art  section  of  the  Chicano  Studies  Program  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  California  at  Berkeley  in  1974  because  he 
believed  it  was  trying  to  become  academically  "respecta- 
ble" rather  than  developing  Raza  cornmunity  and  cul- 
ture. It  was  ordinary  people  in  the  street  whom  he 
believed  Chicano  artists  should  be  trying  to  reach.  He 
said  he  saw  too  many  of  his  companeros  use  their  art  as 
means  of  raising  themselves  out  of  the  barrio  and  never 
returning.  He  was  suspicious  of  the  term  "profes- 
sionalism" when  it  implied  a  prestigious  position  and 
good  income.  He  was  one  of  those  who  had  criticized 
Latino  painters  for  doing  the  mural  in  the  Bank  of 
America  in  San  Francisco.  He  felt  it  not  only  dignified  an 
oppressive  institution  but  also  was  not  sufficiently  out- 
spoken. For  similar  reasons  he  had  refused  to  exhibit  in 
mainstream  museums,  though  invited.  .Museums,  he 
said,  should  support  satellite  galleries  in  the  neighbor- 
hoods; but  in  spite  of  token  concessions  to  the  commu- 
nity, they  continued  to  pursue  the  priorities  of  their 
major  donors.  He  also  refused  to  participate  in  television 
shows,  because  he  believed  the  net  effect  would  be  his 
reinforcing  the  advertisers.  To  become  involved  in  the 
establishment  institutions  seemed  to  him  to  imply  his 
consent  and  tended  to  legitimize  them.  He  was  suspi- 
cious that  government  funding  would  turn  artists'  heads 
so  that  they  would  become  preoccupied  with  their  per- 
sonal reputations.  .Murals  were  being  used  by  the  estab- 
lishment as  "therapy"  in  the  barrio,  he  charged.  They 
had  become  "trendy"  and  were  in  danger  of  losing  their 
cutting  edge.  He  said  that  it  was  natural  for  this  to 
happen,  but  he  hoped  that  some  artists  would  be  able  to 
resist  being  co-opted.  For  himself,  his  refusal  to  get 
drawn  into  the  mainstream  often  left  him  lonely.  But  he 


was  still  working  with  young  people  on  community 
murals  and  posters.  Commissions  for  graphics  came  from 
as  far  away  as  Los  Angeles  and  Texas.  Even  though  these 
posters  might  be  for  a  neighborhood  dance,  he  said,  their 
Mexican  imagery  helped  create  a  sense  of  cultural  iden- 
tity and  pride.  He  was  willing  to  accept  some  funding 
from  the  Alameda  County  Neighborhood  Arts  Program 
to  secure  materials  for  murals  and  graphics,  but  he  felt 
that  doing  business  with  the  establishment  was  a  matter 
that  required  scrupulousness  and  self-discipline. 

.Montoya's  solitary  stance  did  not  make  him  ineffec- 
tual. He  was  widely  known  and  respected  by  local 
artists.  When  the  move  got  under  way  by  a  number  of 
muralists  for  a  weekend  symposium  in  1976,  the  Oakland 
.Museum  offered  to  host  the  affair.  But  .Montoya  said  that 
he  could  not  participate  because  he  believed  the  museum 
was  not  seriously  oriented  to  the  development  of  com- 
munity arts  and  was  only  going  to  capitalize  on  the 
current  public  interest  in  murals.  His  quiet  refusal, 
which  involved  no  effort  to  persuade  others,  in  the  end 
persuaded  enough  participants  so  that  the  symposium 
was  transferred  to  a  community  college. 

Although  .Montoya  had  sought  to  use  the  establish- 
ment's resources,  he  found  that  there  was  a  point  where 
cooperation  meant  weakening  his  efforts  to  strengthen 
the  Chicano  community.  There  was  no  choice  then  but 
to  walk  way.  This  decision  demanded  not  only  moral 
courage  but  also  the  perceptiveness  to  know  when  he  was 
being  co-opted. 

The  judgment  of  different  equally  conscientious  artists 
would  vary  in  the  same  situations  and  depended  partly  on 
an  estimate  of  what  strengths  each  had  to  change  an 
institution  and  use  it  for  the  people  it  was  supposed  to 
serve.  Rene  Yaiiez,  John  Weber,  and  many  other 
muralists  were  as  concerned  as  Montoya  in  the  late 
seventies  about  the  establishment's  success  in  domes- 
ticating murals,  particularly  under  CETA.  There  was  a 
serious  danger  that  local  bureaucracies,  political 
machines,  and  art  establishments,  together  with  artists 
willing  to  take  advantage  of  the  funding,  were  blunting 
the  social  activism  of  murals  and  making  them  safe. 
Weber  addressed  his  colleagues  in  the  pages  of  the  Na- 
tional Murals  Network  Newsletter  in  1978  warning  of  the 
problem  and  calling  on  them  to  redouble  their  "efforts  to 
maintain  authentic  contact  with  the  grassroots  and  every 
progressive  spark  coming  from  the  grassroots.'''"'  At  a 
time  when  funding  was  becoming  increasingly  precari- 
ous and  the  temptations  of  being  co-opted  were  consider- 
able, a  new  effort  by  muralists  to  strengthen  their  rela- 
tions with  their  neighborhoods  and  to  help  provide  for 
their  growing  interest  in  community  arts  and  revive  their 
social  activism  seemed  essential. 

Murals  and  the  Politics  of  Community 

Efforts  will  continue  to  censor  and  control  community 
murals  and  restrict  public  funds  for  them,  especially 


those  that  are  socially  outspoken,  as  long  as  there  is 
reason  for  them  to  be  critical  of  the  status  quo — that  is,  as 
long  as  there  are  privilege  and  exploitation.  Muralists 
understand  that  their  strongest  defense  against  censor- 
ship by  public  officials  and  the  establishment  is  the 
support  of  local  people — their  signatures  endorsing  mu- 
rals, letters  to  officials  and  their  coming  out  to  public 
meetings.  Close  relations  between  muralists  and  the 
community  are  also  important  for  funding.  At  the  murals 
conference  in  Los  Angeles  in  1976  .Mark  Rogovin  urged 
painters  to  look  to  local  business  and  labor  unions  for 
support.  John  Weber,  agreeing,  also  advised  against 
foregoing  government  funding  because  of  the  difficulties 
and  regulations.  He  warned  against  depending  on  private 
funding  as  an  alternative  to  the  opportunities  that  public 
services  and  schools  offered.  "We  must  make  mainstream 
institutions  work  for  the  people,"  he  said.  Edgar  Neiss, 
the  cultural  arts  director  of  the  Los  Angeles  County 
Parks  and  Recreation  Department,  added  that  it  is 
important  for  communities  to  bring  pressure  on  their 
officials  and  representatives  in  government  to  secure 
support  for  murals.  The  matter  was  put  forcefully  on 
another  occasion  by  Dewey  Crumpler,  who  asserted: 
"The  only  way  for  there  to  be  murals  which  people  in 
the  communities  will  see  and  enjoy  and  which  say  some- 
thing, is  for  people  to  get  together  and  demand  not  just 
that  they  get  painted,  but  that  the  city  pay  for  them.""" 

Observing  that  it  was  difficult  for  socially  conscious 
muralists  to  find  progressive  sponsors  and  that  federally 
funded  programs  were  short-lived,  Caryl  Yasko  argued 
in  1978  that  "the  artists  must  take  the  initiative  in  build- 
ing self-sufficient  communities  that  actively  support  and 
create  a  public  visual  dialogue."'"*  She  said  that  it  was 
local  small,  family-owned  businesses  that  put  their 
money  back  into  the  community  that  were  vital  to 
muralists.  They  could  afford  only  small  monetary  con- 
tributions but  often  donated  paints  and  other  materials. 
She  urged  muralists  to  cultivate  this  kind  of  assistance, 
but  not  to  allow  any  one  firm  to  be  sole  patron  of  a 
project  lest  it  seek  to  control  it.  The  ideal  funding  base, 
she  said,  was  a  "careful  balance  of  federal,  state,  city,  and 
corporate  backing"  that  made  possible  accountability  to 
the  local  community.  "The  public,"  she  asserted,  "is 
more  liberal  than  its  current  leaders,"  and  its  ideas 
reached  'beyond  smiling  faces.  Christians  card  scenes, 
sentimental  socialist  posters,  and  rainbows."  It  was  the 
task  of  the  muralists  to  find  the  means  of  expressing  the 
mature  ideas  of  local  people  not  only  by  employing  their 
skills  as  artists,  but  also  by  being  responsive,  organizing 
carefully  and  observing  the  courtesies  of  normal  business 
practice.  Yasko  had  in  mind  an  adult,  progressive  public 
media  that  could  be  taken  seriously  by  local  people  and 
therefore  contribute  to  the  community's  self-reliance. 

There  have  been  a  number  of  proposals  in  California 
for  the  institutionalizing  of  cooperation  between  artists 
and  their  communities.  One  endorsed  by  the  San  Fran- 
cisco Community  Congress  of  nearly  one  thousand  local 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  1 437 

residents  in  1975  called  for  a  major  shift  of  public  fund- 
ing from  the  establishment  to  the  neighborhood  arts.""* 
It  suggested  a  municipal  community  arts  council  repre- 
senting artists  and  the  neighborhoods  that  would  identify 
priorities  and  act  as  an  advocate  within  the  city  adminis- 
tration. The  congress,  which  also  addressed  issues  on 
energy,  housing,  parks,  recreation,  jobs,  criminal  justice, 
health,  and  education,  asserted  in  its  program  that 

The  struggle  for  control  of  cultural  facilities,  jobs, 
funds  and  programs  is  a  part  of  the  larger  struggle  to 

f[ain  control  over  all  the  institutions  that  affect  our 
ives;  therefore,  the  Community  Congress  supports  the 
communities'  right  to  determine  for  themselves  how 
funding  will  be  used  to  support  community 
arts.  .  .  ."» 

While  this  proposal  would  provide  for  grass-roots  input 
through  representatives  on  a  city  wide  arts  council, 
another  one  that  was  being  discussed  at  the  same  time 
foresaw  such  a  council  made  up  of  representatives  from 
district  art  commissions  serving  connected  neighbor- 
hoods. These  latter  would  be  composed  of  elected  resi- 
dents who  would  be  able  to  allocate  public  funds  to 
projects  in  their  area  and  make  possible  more  direct  local 
involvement. ' ' '  This  idea  of  district  art  commissions  was 
revived  in  1978  by  a  supervisor  whose  area  included  the 
Mission  District,  still  the  center  of  the  city's  murals. 

At  the  same  time,  Peter  Coyote,  chairman  of  the 
California  Arts  Council,  who  had  worked  in  community 
theater  for  years  in  San  Francisco,  was  developing  a 
statewide  plan  to  encourage  similar  neighborhood  arts 
commissions.  He  had  been  very  impressed  by  the  idea  of 
neighborhood  government  and  the  achievements  of 
community  development  corporations  around  the  coun- 
try."^ Coyote  saw  official  grass-roots  art  commissions  as 
a  means  of  focusing  the  rising  activity  in  community  arts 
throughout  the  state  which  was  making  itself  felt  in  the 
capital.  He  pictured  a  structure  of  local  bodies  that 
would  review  the  funding  applications  of  artists  from 
their  area  to  the  state  council.  This  would  give  residents  a 
say  in  local  decision  making,  give  them  a  chance  to  order 
their  cultural  priorities  and  provide  them  a  formal  in- 
strument for  lobbying.  These  local  commissions  could 
also  seek  out  funding  from  diverse  public  and  private 
sources.  However,  it  was  important  that  these  bodies  not 
become  an  obstacle  for  projects  to  get  past  but  an  advo- 
cate for  them. 

Organizing  beyond  the  locality  of  community-based 
groups  was  well  under  way  with  the  creation  of  the 
National  Murals  Network  in  1976.  It  had  yet  to  develop 
any  on-going  lobbying  activities  because  of  its  small 
resources  and  the  time  that  would  have  to  be  taken  away 
from  working  on  murals.  However,  early  in  1977  Susan 
Caruso-Green  of  Cityarts  Workshop  led  a  delegation  of 
muralists  to  Washington  to  meet  with  the. new  director  of 
the  NEA's  Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places  program  to 
explain    the    goals    of   the    network."^    In    1978    Eva 


438  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Cockcroft  and  other  artists  fro;n  the  East  representing 
the  network  visited  the  NKA  and  sought  to  put  the  case 
of  the  funding  needs  of  muralists  forward,  but  they  failed 
in  their  support  of  a  candidate  to  one  of  its  community 
arts  panels.  Other  groups  that  at  least  occasionally  visited 
and  more  regularly  communicated  on  matters  of  policy 
with  the  \EA,  CETA,  and  the  state  and  local  art 
commissions  could  make  a  difference.  Ihere  was  also  the 
possibility  of  murahsts  lobbying  with  other  community 
arts  groups,  since  they  have  much  in  common  and  often 
work  together.  A  new  coalition  of  this  kind  participated 
in  the  National  .Murals  Conference  in  1978 — the 
Neighborhood  Art  Programs  National  Organizing 
Committee.  Founded  two  years  earlier,  NAPNOC  was 
seeking  to  build  an  alliance  of  community  arts  groups  to 
develop  public  funding  and  find  job  opportunities  for 
artists."''  For  years  the  NEA  had  largely  ignored 
Chicano,  Puerto  Rican,  and  other  Raza  professionals  and 
community  people,  but  in  1979  its  new  director, 
Livingston  Biddle,  responding  to  their  pressure,  ap- 
pointed a  twenty-three  member  Hispanic  Task  Force.  It 
held  hearings  around  the  country  and  developed  a  set  of 
recommendations  that  Judy  Baca,  one  of  its  members, 
said  were  on  their  way  to  being  implemented  in  1980. 
These  included  the  creation  of  an  Office  of  .Minority 
Affairs  within  the  NEA,  the  appointing  of  Latinos  to  the 
NEA's  regular  panels,  and  the  printing  of  its  publications 
and  grant  applications  in  Spanish. 

In  1978  three  months  after  the  passage  of  the  property 
tax  initiative  that  stripped  his  Arts  Council  of  half  its 
budget,  Peter  Coyote  speculated  that  in  fact  it  might 
have  a  positive  effect  in  uniting  the  establishment  and 
community  arts  groups  in  the  state  which  until  then  had 
been  fighting  each  other  for  a  share  of  what  had  been  a 
meager  budget.  It  had  taken  Proposition  13,  he  said,  to 
help  the  groups  realize  that  they  needed  each  other.  The 
Arts  Council  and  its  conservative  critic,  the  California 
Confederation  of  the  Arts,  had  in  fact  made  peace,  and 
one  of  the  confederation's  members  was  appointed  to  the 
council.  In  San  Francisco  mainstream  and  community 
arts  groups  had  banded  together  to  recover  local  hotel  tax 
funding.  Depending  on  these  new  coalitions  and  believ- 
ing that  there  would  be  strong  public  support.  Coyote 
said  that  he  would  ask  for  $10.9  million  for  the  next  year 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  council's  funds  had  been  cut 
from  $3.5  to  1.4  million  as  a  result  of  the  tax  revolt. 
Governor  Brown  backed  the  Arts  Council's  full  request 
for  fiscal  1980,  and  this  figure  was  pared  down  by  the 
Legislature  to  $7.5  million."^  With  federal  funds  this 
would  provide  the  council  with  $8.4  million.  The  in- 
crease over  the  previous  year  was  attributed  to  the  united 
lobbying  effort  of  establishment  and  community  arts 
groups  and  to  the  quantity  of  mail  and  calls  received  from 
a  broad  range  of  constituents.  Still  the  increase  was  far 
short  of  the  $50  million  that  the  Arts  Council  chairman 
estimated  that  the  state  should  contribute  to  meeting  the 
cultural  needs  of  its  twenty-two  million  people.   The 


council  was  also  seeking  to  channel  the  interest  of 
Californians  in  the  arts  into  a  public  dialogue  in  1979.  It 
was  preparing  a  series  of  statewide  conferences  with  a 
view  to  producing  a  five-year  plan  for  the  arts  in  the  state 
which  would  identify  directions  for  the  leadership  that 
the  council  w  anted  to  give. 

The  readiness  of  the  public  to  support  the  arts  could  be 
gauged  by  recent  surveys.  One  in  New  York  found  that 
those  people  most  dissatisfied  with  their  cultural  oppor- 
tunities and  favoring  more  were  blue-collar  workers, 
people  with  only  high  school  educations  and  incomes 
between  $5,000  and  $15,000."«  In  a  study  of  adults  done 
in  California  in  1975,  three  out  of  four  said  that  they 
"participated  in  arts  activities" — tw  ice  the  national  aver- 
age. Ninety-one  per  cent  responded  that  they  believed 
"that  the  arts  and  cultural  activities  are  as  important  to 
the  quality  and  economic  health  of  community  life  as  are 
schools,  libraries,  parks,  and  recreational  activities."  To 
support  the  arts  54  per  cent  were  willing  to  pay  an 
additional  $5  in  annual  taxes.  Even  two  out  of  five  people 
below  the  1975  poverty  line  favored  higher  taxes  for  the 
arts."^ 

However,  the  public  should  not  have  to  pay  more  for 
the  arts.  The  two  San  Francisco  fine-arts  museums, 
facing  increased  costs,  began  like  others  around  the 
country  in  the  mid-seventies  to  charge  admission.  After  a 
year,  the  number  of  visitors  fell  to  half  of  what  it  was 
when  entrance  was  free. '  '^  But  this  was  soon  made  up  by 
the  highly  advertised  spectacular  touring  shows  like  King 
Tut  that  drew  new  middle-class  audiences.  Working- 
class  and  minority  people  were  clearly  absent.  Whatever 
the  defects  of  museums,  they  can  become  relevant  to  all 
citizens  and  deserve  expanded  public  funding.  With  a 
reasonable  allocation  they  could  cut  back  on  their  show 
biz  extravaganzas  by  which  they  have  sought  to 
popularize  high  culture.  Then  admission  fees  could  be 
eliminated  and  neighborhood  directed  branches  could  be 
created.  This  would  require  rethinking  the  function  of 
museums  and  reorienting  the  priorities  of  government 
budgets  from  subsidizing  big  business  and  the  military. 
Then  San  Francisco  and  other  cities  and  towns  could 
have'their  museums,  murals,  neighborhood  art  facilities, 
and  performing  arts  centers  with  admissions  at  a  level 
that  would  make  it  possible  for  everyone  w  ho  wanted  to 
attend  opera,  ballet,  and  the  symphony,  and  for  much 
longer  seasons  than  now.  More  important,  were  the 
wealth  that  people  produce  turned  to  meeting  their 
needs,  then  an  art  that  grew  out  of  their  experience  and 
aspirations  could  become  a  part  of  their  everyday  work 
and  surroundings. 

The  possibility  of  a  democratic  culture  and  humaniz- 
ing work,  the  possibility  of  a  future  of  any  kind,  depends 
on  the  changing  of  national  and  local  priorities.  This  is 
what  people's  murals  have  been  about  from  the  begin- 
ning. And  from  the  beginning  they  have  depended  on  the 
organizing  of  people,  not  only  to  make  art,  but  to  bring 
about  the  changes  it  calls  for. 


The  most  serious  threat  to  public  support  of  the  arts 
came  in  1981  when  the  budget  proposals  of  the  new 
Reagan  administration  called  for  cutting  the  NEA's  allo- 
cation in  half.  In  seeking  to  justify  this,  the  president 
said, 

Historically  the  American  people  have  supported  by 
voluntary  contributions  more  artistic  and  cultural  ac- 
tivities than  all  the  other  countries  in  the  world  put 
together.  I  wholeheartedly  support  this  approach  and 
believe  Americans  will  continue  their  generosity.'" 

By  "voluntary  contributions"  Reagan  of  course  meant 
not  what  the  electorate's  representatives  vote  for  but 
what  the  philanthropy  of  big  corporations  and  the 
affluent  buy.  Although  establishment  art  institutions 
would  be  hurt  by  the  Reagan  cuts,  community  arts  were 
most  vulnerable.  The  new  budget  also  slashed  federal 
outlays  to  CETA,  which  meant  that  many  public  service 
opportunities  for  muralists  would  disappear.  Compara- 
ble cuts  struck  not  only  at  the  unemployed,  but  also  at 
the  retired  and  aged,  the  disabled,  families  with  depen- 
dent children,  students  requiring  government  aid,  and 
those  served  by  public  health,  public  housing,  public 
broadcasting,  and  the  new  consumer  cooperative  bank. 
What  all  had  in  common  was  their  position  outside  the 
establishment  and  lack  of  political  clout  separately.  It 
was  clear  that  the  only  hope  of  these  people,  who  in- 
cluded the  supporters  of  a  democratic  culture,  was  in 
uniting  for  political  action. 


NOTES 

1.  Brenner,  pp.  245  f.,  254  f. 

2.  Quoted  by  Susan  Barber  and  Susan  Miller,  "An  Histori- 
cal Summary  of  Public  Art  in  Boston,"  Institute  of  Contempo- 
rary Art,  May  1974,  p.  10. 

3.  Ann-Mary  Currier,  "Summerthing  had  Innovations," 
Boston  Globe,  September  4,  1971. 

4.  Robert  Taylor,  "Wall-to-Wall  Boston,"  Boston  Sunday 
Globe,  October  26,  1969. 

5.  Susan  Shapiro-Kiok  and  Susan  Caruso-Green,  "Proposal 
for  Operation  of  Cityarts  Workshop,  Inc.,"  New  York,  1974, 
pp.  5-12. 

6.  Weber,  "The  Chicago  Mural  CJroup,"  in  (^ockcroft, 
Weber,  and  Cockcroft,  p.  153. 

7.  "North  Side  Report— Summer  1974,"  CMC,  pp.  2,  9. 

8.  "Narrative,"  CMC,  p.  2  f.  (attached  to  1973-76  Budget 
Summary). 

9.  "Budget  Summary  1973-76,"  and  "North  Side 
Report— Summer  1975,"  CMC  p.  6. 

10.  "Chicago's  Wall  Paintings:  An  Artist  Sounds  Off," 
Panorama  section,  Chicago  Daily  News,  March  15-16,  1975  p 
17. 

11.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  6. 

12.  MARCH  brochure,  znd  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  6. 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  I  439 

13.  Public  Art  Workshop  brochure. 

14.  Gerri  Kobren,  "Hieronimus:  Bicentennial  Muralist  and 
Free  Spirit,"  The  Sun  Magazine,  Baltimore  Sun,  June  23,  1974, 
p.  10. 

15.  "Who's  Drawing  on  Our  Walls?"  Baltimore  News  Ameri- 
can, Section  I,  November  9,  1975,  p.  1. 

16.  Julie  Roy  Jeffrey,  Beautiful  Walls  of  Baltimore  (catalog  for 
exhibition),  Baltimore  Museum  of  Art,  June  1978,  p.  5. 

17.  Elsa  Cameron,  "The  San  Francisco  Art  Commission's 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program,"  unpublished  ms.,  1974,  p.  55. 

18.  "Statement  for  National  Mural  Conference,"  New  York 
City,  1976. 

19.  Thomas  Kunz,  "The  Haight-Ashbury:  Culture  ant* 
Community,"  Common  Sense  (San  Francisco),  p.  15. 

20.  Reports  Shifra  M.  Goldman  in  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p. 
10. 

21.  Judy  Baca  reported. 

22.  Judy  Baca,  "City wide  Mural  Program,"  (report  to 
Board  of  Recreation  and  Park  Commissioners,  City  of  Los 
Angeles),  1974. 

23.  SPARC  brochure. 

24.  Ibid. 

25.  Commonarts  announcements,  1978. 

26.  The  first  NEA  grants  to  inner-city  arts  were  made  in 
1968  in  cooperation  with  the  President's  Council  on  Youth 
Opportunity.  Sixteen  cities  received  $25,000  each  to  cool 
urban  unrest,  and  it  is  possible  that  some  of  this  money  hclp)cd 
fund  early  murals.  The  program  was  discontinued  the  follow- 
ing year,  and  in  1970  the  NFA  began  its  Inner  City  Mural 
Program.  (Cockcroft,  Weber  and  Cockcroft,  p.  215) 

27.  The  listings  of  \V.\PP  have  been  checked  against  the 
NEA's  Annual  Reports.  There  are  some  discrepancies,  and 
WAPP's  listing  of  grants  has  usually  been  given  precedence 
here  because  they  designate  v\hich  grants  are  for  murals.  The 
latest  list,  dated  1978,  has  been  used  for  all  previous  years. 

28.  "Public  Art  and  the  Government:  A  Progress  Report," 
Art  in  America,  May-June  1974,  p.  48. 

29.  Ibid.,  p.  46. 

30.  Ibid.,  p.  48. 

31.  Ibid.,  p.  45. 

32.  CMG  newsletter,  April  6,  1977. 

33.  NMN,  no.  3,  1978,  p.  23. 

34.  "Expansion  Arts,"  1976  Annual  Report,  NEA,  p.  37. 

35.  Cockcroft,  Weber,  and  Cockcroft,  p.  215. 

36.  Annual  Reports,  NEA,  1971-77. 

37.  Expansion  Arts  letter,  .March  1979. 

38.  Eva  Cockcroft,  "Art  Wars,"  Seven  Days,  February  23, 
1979,  p.  28. 

39.  For  instance,  in  1976  the  New  York  Museum  of  Modern 
Art  received  over  $328,000.  This  was  about  .29  percent  of  the 
appropriation  for  museums,  but  museums  accounted  for  13.8 
percent  of  the  NEA  budget.  Museums  received  $11.46  mil- 
lion, the  third  largest  dollar  amount  of  grants  by  the  NEA, 
after  the  music  and  federal-state  partnership  categories. 
.Museum  funding  was  more  than  three  times  the  $3,588  million 
given  to  the  creators  of  works  in  the  visual  arts.  (7976  Annual 
Report,  NEA.) 


440  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


40.  7976  Annual  Report,  NEA,  p.  4. 

41 .  "Spending  on  the  Arts  Criticized,"  San  Francisco  Chroni- 
cle, April  25,  1978,  p.  12. 

42.  Ann  Geracimos  and  Gerald  Marzorati,  "The  Arto- 
crats,"  Art  In  America,  July-August  1978,  p.  104. 

43.  Ibid.,  p.  107. 

44.  Ibid.,  p.  106. 

45.  "Art  World  Fears  Shift  in  U.S.  Policy,"  San  Francisco 
Chronicle,  October  21,  1977,  p.  66. 

46.  The  occasion  for  these  forebodings  was  the  appointment 
of  Joseph  D.  Duffey  as  chairman  of  the  National  Endowment 
for  the  Humanities,  the  NEA's  sister  organization.  Kramer 
saw  this  as  the  result  of  Carter's  "  'populist'  "  ideology  and  a 
campaign  waged  against  the  NEH's  former  "  'elitist'  "  chair- 
man. 

47.  Richard  Shea,  "Report  on  First  .Meeting  of  NEA  Task 
Force  on  Community  Program  Policy,"  National  Center  for 
Urban  Ethnic  Affairs,  December  19,  1978,  p.  1. 

48.  Deirdre  Frontczak,  .Memorandum  summarizing  first 
meeting  of  the  Task  Force,  NEA,  February  2,  1979,  p.  2. 

49.  Cockcroft,  "Art  Wars,"  p.  28. 

50.  "Summary  of  Final  Report  of  Task  Force  on  Commu- 
nity Program  Policy,"  NEA,  August  1979. 

51.  Cockcroft,  "Art  Wars,"  p.  28. 

52.  Sparks  (Los  Angeles),  May  1978,  p.  1. 

53.  Assistant  Secretary  of  Labor  for  Employment  and 
Training  Ernest  G.  Green,  speaking  of  CETA's  support  for 
the  arts,  said,  "This  Nation  is  increasingly  coming  to  realize 
that  art  is  much  more  than  a  leisure-time  activity — it  is  a  source 
of  creativity  than  can  make  our  lives  far  deeper  and  richer." 
("Arts  Bulletin,"  Department  of  Labor,  1977). 

54.  Conclusion  of  1976  NEA  research  paper  on  employ- 
ment of  artists,  referred  to  by  "Artistic  Applications  of 
CETA,"  Oakland:  Alameda  County  Neighborhood  Arts  Pro- 
gram, 1977,  p.  2. 

55.  Elizabeth  Pomada,  "The  City's  Art  Brigade,"  San  Fran- 
cisco Magazine,  September  1975,  p.  134. 

56.  "Bulletin  on  Public  Service  Employment  and  the  Arts," 
NEA,  Washington,  July  1975,  p.  2. 

57.  Sparks,  p.  1  ff. 

58.  Pomada,  p.  134. 

59.  Ibid.,  p.  135. 

60.  "Bulletin  on  Public  Service  Employment  and  the  Arts," 
p.  2. 

61.  Reported  Rene  Yaiiez. 

62.  .Merla  Zellerbach,  "The  Age  of  Fresco  in  San  Fran- 
cisco," San  Francisco  Chronicle,  September  1,  1975,  p.  11. 

63.  "Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places:  Grants  Made  Through 
Fiscal  1974,"  NEA,  p.  2. 

64.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  6. 

65.  "Labor  Department  Is  Shaking  Up  CETA,"  5fl«  Fran- 
cisco Chronicle,  November  30,  1978,  and  "A  Bulletin  on  Federal 
Economic  Programs  and  the  Arts,"  Public  Alternatives  for  the 
Arts  Project,  NEA,  December  21,  1978,  pp.  3,  6. 

66.  "Bulletin,"  December  21,  1978,  p.  13. 

67.  "Bulletin,"  .March  21,  1979,  p.  10  f. 

68.  Cf.  Cockcroft,  Weber,  and  Cockcroft,  p.  214. 

69.  Cf.  Weber,  "Community  Murals:  An  Update,"  p.  6. 


70.  Rodriguez,  A  History  of  Mexican  Mural  Painting,  p.  155 
ff. 

71.  Olin  Dows,  "The  New  Deal's  Treasury  Art  Program: 
A  .Memoir,"  in  Francis  V.  O'Connor,  ed..  The  New  Deal  Art 
Pro/fcfx  (Washington;  Smithsonian  Institution,  1972),  p.  14  f. 

72.  American  Council  of  the  Arts  survey,  referred  to  in 
Don  Adams  and  Arlene  Goldbard,  "California  Community 
Arts  under  Proposition  13,"  NAPNOC,  1978,  p.  16. 

73.  Nora  Gallagher,  Ken  .McEldowney,  .Michael  Singer  and 
Henry  Weinstein,  "Art  for  Harold's  Sake,"  San  Francisco  Bay 
Guardian,  November  21,  1975,  p.  6. 

74.  Ibid.,  p.  7. 

75.  The  Community  Cultural  Center  Program  and  How  It 
Hasn't  Grown,"  Bicentennial  Arts  Biweekly,  November  26, 
1975,  p.  1. 

76.  .Madeline  Nelson,  "Here  It  Comes  Folks!  Alioto's 
Center  for  the  Performing  Arts,"  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian, 
April  26,  1973,  p.  4  f,  and  Katy  Butler,  "The  Performing  Arts 
Center:  Subsidy  for  the  Rich,"  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian, 
February  14,  1974,  p.  11. 

77.  Elsa  Cameron,  p.  59  f. 

78.  Resolution  46,  United  States  Conference  of  .Mayors, 
June  1974. 

79.  Paul  Kagawa  and  Vicky  Brown,  "2%  for  Art,"  Arts 
Biweekly,  .May  1,  1977,  p.  1. 

80.  "Proposal  for  Operations  of  Cityarts  Workshop,  Inc., 
Summer  1974,"  p.  12. 

81.  Carolyn  Anspacher,  "State  Arts  Commission's  Last 
Days,"  San  Francisco  Chronicle,  October  15,  1975,  p.  2. 

82.  California  Arts  C>ouncil,  Announcements  of  "Commu- 
nity Arts;"  "Arts  in  Social  Institutions;"  "Alternatives  in  ELdu- 
cation  Grants"  Programs,  1975-76;"  "Guide  to  Programs, 
1977-78;"  "Artists  in  Residence  in  Schools  and/or  Commu- 
nity Organizations,  1979-80." 

83.  "The  CAC:  The  First  Year,"  State  of  the  Arts  (Sacramen- 
to: Cultural  News  Service),  January  1977,  p.  2. 

84.  Robert  Commanday,  "Politics  Flares  in  the  Arts,"  San 
Francisco  Chronicle,  February  14,  1978,  p.  40. 

85.  Ibid. 

86.  Commanday,  "The  Council  Like  It — But  Is  It  Art?" 
San  Francisco  Chronicle,  January  10,  1978,  p.  38. 

87.  In  California  inflation,  business  recovery  after  the  reces- 
sion of  1974—75,  and  earlier  tax  legislation  had  flmxled  the  state 
treasury  with  a  surplus  that  was  well  over  $5  billion  in  1978. 
The  surplus  together  with  regressive  property  taxes  led  to 
Proposition  13.  Its  drafters  manipulated  the  popular  demand 
for  tax  relief  so  that  two-thirds  of  the  benefits  were  expected  to 
go  to  business,  particularly  real  estate  interests  and  developers, 
rather  than  homeowners  and  renters.  People  were  persuaded 
that  property  tax  revenue  to  local  government  could  be  cut 
$7.04  billion,  about  57  percent,  and  that  the  state  surplus 
would  bail  out  county  and  municipal  agencies.  After  the  bail- 
out, local  government  and  school  district  losses  netted  an  aver- 
age of  9. 7  percent,  and  they  were  expected  to  be  substantially 
more  in  future  years.  (Don  Adams  and  Arlene  Goldbard, 
"California  Community  Arts  under  Proposition  13,"  San  Fran- 
cisco: Neighborhood  Art  Programs  National  Organizing  Com- 
mittee, 1978,  pp.  4,  9.)  On  the  first  anniversary  of  Proposition 


13  public  payrolls  in  the  state  had  declined  by  1()0,(X)()  or  7 
percent,  mostly  by  attrition,  but  1 7, ()()()  bv  firing.  (Brad 
Knickerbocker,  "Prop.  1 3  jolt  still  sends  aftershocks,"  Christian 
Science  Monitor,  ]unc  12,  1979,  p.  10).  In  San  Francisco  1,I()() 
elementary  and  high  school  teachers  were  fired  in  June  1979;  it 
took  a  prolonged  strike  to  force  the  rehiring  of  700.  To  make 
up  for  the  loss  in  revenue  cities  levied  special  user's  fees  for 
services  previously  supported  by  taxes.  Librarv  hours  were 
shortened  and  summer  school  eliminated.  Also,  the  shift  of 
raising  revenue  by  local  boards  to  the  state  legislature  carried 
with  it  a  massive  shift  of  authority. 

88.  Ibid. 

89.  State  of  the  Arts,  (California  Arts  Council),  June/July 
1979,  p.  1. 

90.  "Art  in  Public  Buildings,"  State  of  the  Arts,  Januarv 
1977,  p.  2. 

91 .  Idaho  was  the  only  state  to  enact  legislation  as  stringent 
as  California's,  but  most  states  adopted  or  were  considering  tax 
cuts. 

92.  A  variety  of  observers  saw  the  Roosevelt  coalition  of  the 
labor  movement,  the  urban  poor,  the  minorities,  and  public- 
interest  liberals  that  had  been  pitted  against  big  business  com- 
ing apart.  The  new  alignments  posed  the  p<x)r  and  public 
employees  against  the  corporations,  the  wealthy,  and  increas- 
ingly middle-income  white  and  blue-collar  workers  who  had 
moved  to  the  suburbs.  The  right  and  left  were  now  vying  for 
the  support  of  these  middle-income  people.  The  response  of  a 
number  of  liberals  and  progressives  was  that  the  left  had  per- 
mitted the  conservatives  to  capture  the  issue  of  regressive 
taxes,  and  that  a  major  drive  to  educate  the  public  was 
necessary.  (Cf.  Tom  Hayden,  "Not  A  Penny  for  Privilege," 
CED  News  (Campaign  for  Economic  Democracy,  Los 
Angeles),  June  1978,  p.  1  f;  Dean  Tipps,  "Interview,"  CED 
News,  ]u\y  1978,  p.  4  f . 

93.  Victor  A.  Sorell,  "Barrio  Murals  in  Chicago,"  Revista 
Chicano-Riquena,  Autumn,  1976. 

94.  Douglas  Macdonald,  "Mural  Defended  on  Basis  of 
Freedom  of  Expression,"  The  Brief:  Civil  Liberties  in  Illinois, 
November  1974,  p.  1. 

95.  Crockcroft,  Weber,  and  Crockcroft,  p.  226. 

96.  Memorandum  Opinion  and  Judgment  Order,  Latin 
American  Advisory  Council,  et  al..  Plaintiffs,  vs.  Richard  W. 
Withers,  et  al..  Defendants,  No.  74  C  2717.  In  U.S.  District 
Court,  Northern  District  of  Illinois,  Eastern  Division, 
November  22,  1974. 

97.  Macdonald,  p.  1. 

98.  Phone  interview  with  Kenneth  Burkstrom,  head  ar- 


Organization,  Funding,  and  Control  1 441 

chitect,  California  State  Universities  &  (x)lleges. 

99.  CMC  Newsletter,  April  6,  1977. 

100.  Robert  Bartlett,  "(TVFA  Job  Program  Stalemate 
Ended,"  San  Erancisco  Chronicle,  June  28,  1977. 

101.  Weber,  "Community  Murals:  An  Update,"  p.  7. 

102.  Mario  Torero,  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  11. 

103.  Weber,  "(Community  Murals:  An  Update,"  p.  7. 

104.  Samella  Lewis,  "The  Street  Art  of  Black  .America," 
Exxon,  U.S.A.,  Third  Quarter,  1973,  p.  2  ff.  and  Juacinto 
Quirarte,  "The  Murals  of  El  Barrio,"  Fourth  Quarter,  1974, 
p.  2  ff. 

105.  April  7,  1975,  p.  79. 

106.  NMN,  no.  3,  1978,  p.  32. 

107.  Ceci  Brunazzi,  "Portrait  of  a  Muralist,"  Common  Sense 
(San  Francisco),  June  1975,  p.  12. 

108.  NMN  no.  3,  1978,  p.  33  f. 

109.  "A  Community  Program  for  Change  in  San  Francisco: 
1975,"  pp.  13  f. 

110.  Ibid. 

111.  Gallagher,  McEldowney,  Singer,  and  Weinstein,  "Art 
for  Harold's  Sake,"  p.  10. 

112.  In  particular,  he  was  interested  in  the  ideas  that  Milton 
Kotler  set  forth  in  Neighborhood  Government  (Indianapolis: 
Bobbs-Merrill,  1969). 

113.  NMN,  no.  1,  1977,  p.  8. 

114.  NAPNOC  was  organized  by  Eric  Reuther,  who  was 
once  codircctor  of  the  San  Francisco  Neighborhood  Arts  Pro- 
gram. Its  main  office  is  in  Washington,  D.C. 

115.  This  request  for  an  expansion  of  arts  funding  was 
bound  to  be  controversial  in  a  budget  that  otherwise  cut  cost- 
of-living  increases  for  state  welfare,  called  for  the  reduction  of 
5, 140  government  employees,  and  planned  for  a  total  spending 
increase  that  was  less  than  the  rate  of  inflation.  Brown  justified 
the  increase  for  the  arts  by  saying  "Artist  expression,  the  life  of 
the  soul,  has  to  be  nourished  along  with  everything  else." 
(Jerry  Roberts,  "Budget's  Cuts  and  Increases,"  San  Erancisco 
Chronicle,  ]znuivy  10,  1979,  p.  1.  Also,  Jerry  Roberts,  "Arts 
Council  Survives  Hearing  on  Big  Budget,"  San  Erancisco 
Chronicle,  April  27,  1979,  p.  7.  John  Balzar  and  Jerry  Roberts, 
"Legislature  Finally  Passes  the  Budget,"  San  Erancisco  Quar- 
terly, }u\y  13,  1979,  p.  1.) 

1 16.  "Artistic  Applications  of  CETA,"  Alameda  County 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program,  1977,  p.  3. 

117.  Carolyn  Anspacher,  "What's  Ahead  for  Arts  in  Ca\\- 
foTnia,"  San  Erancisco  Chronicle,  October  17,  1975,  p.  2. 

118.  San  Erancisco  Chronicle,  }une  20,  1976,  p.  1. 

119.  President  Reagan's  address  to  Congress,  February  18, 
1981. 


PART  III 

THE  WIDER 
PERSPECTIVE 


THE  CONTEMPORARY  CRISIS 


THE  CRISIS  OF  DEVELOPMENT 

The  Murals'  View 

The  importance  of  the  mural  movement  Hes  in  its 
response  to  the  economic,  social,  and  cultural  crisis  that 
confronts  American  life  and  its  example  of  the  role  art 
can  play  as  an  important  source  of  reconstruction.  The 
community  murals  defined  the  crisis  at  first  from  the 
point  of  view  of  society's  underclass,  and,  as  a  growing 
variety  of  people  turned  to  them  as  vehicles  of  expres- 
sion, the  paintings  expanded  their  scope.  The  murals 
helped  bring  the  crisis  into  focus  with  their  indictment  of 
racism,  poverty,  oppressive  working  conditions,  and  the 
destruction  of  neighborhoods.  Murals  went  on  to  attack 
war  and  imperialism.  They  protested  discrimination 
against  the  young  and  elderly,  women,  and  the  uncon- 
ventional. The  wall  art  pointed  to  the  dangers  and  prom- 
ise of  technology,  criticized  the  fouling  of  the  environ- 
ment. They  challenged  the  suppression  and  abuse  of 
culture  in  education,  the  public  media  and  advertising. 
And  most  muralists  were  outspoken  in  their  scorn  of 
careers  in  the  competitive  art  market  and  the  reduction  of 
art  to  a  commodity.  Viewing  themselves  as  cultural 
workers,  some  muralists  criticized  the  misuse  of  the  fine 
arts  as  instruments  of  entertainment  and  authority  while 
most  people  were  denied  a  culture  that  grew  out  of  their 
daily  work  and  traditions.  In  their  images  the  painters 
called  for  occupations  for  all  people  that  could  express 
their  talents  and  ideas;  in  effect  they  were  saying  that  all 
work  should  be  cultural.  The  efforts  of  the  muralists  to 
involve  p>eople  in  social  activism  and  the  making  of  art 


was  a  challenge  to  the  dependence  and  passivity  of  life  in 
mass  society.  In  general  the  muralists  at  least  implicitly 
recognized  that  a  central  feature  of  the  contemporary 
crisis  has  been  the  wrenching  apart  of  serious  expression, 
daily  work,  and  community  life. 

Some  of  the  muralists  saw  racism  at  the  root  of  these 
problems;  others  understood  them  as  a  result  of  class 
exploitation.  Most  felt  that  these  views  were  not  mutu- 
ally exclusive.  Both  discrimination  and  profiteering  were 
clearly  involved  in  urban  renewal,  the  exploitation  of 
farm  workers  and  joblessness  among  the  inner-city 
minorities.  While  the  socially  aware  muralists  brought  to 
their  painting  varied  concerns  and  emphases,  they  shared 
a  common  sense  that  the  control  of  ordinary  people  over 
their  communities,  their  labor,  their  thinking,  and,  in- 
deed, their  lives  was  threatened  by  powerful  economic 
and  political  interests.  Moreover,  the  murals  drew  the 
connection  between  racism  and  economics  at  home  and 
abroad  that  the  Indochina  War  made  plain,  a  war  against 
Third  World  people  in  which  a  disproportion  of  Third 
World  Americans  were  obliged  by  the  draft  or  jobless- 
ness to  fight.  This  international  awareness  was  amplified 
also  by  the  effort  of  Puerto  Ricans  for  self-determination, 
the  problem  of  undocumented  Mexican  workers,  the 
involvement  of  U.S.  business  and  government  in  the 
overthrow  of  democracy  in  Chile,  and  their  defeat  in  the 
Nicaraguan  revolution,  all  of  which  figured  in  the  paint- 
ings. 

Whose  Development? 

The  muralists'  indictment  of  key  conditions  of  Ameri- 


445 


446  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

can  society  and  their  proposal  of  alternatives  suggests 
that  central  to  the  contemporary  crisis  is  a  conflict  be- 
tween different  approaches  to  people's  economic,  social, 
and  cultural  development.  Development  as  a  planned 
process  of  comprehensive  change  became  a  pervasive 
issue  around  the  world  since  1946  when  in  some  areas  it 
meant  reconstructing  after  the  ravages  of  the  w  ar  and  in 
others  the  emergence  of  new  nations  from  colonialism 
and  their  effort  to  modernize  in  a  manner  that  they 
decided.  In  the  United  States  development  involved 
refurbishing  aging  cities  and  putting  together  a  peacetime 
economy  w  hich  had  not  functioned  with  confidence  since 
before  the  Depression.  It  also  entailed  finally  coming  to 
grips  w  ith  American  society's  endemic  problems  of  pov- 
erty and  racism.  Ostensibly  development  in  this  country 
meant  catching  up  with  its  idealism — the  dream  of  a 
democratic,  moral,  abundant,  and  creative  society.  Here 
as  around  the  world,  the  crux  of  development  was  who 
got  developed  and  w  hether  development  was  done  to  you 
or  by  you. 

In  the  United  States  there  were  basically  two  ap- 
proaches to  development:  corporate-liberal  and 
community-based.  This  country  emerged  into  the  post- 
war era  as  the  dominant  world  power,  for  its  economic 
facilities  had  recovered  from  the  Depression  and  were 
undamaged  by  the  fighting.  With  this  headstart  corpo- 
rate expansion  and  centralization  were  marked  by  the 
forming  of  conglomerates  and  multinationals.  At  home 
business  leaders  and  government  cooperated  to  plan 
the  renewal  of  cities  and  the  reshaping  of  whole  re- 
gions to  implement  corporate  growth  and  a  more  com- 
modious way  of  life,  it  was  said,  for  everyone.  Many 
liberals  joined  w  ith  the  corporations  in  supporting  rede- 
velopment because  it  seemed  to  promise  jobs  and  hous- 
ing, less  crowded  and  cleaner  cities  with  greater 
amenities  as  well  as  solutions  to  poverty  and  racism.  This 
was  in  fact  a  continuation  of  the  New  Deal's  compromise 
between  the  large  corporations  and  organized  labor  by 
which  social  reforms  and  expenditures,  such  as  social 
security,  welfare,  and  collective  bargaining,  were  trade- 
offs funded  out  of  the  government's  encouragement  of 
economic  growth.  While  the  new  liberal  coalition  like  the 
old  united  politicians,  organized  labor,  the  minorities, 
government  workers,  and  intellectuals,  it  shared  with  big 
business  a. belief  in  centralized  planning  and  bureaucratic 
control  inherited  from  the  New  Deal  and  the  manage- 
ment of  the  economy  during  wartime.  A  corporate- 
liberal  strategy  of  development  emerged  that  called  for 
the  initial  outlay  for  buying  up  big  stretches  of  inner-city 
real  estate  for  renewal  and  many  of  the  attendant  social 
costs  to  be  carried  by  government  and  hence  taxpayers. 
Factories  were  moved  to  the  outskirts,  and  residential 
suburbs  were  developed.  Fhe  old  congested  urban  areas 
were  ripped  out  and  made  way  for  the  "postindustrial 
city"  marked  by  glass  and  steel  towers  of  corporate 
headquarters  and  luxury  hotels,  expanded  educational 
and  medical  facilities,  and  new  trade,  convention,  sports, 


and  cultural  centers.'  Expressways  and  rapid  transit 
were  built  to  bring  office  personnel  and  consumers  from 
the  suburbs  where  the  middle  class  had  fled  after  the  war 
in  pursuit  of  a  privately  owned  home  and  greenery  and  to 
escape  the  old  urban  scene  and  the  new  minority  popula- 
tions. 

Black  and  Brown  people  who  had  come  north  to  work 
in  war  industry  and  had  to  settle  for  the  least  desirable 
housing  suffered  additional  setbacks  when  peace  came. 
Like  many  war  workers  they  were  laid  off,  but  it  was  the 
Whites  who  were  the  first  to  be  rehired  by  industry  when 
it  retooled  with  a  view  to  increasing  efficiency,  which 
included  minimizing  labor  costs.  Seeking  to  reduce 
wages,  other  industry  relocated  from  the  "snow  belt"  to 
the  "sun  belt,"  or  to  Puerto  Rico,  Mexico,  or  Taiwan.  At 
home  race  and  economic  power  were  the  determinants  of 
who  would  have  to  put  up  with  the  inconveniences  that 
progress  entailed.  But  government  regulations  sought  to 
mitigate  the  dislocations  by  mandating  replacement 
housing,  minority  hiring  in  renewal  projects,  and  the 
"maximum  feasible  participation"  of  residents  in  the 
planning  of  their  development.^  However,  the  War  on 
Poverty  and  Model  Cities  programs  failed  to  reach 
enough  of  those  in  need  and  declined  into  underfunded, 
paternalistic,  centrally  controlled  operations. 

The  benefits  of  urban  growth  were  slow  in  trickling 
down;  expectations  had  been  raised  and  disappointed. 
Crisis  was  precipitated  in  the  fifties  and  sixties  when  first 
Black  people  and  then  other  minorities  became  exasper- 
ated with  the  continued  suppression  of  their  civil  rights, 
the  denial  of  livelihoods,  and  being  pushed  around  by 
renewal  for  the  benefit  of  others.  The  liberal  solutions  of 
integration  and  welfarism  were  insufficient.  One  result 
was  the  urban  riots,  but  another  was  the  efforts  of 
minority  people  and  some  Whites  to  take  charge  of  their 
own  development.  They  tried  militant  ethnic  programs 
to  defend  their  areas,  sweat-equity  housing  rehabilita- 
tion, public  services  initiated  and  operated  by  neighbor- 
hood people,  community  development  corporations,  and 
local  producer  and  consumer  cooperatives.  There  were 
also  community-based  trade  unions  and  a  few  big  labor 
organizations  supporting  progressive  causes  or  with 
rank-and-file  movements  making  themselves  heard. 
These  urban  efforts  were  matched  by  wildcat  activism 
by  Appalachian  coal  miners  and  organizing  in  the  sunbelt 
by  farm  workers  trying  to  achieve  a  "social  revolution"  in 
the  face  of  the  corporate  industrializing  of  agriculture. 
These  were  all  efforts  at  local  initiative,  community 
self-help  and  control,  and  the  moralists  spoke  for  many 
of  them.  While  calling  for  local  self-reliance,  these  proj- 
ects sought  from  government  what  they  believed  was 
their  fair  share  of  public  funding. 

Thus  there  was  a  profound  contrast  between  two  kinds 
of  development,  which  the  murals  themselves  described. 
The  corporate  liberal  involved  the  unstable  but  working 
collaboration  of  big  business,  big  government  and  big 
labor.  It  was  capital-intensive,  centralized,  and  bureau- 


cratic.  Its  paternalism  was  dominated  by  the  priorities  of 
managers  whose  power  depended  ultimately  on  corpo- 
rate growth.  The  other  form  of  development  was 
community-based — decentralized,  democratic,  coopera- 
tive, labor-intensive.  It  was  the  failure  of  corporate 
liberalism's  strategy  for  development  that  helped  revive 
the  community-based  activity,  which  had  a  long  tradi- 
tion of  its  own  and  would  have  certainly  reappeared  in 
any  case,  though  perhaps  in  different  forms. 

In  the  late  sixties  and  then  the  seventies  urban  renewal 
had  advanced  enough  so  that  corporate  personnel  and  the 
affluent  began  to  find  in  the  cities  new  and  attractive 
places  to  live.  Town  houses  were  built  and  once  hand- 
some old  dwellings  were  refurbished.  In  San  Francisco, 
for  instance,  its  decorative  Victorian  houses  were 
restored  as  downtown  became  "Manhattanized"  with 
office  towers.  Old  factories,  warehouses  and  canneries 
were  transformed  into  warrens  of  boutiques,  luxury 
restaurants,  and  decorators'  establishments.  The 
moribund  waterfront  became  a  ribbon  of  eateries,  shops, 
swank  apartments,  and  offices.  As  part  of  this  gentrifica- 
tion,  the  big  museums  were  expanded  and  hosted  inter- 
national shows.  By  1979  the  Performing  Arts  Center  was 
being  built  for  the  symphony  and  ballet,  and  tourism  and 
become  in  fact  the  principal  industry.  San  Francisco's 
establishment  culture  and  that  elsewhere  about  the 
country  were  the  main  beneficiaries  of  the  federal  gov- 
ernment's large  expansion  of  support  that  occurred  v\  ith 
the  founding  of  the  National  Endowment  for  the  Arts  in 
1965. 

But  urban  growth  became  clouded.  Conversion  to 
condominiums  drove  out  renters  of  modest  incomes,  and 
the  competition  for  housing  sent  rents  and  sales  soaring, 
a  situation  from  which  only  investors,  real  estate  firms, 
and  lending  institutions  could  gain.  The  financial  sound- 
ness of  cities'  expansion  upward  and  outward  depended 
on  constantly  rising  land  values.  But  development  failed 
to  return  in  tax  revenues  its  costs  in  enlarged  public 
services  for  utilities,  streets  and  highways,  added  police 
and  fire  protection,  sanitation,  transit,  replacement  pub- 
lic housing,  and  welfare  for  those  whom  the  new  postin- 
dustrial  economy  could  not  employ.^  The  federal  gov- 
ernment assumed  only  a  portion  of  these  expenses.  New 
sports  palaces  did  not  yield  the  anticipated  returns,  and 
areas  bulldozed  for  development  failed  to  find  develop- 
ers. City  halls  began  to  face  the  threat  of  insolvency.  In 
New  York  in  1975  when  efforts  to  refinance  deficits 
became  overwhelming,  60,000  municipal  employees 
were  laid  off  and  voters  were  disenfranchised  as  govern- 
ment was  turned  over  to  an  Emergency  Financial  Control 
Board  of  corporate  executives  and  public  officials.''  The 
massive  looting  and  arson  that  occurred  there  during  the 
summer  blackout  of  1977  indicated  that  its  social  fabric 
was  as  divided  as  any  city's  had  been  during  the  sixties. 
In  California  the  excessive  costs  of  urban  growth  con- 
tributed to  the  skyrocketing  property  values  and  taxes 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  I  447 

which  provoked  the  tax  revolt  of  homeowners  and  rent- 
ers that  slashed  services,  particularly  in  education, 
health  care,  and  the  arts.  By  1980  public  services  in 
Cleveland,  Chicago,  Philadelphia,  and  other  cities  were 
running  out  of  money. 

During  the  late  sixties  and  seventies  the  difficulties  of 
corporate  liberalism  multiplied.  The  Indochina  War  be- 
came increasingly  unpopular  and  together  v\  ith  Water- 
gate it  alienated  the  public  from  leaders  and  top-dow  n 
politics,  giving  new  life  to  community  activism.  Follow- 
ing the  example  of  the  sixties,  new  groups,  Ixrth  w orking- 
and  middle-class,  white  and  minority,  progressive  and 
conservative,  organized  to  make  government  more  re- 
sponsive or  to  develop  services  that  it  had  failed  to 
provide. 

In  spite  of  the  vast  business  expansion  following  World 
War  II,  the  rate  of  profit  had  been  falling  since  the  later 
fifties.  Corporate  mergers  increased,  and  economic 
power  became  more  concentrated  and  autonomous.' 
Economic  growth  was  slowed  not  only  by  competition 
with  revitalized  industry  abroad  but  also  by  the  energy 
crisis  that  began  when  domestic  petroleum  companies 
held  back  supplies  in  1973  to  raise  prices  even  before  the 
OPEC  oil  cartel  initiated  its  cycle  of  increases.  Recession 
struck  in  the  follow  ing  two  years  and  again  at  the  end  of 
the  decade,  and  unemployment,  especially  among  the 
minorities,  remained  chronic.  Contrary  to  liberal 
economic  theory,  as  growth  declined,  inflation  rose. 
When  in  the  late  sixties  the  government,  not  daring  to 
raise  taxes  to  pay  for  an  unpopular  war,  had  begun 
printing  money  instead,  it  fueled  inflation,  which  was 
then  aggravated  by  the  soaring  cost  of  energy  and  the 
compounding  indebtedness  of  urban  development.  Ihe 
federal  government,  preferring  to  curb  inflation  rather 
than  reduce  joblessness,  further  contained  economic 
growth  by  fiscal  measures.  During  the  last  years  of  the 
decade  the  Democratic  administration  chose  the  route  of 
lowering  corporate  taxes,  deregulating  the  price  of 
natural  gas  and  oil,  pressing  ahead  on  nuclear  power, 
increasing  military  spending,  and  cutting  back  on  social 
outlays.  For  1980  the  National  Endow  mcnt  for  the  Arts 
asked  Congress  for  the  smallest  budget  increase  it  had 
ever  sought — from  just  under  $150  million  the  previous 
year  to  $154  million. 

The  tax  revolt  that  was  spreading  across  the  nation 
increased  talk  by  erstwhile  liberal  leaders  of  a  "new 
austerity "  and  "lov\ering  of  the  expectations  of  govern- 
ment." Some  observers  saw  this  as  the  beginning  of  the 
end  for  welfare  liberalism,  the  social  programs  of  w hich 
had  been  funded  by  forty  years  of  government-supported 
corporate  development.  At  the  very  least  the  corporate 
liberal  compromise  was  severely  strained,  and  its  sup- 
porters were  being  forced  to  reassess  their  allegiance. 
The  end  of  an  era  seemed  to  be  confirmed  bv  the  election 
of  Ronald  Reagan  as  president  in  1980  and  the  gutting  of 
public  services  that  ensued. 


448  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


THE  ARTS  UNDP:R  CORPORATE 
LIBERALISM 

Business  and  the  Arts 

The  crisis  of  contemporary  culture  is  largely  the  lack 
of  meaning  of  work  and  public  affairs  for  most  people, 
which  is  due  to  their  lack  of  control  on  the  job  and  in 
politics.  It  is  also  the  establishment's  capitalizing  on  these 
discontents  by  mass  entertainment  and  superfluous 
goods.  There  is  money  to  be  made  out  of  such  frustra- 
tions, and  that  is  what  advertising  is  largely  about — 
channeling  anxieties  and  exciting  new  needs  so  that  they 
can  be  assuaged  by  buying.  Those  who  are  humiliated, 
exploited,  and  bored  are  ready  victims  of  advertising's 
promises  of  glamour,  virility,  success,  and  the  envy  of 
friends.^  Image-making  for  hire  has  become  the  culture 
not  only  of  a  consumer  society  but  also  of  government  by 
public  relations.  This  is  a  culture  that  threatens  to  oblit- 
erate the  initiative  and  creativity  of  ordinary  people  and 
their  ability  to  recognize  their  real  interests.  Mass  culture 
is  a  culture  of  compensation,  social  control,  and  profits. 
Packaging  and  publicity  are  the  principal  ways  by  which 
those  with  artistic  talent  can  make  a  living  today  and  the 
dominant  form  of  contemporary  art. 

Downtown's  appropriation  of  the  arts  corresponds  to 
its  domination  of  the  economic  and  social  life  of  the  city. 
The  chairman  of  Container  Corporation  of  America, 
Leo  Schoenhofen,  remarked  in  the  course  of  addressing 
businessmen  at  Lincoln  Center: 


The  products  of  Container  Corporation  are  essentially 
prosaic,  bi't  the  design  of  these  everyday  items  is  of 
critical  importance  in  the  market-place,  and  the  prag- 
matic businessman  understands  this.  A  strong  associa- 
tion of  Container  Corporation  with  fine  art,  good 
design,  and  great  ideas  helps  us  sell  our  product.  It 
elevates  our  salesman  in  the  eyes  of  the  people  he  calls 
upon.  It  predisposes  at  least  some  customers  to  do 
business  with  us.  .  .  .  There  is  no  doubt  that  some 
have  viewed  with  alarm,  have  worried  about  the  cor- 
ruption of  the  artist  in  the  executive  suite;  have  won- 
dered what  will  be  the  dire  results  of  the  fact  that  an 
increasing  percentage  of  private  gallery  sales  are  to  the 
corporations,  rather  than  to  the  individual  or  the 
museum.  I  would  remind  those  who  think  such  dark 
thoughts,  that  except  for  a  relatively  brief  period  in 
world  history — the  most  recent  period,  in  fact — the 
dominant  center  of  power  was  always  the  major 
stimulus  to  art,  serving  as  a  sponsor  and  patron.  It 
seems  logical  that  the  role  of  art  patron  should  be 
assurhed  by  this  new  major  force  jn  society,  the 
corporate  management  team.  There  is  nothing  either 
new  or  sinister  m  the  fact  that  they  are  using  fine  art 
for  their  own  ends.  That  has  almost  always  been  true 
of  art  patrons.  Industry  must  begin  truly  to  believe  in 
the  arts,  believe  in  them  enough  to  use  them  selfishly 
to  put  them  to  work  for  business  rather  than  serving 
merely  as  corporate  decoration.* 


The  speaker's  audience  was  probably  less  embarrassed  to 
put  art  to  use  than  he  assumed.  But  they  may  have  been 
surprised  that  they  shared  their  no-nonsense  view  of  art 
with  .Marx,  who  argued  that  culture  is  naturally  the 
expression  of  those  who  control  the  means  of  production. 
The  address  also  provides  a  good  summary  of  the  ways 
art  is  employed  by  business:  making  intrinsically  unin- 
teresting products  attractive;  building  prestige  for  the 
product  and  status  for  its  salesman;  and,  less  important  in 
the  view  of  the  president  of  the  Container  Corporation, 
adorning  corporate  offices. 

The  Container  Corporation  has  been  no  slouch  in 
implementing  these  goals.  Since  the  1930s  it  has 
pioneered  in  putting  well-known  artists  "to  work  for 
business."  In  the  early  years  Fernand  Leger,  Georgy 
Kepes,  and  others  designed  advertising  for  it  with  a  view 
to  giving  its  product  distinction.  In  the  forties  it  turned  to 
posters  and  the  fine  arts.  Patriotism  and  international 
brotherhood  became  themes  in  series  like  "Packaging 
Goes  to  War,"  "United  Nations,"  and  the  "States,"  in 
which  native  artists  interpreted  their  area.  CCA  mounted 
the  first  exhibition  of  ad  art  in  a  major  U.S.  museum  at 
the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago  in  1946. 

la  1950  a  new  marraige  of  art,  principle,  and  packag- 
ing emerged  from  the  Aspen  Institute  of  Humanistic 
Studies.  .Mortimer  Adler,  successful  promoter  of  the 
University  of  Chicago's  Great  Books  program,  was  hired 
by  CCA  to  select  the  "Great  Ideas  of  Western  Man,"  and 
reputable  artists  were  commissioned  to  interpret  them. 
Since  then  about  two  hundred  of  these  works  by  such 
figures  as  Ben  Shahn,  Joseph  Hirsch,  William  Baziotes, 
Milton  Glaser,  and  Rene  Magritte  have  been  circulating 
among  the  nation's  museums.  Each  work  has  to  be  of  a 
size  to  be  slickly  mounted  and  enclosed  in  glass  in 
uniform  free-standing  stainless-steel  easels.  When  you 
first  enter  the  gallery  where  they  are  displayed,  what 
arrests  you  is  the  mounting,  and  the  impression  never 
departs.  Art  has  been  strikingly  packaged.  The  great 
ideas  as  well  as  the  artists  have  been  marvelously  con- 
tained. 

Colorful  pamphlets  that  open  into  posters  displaying 
reproductions  above  CCA's  name  are  provided  free  to 
visitors.  The  pamphlet  describes  its  "campaign"  as  "an 
opportunity  to  stimulate  thinking  and  discussion  about 
the  ideas  at  the  root  of  what  the  philosophers  call  'the 
good  life,'  ideas  that  they  consider  infinitely  more  im- 
portant than  pursuit  of  material  gain."  But  the  purpose  is 
abundantly  clear.  What  is  surprising  is  the  openness  with 
which  the  fine  arts  have  been  co-opted  to  advertise  the 
advertiser.  The  Great  Ideas  hawk  the  pitchmen  of  tooth- 
paste and  deodorants.  Modestly  the  pamphlet  observes 
that 

With  the  success  of  the  Great  Ideas  campaign  on 
record,  other  business  enterprises  moved  to  incorpo- 
rate higher  degrees  of  quality  into  their  own  advertis- 
ing; some  even  began  expressing  laudable  commitment 
to  civic  mindedness  and  concern  for  the  larger  issues. 
Such  is  progress. 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  I  449 


oducation  i»  fVvetalKMi  that 

att«ctim 

•  indwidual 

■1 

^^^^^H 

I^C^uk^ 

^^H 

contsinAr  corporatkxi  of  am«fica 


Container  Corporation  of  America:  Exhibition  pamphlet- 
poster,  early  1970s. 


Art  and  culture  have  become  the  packaging  of  the 
corporation — "this  new  major  force  in  society,"  as  the 
CCA  chairman  puts  it. 

Museums 

The  growth  of  an  educated  pubHc  interested  in  art 
reflects  the  increasing  size  and  prosperity  of  the  middle 
class  after  World  War  II,  and  the  swelling  enrollments  in 
higher  education.  The  first  of  the  Western  nations  to 
recover  from  the  war,  America  could  afford  to  invest  in 
the  arts  and  fund  the  migration  of  the  capital  of  the 
avant-garde  from  Paris  to  New  York,  with  a  secondary 
center  in  Los  Angeles.  Not  only  did  native  talent,  ini- 
tially in  the  form  of  the  Abstract  Expressionists,  then 


(§1 


Pop,  justify  this  shift,  but  American  collectors  could 
afford  to  pay  handsomely  for  it.  At  the  same  time 
increasing  numbers  of  people  who  could  go  to  college, 
some  of  them  on  the  G.I.  Bill,  were  attracted  to  courses 
in  studio  work,  art  appreciation  and  history,  and  the 
humanities.  It  was  hard  not  to  be  attracted,  for  art  was 
presented  as  sensory  and  intellectual  stimulation  unen- 
cumbered with  social  aims.  At  the  very  least  such  courses 
created  future  audiences,  at  the  most,  professionals.  A 
growing  proportion  of  students  was  drawn  to  vocations 
as  artists,  teachers  of  art  and  arts  management  personnel, 
while  the  public  began  flocking  to  museums,  and  the 
number  of  new  art  institutions,  especially  those  exhibit- 
ing contemporary  art  grew  spectacularly. 

When  the  U.S.  Conference  of  Mayors  affirmed  in  1974 
the  right  of  all  Americans  to  the  experience  of  art  and  the 
responsibility  of  government  to  make  this  possible,  they 
were  extending  familiar  liberal  democratic  sentiments  in 
a  significant  way.  The  National  Endowment  for  the  Arts 


450  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

had  been  in  operation  for  ten  years,  and  Congress  had 
voted  it  continually  increasing  budgets.  This  occurred  in 
the  midst  of  a  nationwide  growth  of  fine-arts  museums, 
which  was  part  of  the  corporate  Hberal  program  of  urban 
redevelopment.  Museum  staffs  sought  to  introduce  larger 
audiences  to  the  arts  by  elaborate  public-relations  efforts 
and  showy  exhibition  techniques.  And  people  did  come. 
They  lined  up  and  stood  for  hours  as  they  did  to  see  the 
Rockettes.  They  came  to  see  Picasso's  erotic  drawings. 
Pop,  New  Realism,  van  Gogh,  Andrew  Wyeth,  and 
Norman  Rockwell,  the  recent  archeological  discoveries 
of  China,  the  old  masters  from  the  Hermitage  and  other 
Soviet  museums.  Bicentennial  Americana,  the  treasures 
of  the  Scythians,  the  Irish,  Pompeii,  and  Dresden. 
People's  senses  and  intellects  were  temporarily  dilated 
and  exercised,  but  that  was  all.  Viewing  works  of  art 
stimulated  curiosity  and  interest,  but  no  more  than  could 
be  satisfied  by  purchasing  a  picture  postcard  or  art  book. 

The  exhibition  of  the  tomb  furnishings  of  King 
Tutankhamun  carried  further  than  any  of  these  specta- 
cles the  popularizing  of  the  fine  arts.  The  show  traveled 
to  seven  U.S.  cities  between  1977  and  1979  and  more 
than  eight  million  people  purchased  reserved  tickets  to 
see  it.  The  price  at  San  Francisco's  "public"  de  Young 
Museum  was  $4.50,  three  times  the  regular  admission.  A 
local  radio  station  ran  a  competition  for  tickets  widely 
advertised  on  billboards  graced  by  the  boy  king's  death 
mask.  Months  in  advance  the  de  Young  had  to  close  its 
high-priced  museum  memberships  that  included  free  ad- 
mission to  Tut.  In  Los  Angeles  $14  was  not  an  unusual 
scalper's  price  for  a  ticket.  At  the  National  Gallery  in 


Washington,  visitors  spent  $100,000  a  week  at  the  museum 
store  for  replicas  of  Egyptian  artifacts,'  and  in  San  Fran- 
cisco a  Tut  shop  opened  just  before  Christmas  eighteen 
months  in  advance  of  the  exhibition.  When  Tut  arrived, 
the  shop  with  a  hundred-member  staff  did  at  least  $30,000 
in  business  each  day.'"  There  Tut  postcards,  posters, 
books,  T-shirts,  and  cushions  were  on  sale  along  with 
reproductions  and  allegedly  genuine  relics  of  Egyptian 
tomb  art,  authenticated  by  experts'  certificates.  During 
the  first  week  they  ran  out  of  the  $43.50  replicas  of  the 
statue  of  the  goddess  Selket  that  guarded  the  boy  king's 
inner  organs.  Jewelry  and  perfume  manufacturers  in 
addition  to  fashion  designers  capitalized  on  the  Egyp- 
tomania  hyped  by  the  exhibit's  corporate  sponsors  and 
museums."  There  were  sphinx  burgers  and  Tut  puzzles. 
Tut  cocktails,  and  in  Los  Angeles  a  Tutmobile  with  a 
cobra-headed  stick  shift  displayed  by  a  car  dealer.  Tut 
departed  from  New  Orleans  with  a  funeral  led  by  a  jazz 
band  down  Bourbon  Street  and  from  San  Francisco  with 
the  winged  Horus  projected  by  Eugene  Kenney  and  a 
rented  laser  beam  trained  on  the  Transamerica  pyramid 
— a  special  effects  mural. 

The  adoption  of  the  Tut  mask  by  community  murals 
was  over  before  the  coming  of  the  exhibition  to  the 
United  States.  Even  though  the  historical  justification  of 
this  use  of  Tut  by  Black  people  was  open  to  question, 
here  art  was  helping  them  build  confidence  in  themselves 
and  grapple  with  urgent  concerns  of  everyday  life,  while 


Picketers  in  front  of  the  de  Young  Museum  on  the  opening 
day  of  the  King  Tut  exhibition.  Hors  d'oeuvres  were  served 
in  the  circus  tent  beneath  a  Tut  blimp. 


TUTAMKHAMUN 


the  road  show  of  the  actual  artificats  was  show  biz. 

Although  these  museum  exhibitions  were  fascinating, 
not  much  could  be  learned  that  could  be  used  by  anyone. 
The  intellectual  life  that  the  museums  purveyed  did  not 
move  viewers  to  come  to  grips  with  the  problems  of  their 
time,  or  to  change  their  lives  in  any  serious  way.  They 
were  only  more  likely  to  stand  in  line  for  the  next  big 
show.  The  display  of  culture  did  not  lead  them  to 
question  or  challenge  their  society,  but  to  enjoy  it  and  the 
other  cultures  it  voraciously  assimilated.  They  became 
the  consumers  of  the  art  of  the  world.  Art  in  short  was 
elevating  entertainment.  And  viewers  could  be  grateful 
to  the  museums  and  respect  the  system  that  brought 
them  King  Tut,  Norman  Rockwell,  and  comparable 
spectaculars. 

It  was  mainly  the  funding  of  the  big  corporations  that 
made  possible  these  blockbusters.  Tut's  original  angel 
was  Exxon,  which  spent  over  a  million  dollars  on  pub- 
licity. In  San  Francisco  the  show  was  sponsored  by  the 
Emporium  department  stores.'^  Andrew  Wyeth  came 
with  the  compliments  of  the  Bank  of  America;  Pompeii 
was  mounted  by  Xerox;  Dresden  and  the  Archeological 
Finds  of  China  by  IB.VI;  three  Soviet  exhibitions  by 
Occidental  Petroleum;  Edvard  Munch  by  .Mobil;  the 
Irish  Treasures  by  World  Airways.  The  corporations, 
which  needed  to  improve  their  public  image  as  their 
profits  and  power  soared,  also  enjoyed  handsome  tax 
write-offs  for  their  civic  spirit.  In  addition  they  created 
subsidiaries  to  purvey  reproductions,  catalogs,  and  re- 
lated books,  such  as  Control  Data  Arts  when  its  parent 
firm  was  sponsoring  the  road  show  from  the  Hermitage 


North  American  Van  Lines:  Billboard,  1980,  Fresno. 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  I  45 1 

in  Leningrad.  Time,  Inc.  did  the  same  along  with  a 
television  series  to  accompany  its  mounting  of  the  Alex- 
ander the  Great  exhibit  that  opened  at  the  National 
Gallery.'^ 

Art  museums  arc  also  one  of  the  principal  buttresses  of 
the  travel  industry.  Apart  from  the  attractions  of  par- 
ticular landscapes  and  climates,  it  is  art  and  historical 
sites  (which  are  usually  the  same)  that  determine  the 
itinerary  of  tourists.  The  transportation,  fuel,  hotel  and 
restaurant  industries,  travel  agencies,  banking  and  cur- 
rency exchanges,  and  all  their  supporting  services  arc 
thus  beneficiaries  of  art.  Among  the  consequences  of 
college  art  education  are  the  cultivation  of  a  taste  for  such 
travel  and  the  identification  -of  the  museums, 
monuments,  and  ruins  that  must  be  seen.  To  these 
relations  of  art  and  business  must  be  added  not  only  the 
publishing  of  textbooks,  but  also  the  guidebooks  and 
posh  picture  albums  that  grace  coffee  tables. 

John  Weber,  who  has  taught  at  the  .\rt  Institute  of 
Chicago,  speaks  for  other  community  muralists  w  hen  he 
charges  that  museums  mystify  art  and  debilitate  people 
in  relation  to  it.  He  thinks  this  is  often  a  deliberate  effort 
of  the  technocrats  of  the  art  world  to  maintain  their 
hegemony  over  cultural  life.  At  least  it  can  be  said  that  in 
spite  of  the  good  intentions  of  many  museum  staff  to 
introduce  people  of  all  classes  and  races  to  art,  the  effect 
is  usually  to  induce  all  art  activity  to  gravitate  tow  ard  the 
museums  so  that  people  become  dependent  on  them 
rather  than  developing  art  where  they  are — in  their 
neighborhoods  and  workplaces.  Fhe  museums  make 
visitors  clients  of  professionals  who  channel  cultural 
activity  to  accord  w  ith  priorities  they  or  their  boards  or 
directors  define.  This  is  another  form  of  corporate  liberal 


452  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

welfarism  that  justifies  increasing  budgets  and  staffs  of 
specialists  and  managers.  Art  is  provided  as  another 
public  service  that  people  passively  undergo,  rather  than 
a  stimulus  to  their  own  activity.  The  muralists  do  not 
deny  that  there  is  a  great  deal  that  can  be  learned  from 
museums.  They  take  their  young  assistants  to  the  gal- 
leries and  carefully  study  slides  of  traditional  art.  Their 
concern  is  that  the  fine  arts  are  approached  from  how 
they  can  be  critically  used  to  help  people  understand 
their  past  and  to  meet  current  problems. 

Up  until  the  later  sixties  the  major  museums  failed  to 
exhibit  the  contributions  that  the  ethnic  minorities  and 
women  had  made  to  American  culture  and  their  contem- 
porary achievements.  Museum  staffs  were  nearly  devoid 
of  Third  World  people,  particularly  at  the  curatorial 
level.  In  response  the  .Metropolitan  .Vluseum,  the  Whit- 
ney .Museum  of  American  Art,  and  the  .Museum  of 
.Modern  Art  were  picketed,  particularly  by  the  Art 
Workers  Coalition.'''  There  were  confrontations  with 
museum  administrations  across  the  country  that  did  not 
end  with  controversial  exhibits  like  the  .Metropolitan's 
"Harlem  on  .My  .Mind"  in  1969.  Socially  concerned 
ethnic  artists  and  community  people  would  not  be 
satisfied  with  token  shows  and  token  hiring  of  minority 
staff.  They  wanted  museums  to  exhibit  minority  artists 
regularly  and  to  purchase  their  work.  Although  a 
number  of  museums  set  up  classes  for  underprivileged 
children  on  their  premises  or  in  the  inner  city,  the 
activists  sought  museum  funding  and  support  for  gal- 
leries and  workshops  operated  by  neighborhood  artists. 
They  were  opposed  to  the  extension  of  the  White  estab- 
lishment with  its  view  of  art  into  ethnic  communities. 
But  there  remained  a  continuing  division  of  thought 
among  art  activists  between  their  desire  to  gain  recogni- 
tion and  employment  in  establishment  museums  or  to 
demand  public  funding  for  alternative  institutions  which 
neighborhoods  could  control.  As  we  have  seen,  muralists 
in  general  received  some  help  from  establishment 
museums,  but  as  a  whole  it  amounted  to  very  little. 

It  was  widely  recognized  by  the  social  critics  of  the  art 
establishment  during  the  thirties  and  again  in  the  sixties 
and  seventies  that  the  major  patrons  of  the  fine  arts  and 
the  trustees  who  preside  over  the  nation's  major 
museums  and  other  cultural  institutions  were  the  same 
elites  who  dominated  the  corporate  economy.  The  best 
known  have  been  the  members  of  the  Rockefeller  family, 
who  were  instrumental  in  founding  the  New  York 
Museum  of  Modern  Art  in  1929  and  have  contributed 
substantially  to  the  Metrof>olitan  Museum  and  other 
collections,  which  has  brought  them  influence  on  decid- 
ing what  is  to  be  exhibited  and  in  determining  in  this  way 
what  in  fact  is  art.  The  Whitneys,  Guggenheims, 
Morgans,  Astors,  Paleys,  and  Dillons  who  have  sat  on 
the  boards  on  New  York  museums  have  their  counter- 
parts elsewhere  in  the  country.  In  San  Francisco  it  was 
the  same  business  leaders  who  planned  the  reshaping  of 
the  Bay  Area  around  its  corporate  economy  after  World 


War  II  who  have  served  as  trustees  of  local  art  institu- 
tions. Harold  Zellerbach,  for  instance,  who  was  head  of 
one  of  the  country's  largest  paper  and  wood  firms,  and  a 
leading  proponent  of  the  ".Manhattanized"  renewal  of  the 
city,  not  only  served  as  chairman  of  the  Art  Commission 
from  1948  to  1976  but  was  active  on  the  boards  of  the 
symphony,  opera,  and  ballet,  and  sweetened  his  spon- 
sorship of  the  Performing  Arts  Center  with  subsidies  to 
the  Neighborhood  Art  Program.'*  The  weight  of  Zeller- 
bach together  with  the  other  business  executives  who  sat 
on  local  cultural  boards  was  crucial  in  setting  the  policies 
that  channeled  the  bulk  of  funding  to  the  city's  high 
culture  and  conceived  of  the  democratizing  of  art  as 
attracting  mass  audiences  to  museum  spectaculars. 

A  popular  error  is  that  "art"  is  what  a  consensus  of 
millions  of  viewers  or  experts  over  centuries  have  decided 
it  is.  Although  art  may  appeal  to  a  universal  human 
responsiveness  to  form,  each  society  and  class  has 
utilized  this  for  its  own  purposes.  Today  what 
mainstream  art  is — contemporary  and  old  masters — is 
defined  by  those  who  buy  and  sell  it,  donate  and  exhibit 
it,  acquire  prestige  and  power  by  its  use.  It  is  they  who 
hire  the  professionals  to  select  and  evaluate  it  according 
to  establishment  priorities.  Museums,  while  acknowl- 
edging the  relation  of  their  art  to  its  historical  context  and 
while  advertizing  its  donors,  do  not  make  clear  that  their 
station  in  life  had  a  good  deal  to  do  with  what  they 
collected  and  hence  what  the  museums  display.  This 
does  not  mean  that  these  artifacts  should  not  be  shown, 
but  the  manner  of  exhibition  should  help  people  under- 
stand and  seriously  use  them.  .Moreover,  art  that  was 
passed  over  by  past  collectors  needs  to  be  sought  out  and 
reviewed  by  scholars  comitted  to  democratic  values.  The 
prejudicial  distinction  between  the  ditist  fine  arts  and 
popular  crafts  needs  to  be  re-evaluated.  The  presumption 
has  been  that  the  purpose  of  democratic  education  is  to 
"acquaint"  people  with  what  has  pleased  those  in  the  past 
who  have  had  a  chance  to  become  cultivated.  The  prob- 
lem is  to  develop  genuinely  democratic  cultivation.  And 
the  muralists  with  the  benefit  of  their  training  have 
begun  to  bridge  the  gap  between  the  cultural  inheritance 
of  different  ethinic  groups,  both  sexes  and  varied  income 
levels,  on  the  one  hand,  and  their  current  needs  and 
experiences,  on  the  other. 

Avant-Garde  Murals 

The  corporate  liberal  and  community-based  ap- 
proaches to  development  each  have  had  their  own  kind  of 
murals  that  have  been  done  at  the  same  time.  Super- 
graphics  like  those  of  City  Walls  were  often  painted  for 
downtown  patrons.  There  were  for  instance  the  poised 
and  projecting  shapes  that  Robert  Wiegand  did  in  1970 
above  the  atrium  of  Lever  House  in  New  York  City.  The 
design  alludes  to  the  novel  cantilevered  construction  of 
the  building  as  does  the  witty  title,  Leverage,  which  also 
plays  with  the  patron's  name. 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  /  45  3 


Robert  Wiegand:  Leverage,  1970,  Lever  House,  New 
York. 


Meanwhile  in  downtown  Minneapolis  the  five-story 
exterior  of  Schmitt's  Music  Store  was  adorned  by  the 
Lawrence  Sign  Co.  with  about  fifty  measures  from  the 
score  of  Ravel's  Gaspard  de  la  Nuit.  In  downtown  Cincin- 
nati in  the  early  seventies,  Urban  Walls  was  doing  humor- 
ous super-graphics,  and  throughout  the  country  the  decora- 
tion of  business  centers  and  corporate  suites  with  avant- 
garde  painting  and  sculpture  became  the  major  market 
for  artists  in  the  sixties  and  seventies.  The  placing  of 
monumental  works  in  the  plazas  of  commercial  areas, 
along  shopping  malls,  at  airports — added  exhilaration  to 
business. 

Frank  Stanton,  former  president  of  CBS,  has  said: 

There  are  .  .  .  immediate  reasons  why  alert  business 
managements  are  taking  new  and  longer  looks  at  the 
arts  on  local,  regional  and  national  scales:  to  attract  to  a 
business  career  a  fairer  share  of  the  brightest,  most 
creative  and  most  venturesome  college  students  than 
the  current  12  percent  who  make  it  their  first  choice, 
business  has  got  to  offer  a  cultural  environment  as  rich 
and  varied  and  meaningful  as  that  of  competing 
fields. '« 

Implicit  here  is  the  confession  that  business  in  itself  is  not 


sufficiently  attractive  and  therefore  requires  added  al- 
lurements. Art  in  the  corporate  offices,  nearby  commer- 
cial galleries  and  museums,  as  well  as  the  theater  and 
films,  the  symphony  and  opera  are  amenities  that  draw 
educated  young  executives  to  choose  one  firm  over 
another,  one  city  rather  than  another.  Art  makes  busi- 
ness trips  inviting  and  draws  suburbanites  to  spend  their 
money  downtown. 

While  traditional  art  appealed  to  more  conservative 
firms  as  it  had  to  nineteenth-century  magnates  who  were 
uncertain  about  their  taste  and  wanted  to  give  the  ap- 
pearance of  cultivation  and  respectability,  avant-garde 
art  became  the  principal  fare  of  eager,  venturesome 
executives  who  thought  of  themselves  as  progressive  and 
sought  out  the  excitement  of  the  new.  It  was  they  who 
were  often  associated  with  corporate  liberal  policies. 
They  bought  art  for  their  offices,  their  firms'  public 
areas,  and  their  homes.  The  art  they  favored  displayed 
their  values  of  ingenuity  and  "professionalism,"  a  kind  of 
craftsmanship  that  was  often  more  a  matter  of  abstract 
problem-solving  and  polished  rendering  than  content  and 
function.  This  art  was  often  big  and  bold  and  sought  to 
stimulate  by  the  unusual  and  sometimes  baffling.  There 
was  frequently  wit  and  irony.  It  was  "cool."  It  was 
unencumbered  with  messages  that  might  embarrass  view- 
ers by  urging  them  to  take  a  social  or  ethical  stand.  Its 
patrons  who  were  skeptical  of  most  public  causes  and 
personal   motives,   appreciated   the   irreverence   of  the 


454  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Lawrence  Sign  Co:  Gaspard  dc  la  Nuit  of  Maurice 
Ravel,  1972,  Schmitfs  Music  Store,  Minneapolis.  (Photo 
Tim  Drescher) 


avant-garde  even  when  it  baited  them.  Though  avant- 
garde  art  may  have  arisen  originally  out  of  antibourgeois 
intentions  and  was  still  often  produced  by  a  countercul- 
ture, nevertheless  it  was  taken  up  by  young  executives 
because  of  its  novelties  that  made  no  further  demands  on 
viewers  besides  quick-witted  appreciation. 

The  murals  of  the  Los  Angeles  Fine  Art  Squad  illus- 
trate the  problem  many  avant-garde  artists  have  faced  in 
taking  an  ethical  or  social  stand  in  their  art  in  an  era  when 
such  positions  were  unpopular  or  seemed  naive.  In  1969 
Vic  Henderson  and  Terry  Schoonhoven,  the  principal 
members  of  the  Squad,  began  the  Beverly  Hills  Siddhartha 
on  the  convex  exterior  of  the  Climax  nightclub.  It  was 
whitewashed  in  1972  when  new  management  took  over. 
The  style  was  Photo-Realist  and  the  sequence  of  scenes 
depicted  the  quest  for  reality  of  a  young  man  who  was  to 
become  Buddha.  Scene  1:  Enter  Siddhartha,  suitcase  in 
hand,  having  just  arrived  in  city  of  stars,  whose  homes 
are  marked  on  enlarged  tourist  map  by  stars,  of  course. 
Scene  2:  Donald  Duck  on  two-story-high  TV  screens. 
"Security  Wise?"  Donald  inquires,  gesturing  toward 
bank  with  columns  of  stacked  coins.  Scene  3:  Jumbled 
TV  image.  Scene  4:  Pretty  girl,  lightly  clad,  pressing 
appealingly  against  her  reflection  in  mirror.  Scene  5: 
Siddhartha  and  pretty  girl  behind  windshield  of  .Mer- 
cedes Benz  at  entrance  of  Climax  Club.  Scene  6:  Exit 
Siddhartha  on  motorcycle  from  Club,  apparently  fed  up 
with   L.A.    Scene   7:   Siddhartha   naked,   immersed   in 


steam,  meditating.  Scene  8:  Siddhartha  in  hut  on  beach 
contemplating  his  portrait  of  same  pretty  girl  sitting 
cross-legged  looking  out  toward  herself  in  distance  sitting 
cross-legged  on  sand  meditating. 

Thus  the  series  moved  through  a  city  whose  unreality 
was  conveyed  by  a  tourist  map,  television  images,  mirror 
reflections,  and  in  the  end  Siddhartha  pondering  a 
painting  he  had  made,  while  its  subject  in  and  out  of  the 
painting  within  the  painting  meditated  upon  a  reality 
beyond  the  sky.  From  the  cornice  above  these  panels  a 
frieze  of  eyes  stared  out,  likewise  seeking  reality  through 
all  these  appearances.  The  mural  was  seemingly  an  in- 
dictment of  the  very  nightclub  it  decorated  and  an  invi- 
tation to  a  more  authentic  kind  of  life.  Its  cleverness  was 
presumably  meant  to  entice  jaded  clubgoers  and 
passersby  with  a  taste  for  intellectual  highjinks  into 
serious  reflection  on  their  lives.  Perhaps  the  artists  sought 
to  deliver  their  message  in  the  only  way  it  seemed 
possible  in  the  very  heart  of  the  society  they  criticized. 
But  the  net  effect  of  the  visual  games  for  those  who  took 
the  trouble  was  probably  to  stimulate  the  taste  for  more 
such  play.  This  was  probably  the  hope  of  the  owner  of 
the  Climax  Club  also,  which  was  muralized  with 
psychedelia  inside. 

The  best  known  of  the  surviving  work  of  the  Fine  Art 
Squad  is  The  Isle  of  California,  which  was  done  between 
1970  and  1971.  It  fills  the  side  of  a  two-story  building  so 
that  seen  against  the  sky  it  gives  a  compelling  view  of  the 
state  and  Highway  66  having  dropped  into  the  Pacific  at 
the   Arizona   line.    All   the   details   of  foaming   ocean, 


sf-- 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  /  455 


Terry  Schoonhoven  and  Vic  Henderson  (Los  Angeles  Fine 
Arts  Squad):  Beverly  Hills  Siddhartha  (partial  view), 
1969-70,  Los  Angeles.  (©  Environmental  Communica- 
tions) 


Beverly  Hills  Siddhartha  (partial  view).  (©  Environ- 
mental Communications) 


456  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Terry  Schoonhoven,  Vic  Henderson,  and  James  Frazin: 
The  Isle  of  California,  1971-72,  Santa  Monica. 


Terry  Schoonhoven  and  Vic  Henderson:  Ghost  Town, 
1973,  Thousand  Oaks,  California. 


mountains,  freeway  ramp  and  clouds  are  rendered  with  a 
verisimilitude  that  invites  you  to  touch  the  surface  to  be 
sure  that  the  scene  is  not  real.  Schoonhoven  says  that  the 
mural  played  to  the  persistent  talk  about  earthquakes.  A 
major  one,  in  fact,  did  occur  in  Los  Angeles  a  few  weeks 
after  the  mural's  completion. 

The  Squad  followed  this  with  one  in  nearby  Venice, 
depicting  what  never  happens  at  this  beach  community 
of  Los  Angeles — the  streets  under  a  thick  blanket  of 
snow — the  nightmare  of  the  Chamber  of  Commerce. 

In  1973  the  Squad  painted  Ghost  Town  in  a  shopping 
center  of  the  Los  Angeles  suburb  of  Thousand  Oaks.  It 
was  commissioned  by  the  owner  of  the  center.  At  first 
glance  you  take  it  for  the  sleek  glass  and  marble  entrance 
of  the  Conejo  Community  Trust  Co.  Then  you  are 
convinced  that  it  is  a  mural  painted  across  the  entrance  of 
the  bank.  Finally  you  realize  that  there  is  no  bank  at  all 
and  that  the  whole  affair  is  a  painting.  It  offers  a  view 
into  "the  bank"  and  a  mirror  image  of  the  other  side  of  the 
mall,  only  after  a  catastrophe  that  has  left  it  in  ruins.  The 
reflection  of  an  historical  marker  that  must  be  read 
backwards  explains: 

THOUSAND  OAKS— From  sheep  ranch  to  subur- 
ban community,  this  area  reached  its  peak  rapidly  but 
was   abandoned   during  the  economic  crises  of  the 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  I  ^Sl 

1970's.  To  your  left  can  be  seen  the  remnants  of  the 
old  Sears  Parking  lot  which  had  capacity  for  2300 
gasoline  driven  autos.  California  Registered  Historical 
Landmark  No.  541.  Plaque  placed  May  12,  1983. 

The  area  has  returned  to  its  former  state.  The  reflection 
shows  sheep  grazing  in  the  suburban  shambles  as  in  an 
eighteenth-century  painting  of  the  ruins  of  Rome.  Her- 
ders in  rough  hide  jackets  watch  over  them.  All  that 
remains  of  a  Kentucky  Fried  Chicken  establishment  is  its 
big  bucket  sign  that  has  fallen  awry,  but  Colonel  Sanders' 
faded  portrait  is  still  recognizable.  There  is  also  a  de- 
cayed "Palace  of  Pl[easure],"  an  eviscerated  TV  .set,  a 
toilet  and  icebox,  and  a  ranch-style  house  with  its  car  and 
furniture,  but  the  roof  has  gaping  holes.  Other  aban- 
doned houses  stretch  in  the  background.  Meanwhile 
business  continues  as  usual  at  the  bank  \\  ith  its  fluores- 
cent lighting,  customer  tables,  signs,  tile  floors,  and 
Venetian  blinds. 

The  painting  is  both  a  whimsical  and  ironic  indictment 
of  the  very  society  the  artists  painted  for.  For  anyone 
who  examines  the  details  carefully — and  the  painting 
makes  a  strong  invitation — it  is  hard  to  escape  at  least  a 


Ghost  Town  (partial  view). 


458  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


momentary  chill.  The  very  precariousness  of  competitive 
existence  and  dependence  on  mysterious  forces  that  few 
understand  and  no  one  controls  make  this  depositors' 
nightmare  one  in  which  the  bank — Community  Trust, 
no  less — survives — just  as  the  ads  always  said  it 
would — but  while  everything  else  is  in  ruin.  The  State 
Department  of  Public  Works  has  also  endured  to  place 
the  marker — reflecting  the  blandness  with  which 
bureaucracy  can  reduce  a  catastrophe  to  an  official 
notice.  The  fantasy  of  economic  bust  provokes  a  shudder 
that  ends  in  delight.  The  artists  do  show  the  fragility  and 
illusoriness  of  the  system,  but  they  make  art  of  this  that 
only  leads  to  our  entertainment.  Once  more  the 
bourgeois  can  enjoy  a  pasting. 

It  is  hard  to  avoid  the  conclusion  that  arousing  a 
whimsical  shudder  along  with  displaying  their  very  con- 
siderable skills  at  befuddling  viewers  about  what  is  real 
has  been  the  principal  aim  of  Squad  members. 
Schoonhoven  said  at  a  slide  showing  of  their  work  at 
UCLA  in  1974  that  they  hoped  viewers  would  draw  the 
consequences  from  their  ironic  scenes  of  ruins.  He  would 
not  say  what  consequences  but  added  that  people  maybe 
had  always  wanted  to  see  ruins  in  the  places  the  Squad 
painted.  Still,  there  is  a  simple  lack  of  seriousness  about 
their  playing  with  images.  It  may  be  that  the  painters 
wanted  to  keep  their  social  criticism  "cool"  with  the  hope 
of  being  taken  seriously  by  the  skeptical.  While  remind- 
ing us  of  the  questions  we  already  had  about  our  society, 
these  murals  do  not  encourage  us  to  do  anything  about  it. 
They  invite  us  to  shake  our  heads  at  the  folly  of  modern 
life  and  go  on  pursuing  it. 

This  was  most  clear  in  the  big  wall  Schoonhoven  did 


in  1978  near  the  beach  in  Venice  on  which  he  painted  a 
mirror  image  of  a  building  and  sky  behind  you  as  you 
approach  the  mural.  There  is  not  a  person  in  the  street, 
which  is  not  like  Windward  Avenue  at  any  time  of  day  or 
night.  Schoonhoven  titled  the  work  St.  Charles  Painting 
because  this  was  the  name  of  the  hotel  that  occupied  the 
building.  He  says  that  he  wanted  to  show  "the  ordinary 
made  extraordinary  by  being  put  in  the  context  of  a 
painting."  The  mural  has  no  exact  meaning,  he  adds;  he 
wanted  to  leave  it  up  to  the  viewer.  What  was  in  his  mind 
when  he  painted  these  streets  without  people,  he 
confides,  was  a  Venice  that  was  disappearing  as  new 
money  came  in,  rents  rose,  and  artists  were  forced  to 
leave.  It  also  occurred  to  him  that  this  is  how  Venice 
might  look  after  a  neutron  bomb  had  taken  out  people 
and  not  buildings.  The  same  sense  of  loneliness,  he 
comments,  characterizes  all  his  "apocalyptic"  paintings. 
But  the  social  implications  are  even  less  explicit  here  than 
in  the  other  works,  and  the  passerby  may  read  St.  Charles 
Painting  as  simply  a  backdrop  for  all  the  activity  that  goes 
on  before  it,  or  as  a  visual  joke.  With  all  his  legibility, 
Schoonhoven's  reluctance  to  make  his  meaning  clear  or  to 
suggest  what  has  produced  the  desolation  or  what  is  to  be 
done  about  it  is  akin  to  the  alienation  he  depicts.  The 
painter  is  as  absent  as  people  from  his  painting. 

The  Squad's  murals  are  like  much  other  avant-garde 
art  from  its  beginning  in  the  nineteenth  century,  when 
artists  turned  to  the  fascinations  of  the  visible  world  and 
image  making  as  well  as  the  involutions  of  irony  because 


Terry    Schoonhoven:    St.    Charles    Painting,    1978, 
Venice. 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  /  459 


society  seemed  irremediable.  In  such  art  alone,  it 
seemed,  a  person  could  exercize  his  intelligence  and  skill 
and  maintain  control  over  his  work  and  integrity.  In  a 
sense  this  was  "work  for  work's  sake,"  or,  more  precisely, 
work  for  the  sake  of  the  worker  and  those  interested  in 
ingenious  but  useless  constructions.  By  painting  the 
disasters  of  modern  life,  the  Fine  Arts  Squad  tried  to 
avoid  escaping  into  art  for  beauty's  sake,  but  in  fact  they 
sought  refuge  in  pictorial  high  jinks.  And  this  seemed  to 
be  a  stronghold  also  against  all  the  deceptions  of  social 
causes  and  activism. 

Similar  visual  wit  was  accomplished  by  John  Wehrle 
and  John  Rampley  in  1975  and  1976  with  two  murals  in 
San  Francisco  that  seemed  to  lament  the  artificiality  of 


John  Wehrle  and  John  Rampley:  EB  1942,  1975,  de 
Young  Museum,  San  Francisco. 


modern  civilization.  The  first  showed  a  Goodyear  blimp 
with  "Moon"  illuminated  on  its  Hank  floating  over  a  cow 
meadow  where  a  rusting  car  and  old  farm  equipment 
moldered.  The  license  plate  gives  the  mural  its  ironic 
title.  The  second.  Positively  Fourth  Street,  offered  nature's 
revenge — flora  and  fauna  gradually  taking  over  a  San 
Francisco  freeway  and  abandoned  cars  w  hilc  in  the  dis- 
tance downtown  highrises  were  being  overgrown  by 
their  roof  gardens.  The  works  that  at  first  mystify  w  ere 

John  Wehrle  and  John  Rampley:  Positively  Fourth 
Street,/ 9 76,  de  Young  Museum,  San  Francisco.  (Photo 
Wehrle) 


460  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


John  Wehrle:  The  Fall  of  Icarus,  1979,  Venice. 


rendered  in  a  style  that  combined  the  Magic  Realism  of 
the  thirties  with  the  current  New  Realism.  They  were 
executed  at  the  side  of  the  de  Young  Museum,  which 
sponsored  them  as  part  of  a  project  titled  "The  Museum 
Celebrates  the  Community."  In  1978  Wehrle  painted  The 
Fall  of  Icarus,  which  almost  faces  Schoonhoven's  St. 
Charles  Painting  in  Venice.  Here  he  shows  the  image  of  a 
tumbling  astronaut  locked  on  an  outdoor  moving  picture 
screen  in  an  abandoned  lot  that  has  been  taken  over  by 
the  desert.  Meanwhile  three  angels  seem  to  be  descend- 
ing for  a  new  annunication  as  a  cowboy  (or  shepherd?) 
watches,  and  a  ramshackle  marquee  announces  the  last 
movie  and  title  of  the  mural .  The  real  but  empty  cars  that 
park  in  front  of  the  wall  seem  to  be  watching  the  new 
picture  show.  As  in  the  case  of  Werhle's  other  work  and 
the  Fine  Arts  Squad's  murals,  there  is  verisimilitude  and 
mystification,  wry  but  unfocused  social  criticism,  a  brief 
shudder  and  a  chuckle. 

More  artists  got  into  the  act  of  visual  irony  and  slick 
rendering  w  ith  billboard  festivals  in  Los  Angeles  and  San 
Francisco  in  1977  organized  by  the  Eyes  and  Ears  Foun- 
dation and  funded  by  the  California  Arts  Council.  De- 
signs were  selected  by  competition,  and  nine  were 
mounted  on  big  commercial  boards  along  La  Cienega  and 
Wiltshire  Boulevards  and  seventeen  near  Fisherman's 
Wharf.  They  played  with  topics  like  the  charmless 
middle-aged  in  their  backyard  pools,  learning  how  to 
draw,  and  unzipping  the  universe  with  a  .Mastercharge 
card. 

A  work  that  offers  a  particularly  useful  comparison 
with  people's  murals  is  Running  Fence  of  Christojavacheff 
because  of  its  connection  with  everyday  life  and  the 
aesthetic  character  that  he  attributed  to  the  process  of 
creating  it.  It  was  a  sort  of  nonfigurative  mural,  an 
eighteen-foot-high,     twenty-four-mile-long    ribbon    of 


white  nylon  suspended  from  steel  posts  and  cables  that 
loped  across  the  hills  forty  miles  north  of  San  Francisco 
and  finally  dove  down  a  cliff  into  the  Pacific  and  came  to 
an  end  on  a  series  of  buoys.  It  had  a  planned  life  of  two 
weeks  during  September  1976.  It  can  be  compared  to 
murals,  for  it  was  after  all  a  wall  that  was  intended  to 
function  aesthetically.  Whatever  can  be  said  against  it,  it 
was  fascinating  to  see.  It  would  billow  out  brightly  on 
the  flank  of  a  tawny  hill,  rise  to  a  crest,  shimmering 
against  a  deep  blue  sky,  disappear,  then  emerge  once 
more  and  wind  and  swing  through  the  countryside, 
allowing  itself  to  be  seen  in  fits  and  starts  for  miles  ahead. 
You  began  to  see  the  dairyland  in  a  new  way:  the  white 
fences  of  the  pastures  became  part  of  a  composition 
Running  Fence  created.  Roads  and  their  divider  lines, 
some  continuous,  some  a  sequence  of  dashes  were  ab- 
sorbed by  the  design;  then  the  telephone  wires,  the 
eroded  ravines,  the  windbreaks  of  dark  pines,  the  un- 
dulating horizon,  a  bank  of  white  fog,  laundry  lines  and 
the  houses  they  were  attached  to.  Everything  in  view  was 
transfigured  into  "art."  It  was  a  spectacular  experience. 
The  usual  meanings  and  uses  of  things  were  half  forgot- 
ten, and  they  became  parts  of  an  enormous  aesthetic 
composition.  The  effect  was  so  complete  that  the  most 
familiar  objects  became  abstract  forms  relating  to  one 
another  as  theme  and  variations. 

Christo  repeatedly  told  public  meetings  and  the  press 
that  the  whole  process  of  creating  Running  Fence  should 
also  be  understood  as  an  essential  part  of  the  work  of  art: 
landscapes  had  to  be  reconnoitered  for  suitable  sites; 
cloth,  posts,  and  cables  sought  out  in  surplus 
warehouses;  the  fabric  sewn  into  panels.  Ranchers  were 
approached  and  persuaded  to  make  their  land  available. 
The  boards  of  supervisors  of  two  counties  and  state 
environmental  agencies  had  to  be  convinced.  Officials 
and  the  public  were  drawn  into  controversy  that  ex- 
tended over  two  years  concerning  what  was  art  and  what 
harm  it  might  cause.  It  took  four  months  for  laborers  to 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  I  461 


Christo  Javacheff,  professional  staff,  and  crew  of  300 
college  students:  Running  Fence,  1976,  Sonoma  and 
Marin  Counties,  California. 


Running  Fence. 


mount  the  one  hundred  sixty-pound,  twenty-one  foot 
posts,  and  over  three  hundred  college  students  were 
hired  to  string  up  the  nylon  and  monitor  its  full  length. 
Police  and  rangers  patrolled  it,  not  permitting  drivers  to 
stop  for  fear  of  tie-ups  and  accidents.  The  enterprise  of 
course  generated  its  own  publicity,  and  newspapers  were 
full  of  it.  Art  experts  from  around  the  world  descended. 
The  San  Francisco  Museum  of  Modern  Art  held  a  con- 
current exhibition  of  photographs  and  designs.  Running 
Fence  was  recorded  by  professional  filmmakers  and 
Abrams  prepared  a  book  about  it.  An  incredible  number  of 
pictures  must  have  been  shot  by  amateur  photographers. 
After  the  fence  was  disassembled,  the  nylon,  posts,  and 
cables  were  distributed  to  the  ranchers  whose  land  it 
occupied.  Pieces  of  the  fabric  were  sold  to  souvenir 
hunters  to  linger  in  drawers  to  who  knows  what  fate. 
Running  Fence  was  finally  memorialized  in  a  mural  by 
Michael  John  over  the  entrance  of  the  food  market  in 
Valley  Ford,  the  only  village  in  its  path. 


This  was  all  part  of  the  process  that  Christo  claimed 
was  Running  Fence.  He  would  tell  the  public  assembled  at 
a  hearing  of  a  county  board,  "you  don't  realize  it,  but  you 
are  all  part  of  a  work  of  art."  And  undoubtedly  many 
who  argued  for  and  worked  on  the  project  felt  they  were 
part  of  something  bigger  than  themselves.  Running  Fence 
was  the  largest  happening,  the  most  all-embracing  and 
extended  example  of  performance  art  to  date. 

Running  Fence  was  an  example  par  excellence  of 
aestheticism — that  is,  experience  for  its  own  sake  without 
practical  or  moral  commitments.  Christo's  work  was 
important  because  it  ordered  and  heightened  people's 
awareness,  using  the  substance  of  everyday  life — 
ranches,  roads,  familiar  landscape,  neighbors,  and  public 
meetings.  But  it  reduced  life  to  art  rather  than  enlarging 
art  to  everyday  reality.  Running  Fence  asked  local  people 
to  join  it;  it  did  not  seek  to  become  part  of  their  lives  to 
serve  them.  The  culmination  of  Christo's  efforts  was  the 
construction  and  viewing  of  a  fascinating  ribbon  across 


462  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


the  countryside,  whereas  what  really  concerned  the 
people  who  lived  there  was  the  decline  of  the  family  farm 
and  the  disappearance  of  dairying,  the  incursion  of  sub- 
urban developers,  and  what  was  happening  to  their 
young  people.  What  would  have  engaged  art  in  human 
affairs  would  have  been  a  much  more  modest  mural  on 
these  issues  that  would  help  local  people  organize  to  save 
the  way  of  life  that  many  generations  had  created.  This 
organizing  would  be  a  more  authentic  and  comprehen- 
sive art  than  Christo's  because  it  would  grapple  with  the 
real  substance  of  life  rather  than  playing  with  its  sur- 
faces. The  ultimate  art  would  then  have  been  the  de- 
veloping of  life  on  the  land. 

Both  Running  Fence  and  the  murals  are  forms  of  par- 
ticipatory art,  but  Christo's  work  was  a  distraction  from 
the  disorderliness  of  daily  life,  whereas  the  murals  and 
the  community  activism  they  are  a  part  of  are  attempts  to 
come  to  grips  with  the  world  in  productive  ways.  Run- 
ning Fence  was  perhaps  the  most  total  effort  of  the  avant- 
garde  to  date  to  aestheticize  existence  by  reducing  it  to 
the  safe  playground  of  recreation  from  which  people 
could  return  refreshed  to  everyday  routines.  What  was 
particularly  dismaying  about  it  was  the  waste  of  human 
energy  and  resources,  the  long  debates  and  public  meet- 
ings, which  could  have  as  well  been  devoted  to  serious 
efforts  at  community  development.  This  digression  from 
real  issues  suggests  how  the  fine  arts  are  now  being 
"democratized."  Once  the  preserve  of  the  privileged  for 
their  own  enjoyment,  they  risk  becoining  an  instrument 
to  entertain  the  masses  by  audience  participation. 

There  is  some  question  as  to  whether  Christo  was  as 
much  concerned  with  bringing  art  to  the  people  as  he  was 
in  using  people  to  further  his  project  and  career.  This  is 


Michael  John:   Valley  Ford 
Valley  Ford,  California. 


Market  Mural,   1976, 


an  ambiguity  that  hangs  over  all  art  professionals  in- 
cluding museum  staffs  who  want  to  attract  large  numbers 
of  people  by  show-biz  museum  exhibitions,  super- 
graphics,  monumental  public  sculpture,  and  the  spec- 
tacular architecture  of  the  urban  scene.  This  is  also  the 
problem  of  all  paternalist  corporate  liberal  practice, 
which  makes  people  the  clients  of  experts.  And  even 
when  these  efforts  do  not  deliberately  manipulate  the 
public,  they  render  it  passive  and  dependent.  Running 
Fence  like  so  many  other  efforts  to  "involve"  people  in  art 
kept  the  aesthetic  isolated  from  the  serious  operations  of 
society.  Independent  creativity  has  thereby  been  ren- 
dered innocuous,  while  the  establishment  kept  society's 
controversial  decisions  and  activities  under  control.  This 
has  been  the  corporate  strategy  of  dealing  with  human 
needs  in  general,  and  many  liberals  seriously  concerned 
about  people's  chances  for  initiative  and  imagination  have 
gone  along,  seeking  "realistically"  to  make  them  available 
in  leisure  only.  As  a  result  creativity  has  been  relegated 
to  the  fine  arts  and  institutionalized  in  the  corner.  Both 
art  and  work  have  become  pathological  specializations 
precisely  because  they  are  separated.  This  is  what  the 
detachment  and  disinterestedness  of  the  arts  are  about. 
This  narrowing  of  creativity  and  work  by  isolating  them 
from  each  other  reflects  the  contemporary  crisis — the 
need  to  make  the  production  of  the  means  of  life  both 
meaningful  and  democratic.  People's  murals  f>oint  to  the 
possibility,  and  in  this  resjsect  they  are  examples  of  the 
community-based  process  of  development  and  its  appro- 
priate technology. 


NOTES 

1.  John  H.  Mollenkopf,  "The  Fragile  Giant:  The  Crisis  of 
the  Public  Sector  in  American  Cities,"  Socialist  Revolution, 
July-September  1976,  p.  11  ff. 

2.  The  Economic  Opportunity  Act  of  1964,  designed  to 
combat  poverty,  authorized  the  creation  of  Community  Action 
Programs  conducted  with  the  "maximum  feasible  participation 
of  residents.  .  .  ."  (Title  II-A,  Sec  202,  a,  3.)  (Cf.  Ralph  M. 
Kramer,  Participation  of  the  Poor,  Englewood  Cliffs:  Prentice- 
Hall,  1969.) 

3.  Bruce  B.  Brugmann  and  Greggar  Sletteland,  The  Ulti- 
mate Highrise  (San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian,  1971),  p.  31.  In  1970 
the  downtown  highrise  district  cost  the  city  $5  million  more 
than  it  contributed  in  revenues.  As  residential  tax  assessments 
rose  dramatically,  the  downtown  proportion  of  the  city  tax  bill 
fell  (Brugmann,  p.  35).  Also,  Mollenkopf,  p.  18  ff. 

4.  Mollenkopf,  p.  28.  Also,  Nat  Hentoff,  "How  the  Banks 
Mugged  New  York  in  Order  to  Save  It,"  Social  Policy,  May- 
June  1977,  p.  59  ff.  (Review  of  Jack  Newfield  and  Paul 
Bubrul's  Abuse  of  Power). 

5.  Barry  Commoner,  The  Poverty  of  Power  (New  York: 
Bantam,  1976),  p.  226  ff. 


The  Contemporary  Crisis  /  463 

6.  Cf.  chapter  8,  note  92. 

7.  John  Berger,  Ways  of  Seeing  (New  York:  Penguin  Books, 
1973),  p.  142  ff. 

8.  Quoted  in  "Big  Business  and  the  Arts,"  Bicentennial  Arts 
Biweekly,  no.  14,  June  5,  1975. 

9.  "Greatest  and  Shabbiest  .Museum  Gets  a  Dusting,"  This 
World  section,  San  Francisco  Sunday  Examiner  and  Chronicle, 
February  27,  1977. 

10.  Don  Wegars,  "Business  Brisk  at  .Museum  Gift  Shop," 
San  Francisco  Chronicle,  June  11,  1979. 

11.  Walter  Blum,  "The  Treasures  of  Tutankhamen," 
California  Living,  San  Francisco  Sunday  Examiner  and  Chronicle, 
May  27,  1979,  p.  3. 

12.  Ibid.,  p.  2f. 

13.  .Maryanne  Conheim,  "The  latest  thrust  in  corporate 
support  for  art  exhibits,"  Scene,  p.  8,  San  Francisco  Sunday 
Examiner  and  Chronicle,  October  14,  1979. 

14.  Sophy  Burnham,  The  Art  Crowd  (New  York:  McKay, 
1973),  pp.  13-22,  167-85. 

15.  "San  Francisco's  Arts  Bureaucracy  and  How  to  Change 
\t,""  Arts  Biweekly,  May  15,  1977,  p.  1  ff.  Also,  Nora  Gallagher 
et  al.,  "Art  for  Harold's  Sake,"  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian, 
November  28,  1975,  p.  8  ff. 

16.  Quoted  in  "Big  Business  and  the  Arts." 


10 


PEOPLES  ART 


MURALS  AS  APPROPRIATE  TECHNOLOGY 

Community  murals  are  a  communications  technology. 
Their  union  of  art  and  work  is  clarified  when  the  paint- 
ings are  understood  also  as  a  form  of  "appropriate 
technology,"  that  is,  efforts  to  humanize  ordinary  pro- 
duction by  meeting  the  social  and  cultural  needs  of 
workers  and  users  as  well  as  their  economic  require- 
ments.' This  technology  has  been  typical  of  the  com- 
munity-based method  of  development  in  this  country  and 
abroad.  It  has  been  pursued  particularly  by  some  of  the 
non-industrial  peoples  of  the  Third  World  since  World 
War  II  in  order  to  modernize  in  their  own  way  and  avoid 
the  human  costs  of  the  kind  of  industrializing  typical  of 
Western  countries  over  the  past  two  hundred  years.  The 
new  nations  also  sought  to  eliminate  the  possibility  of 
heavy  foreign  investment  dominating  their  economy, 
narrowing  its  production  to  commodities  needed  abroad 
and  carrying  off  profits  and  interest  on  debts. ^  Intro- 
ducing capital-intensive  technology,  this  neocolonialism 
created  small  local  middle  classes  but  threw  large  num- 
bers of  artisans  and  peasants  out  of  work  and  off  the  land 
with  the  result  that  they  converged  on  cities  where  their 
hopes  for  employment  could  not  be  met  and  they 
crowded  into  shantytowns.  The  plight  of  the  minorities 
of  the  inner  cities  of  the  United  States  and  the  farm 
workers  of  agribusiness  has  been  comparable  and  has  also 
been  characterized  as  "colonial."  Fhey  likewise  became 
increasingly  superfluous  in  an  investors'  economy  for 
which  high  technology  was  designed  to  minimize  labor 
costs.  Packed  into  ghettos  and  barrios,  the  jobless  and 
underemployed  began  to  lose  their  social  cohesion  and 
culture,  as  did  their  counterparts  abroad. 


But  people  in  the  inner  cities  and  labor  camps  in  this 
country  like  those  in  traditional  villages  and  urban  slums 
overseas  soon  began  grappling  with  their  own  develop- 
ment, employing  whatever  skills  they  had,  drawing  on 
resources  that  were  immediately  available,  and  produc- 
ing directly  for  their  own  needs.  There  were  important 
precursors  of  this  appropriate  technology,  such  as  the 
attempts  over  the  last  fifty  years  to  update  the  coopera- 
tive methods  of  the  village  ejido  in  Mexico.*  In  India 
Gandhi  pressed  for  the  renewal  of  cottage  industry, 
which  the  British  had  made  illegal  so  that  Indian  cotton 
could  be  milled  in  Manchester  to  be  returned  as  cloth  for 
sale  in  the  subcontinent,  with  the  result  that  thousands  of 
peasant  were  thrown  out  of  work.^  The  Chinese  during 
the  Long  March  developed  backyard  foundries  to  supply 
their  forces,  and  after  Liberation,  they  emphasized  the 
importance  of  self-reliance,  depending  mainly  on  their 
largest  available  resource,  human  power,  and  integrating 
small-scale  industry  into  the  countryside  and  residential 
urban  neighborhoods.  They  also  trained  paraprofession- 
als,  like  "barefoot  doctors,"  to  provide  necessary  services 
to  everyone.^  In  Cuba  under  Castro,  many  of  the  edu- 
cated middle  class  went  into  the  countryside  to  teach 
literacy  and  learned  about  their  own  country  in  turn. 
The  "cultural  circles"  that  Paolo  Freire  developed  in 
Brazil  were  also  a  form  of  appropriate  technology.® 
Elsewhere,  technicians  working  with  local  people  have 
researched  old  indigenous  methods  or  have  used  modern 
know-how  to  design  means  well  adapted  to  the  local 
milieu.  Wind  and  solar  technologies  have  been  widely 
used,  not  only  abroad  but  also  in  the  slums  of  New  York 
City  and  San  Bernardino,  along-  with  intensive  urban 
agriculture.^  Low-cost  housing  built  or  rehabilitated  by 


464 


resident  owners  and  their  neighbors  is  another  im- 
portant example.* 

Such  ingenuity  and  cooperative  self-reliance  are  in  the 
American  grain.  When  de  Tocqueville  visited  this 
country  in  the  1830s,  he  was  struck  by  the  number  of 
locally  initiated  voluntary  groups  serving  community 
purposes.  In  fact,  much  of  appropriate  technology  is  a 
recovery  and  updating  of  the  old-fashioned  virtues  of 
mutual  aid,  local  control,  and  creativity  common  at  the 
grass  roots  throughout  the  world  before  the  onset  of 
centrally  administered,  professionally  incapacitated  mass 
society.*  What  is  new  is  the  redirection  of  industrialism's 
inventiveness  to  these  purposes  and  the  possibility  of 
wider  communication  and  cooperation  than  ever  before. 
For  instance,  the  small  flexible  power  tools  of  modern 
technology  like  new  energy  sources  are  readily  adapted 
to  human  scale  operations,  and  muralists  themselves  have 
taken  advantage  of  recent  developments  in  paint  chemis- 
try. 

In  general,  appropriate  technology  has  meant  forms  of 
production  and  service  designed  to  help  workers  develop 
their  abilities  readily  to  meet  local  needs.  It  has  released 
people's  initiative  and  given  them  control  over  their  own 
production.  It  is  typically  labor-intensive,  creating  jobs; 
it  is  decentralized  and  can  be  understood  and  maintained 
by  the  people  it  serves;  it  is  relatively  low-cost,  using 
renewable  energy  and  respecting  the  environment.  While 
small  and  intermediate  scale  apparatus  is  often  appropri- 
ate, heavy  equipment  may  be  more  humanly  efficient  in 
other  situations.'"  What  is  crucial  is  not  scale  but  how 
workers  and  consumers  are  involved  and  whether  they 
make  the  decisions.  When  they  do,  they  tend  to  shape 
their  methods  in  a  manner  that  is  responsive  to  their 
social  and  cultural  values  as  well  as  being  economically 
viable.  Their  technology  can  then  be  occupied  with 
humanizing  means — that  is,  with  the  satisfactions  of  the 
process  of  production  for  workers,  in  addition  to  its 
products.  As  a  result,  work  has  the  possibility  of  be- 
coming craftsmanship  and  art. 

The  emergence  of  appropriate  technology  has  made 
clear  that  massivt,  centralized  industry  was  not  the 
primary  kind  necessary  to  meet  the  needs  of  ordinary 
people  during  the  last  two  centuries.  Indeed,  it  has  been 
its  failure  to  do  just  that  as  well  as  its  declining  profit 
margins,  its  poisoning  of  the  environment,  and  exhaust- 
ing of  natural  resources  that  are  finally  catching  up  with 
it.  It  was  owners'  control  of  the  surpluses  society  pro- 
duced that  created  the  system  of  concentrated  capital 
accumulation  and  investment  that  shaped  the  industry 
we  have  been  saddled  with.  Technology  became 
capital-intensive  because  those  who  profited  from  it  were 
left  free  to  design  it  and  our  urban  and  rural  landscapes. 
For  technology  to  be  truly  appropriate,  all  who  create 
society's  wealth  must  have  a  share  in  determining  how  it 
is  produced  and  used. 

In  general  the  new  technology  aims  at  treating  all 
production  as  culture.  Rather  than  exploiting  human  and 


People's  Art  /  465 

natural  resources,  its  use  implies  their  cultivation — that 
is,  their  renewal  and  growth.  With  the  intention  of 
gaining  power  over  the  world  and  one  another,  men  since 
the  sixteenth  century  have  had  in  mind  a  mechanical 
model  of  coercion  from  outside  which  has  fostered  the 
regimentation  of  people  as  well  as  the  abuse  of  their 
habitat.  But  the  new  technology  implies  a  self-regulating 
biological  or  organic  model  that  respects  all  people  as 
purposive  and  deserving  to  be  involved  in  the  decisions 
that  affect  their  lives.  It  recognizes  the  need  for  the 
mutual  nurturing  of  part  and  whole — individual,  com- 
munity, and  environment.  And  the  criteria  of  this 
technology  also  call  for  the  drawing  out  of  the  capa- 
bilities of  persons  in  a  balanced  way,  rather  than  restrict- 
ing and  fragmenting  them." 

The  connection  of  community  murals  with  appropri- 
ate technology  is  made  plausible  when  it  is  recalled  that 
the  murals  were  improvised  by  people  of  little  means  to 
meet  compelling  needs  because  the  heavily  capitalized 
media  were  not  accessible  to  them.  They  used  the  re- 
sources they  had — an  abundance  of  willing  hands,  a  lot 
to  say,  imagination,  and  the  good  will  of  local  merchants, 
who  often  provided  materials.  The  murals  are  labor- 
intensive  and  depend  on  manual  skills  that  can  be  learned 
on  the  job.  A  major  resource  are  the  professional  artists 
who  facilitate  the  participation  of  lay  people.  As  in  the 
case  of  appropriate  technology,  the  muralists  are  con- 
cerned with  preserving  what  is  valuable  from  the  past, 
often  traditional  imagery,  and  combining  it  with  up-to- 
date  ideas  and  methods.  And  their  intention  has  been  to 
promote  what  has  been  the  central  purpose  of  appro- 
priate technology — the  stimulating  of  local  initiative.'^ 

Those  who  have  turned  to  appropriate  technology 
include  not  only  the  poor  of  the  nonindustrial  and  in- 
dustrial countries,  but  also  educated  professionals  of  the 
middle  class  who  are  critical  of  the  abuses  of  human  and 
natural  resources  by  modern  society,  particularly  the 
costs  to  the  health  and  quality  of  life  of  people.  These 
dissidents  have  turned  their  knowledge  to  seeking  al- 
ternatives to  capital-intensive  technology  both  for  the 
overdeveloped  and  developing  nations.  They  often  dis- 
tinguish between  hardware  and  software,  the  material 
apparatus  as  against  the  human  input,  which  is  to  their 
mind  the  most  important,  not  only  because  it  is  for 
people  that  technology  exists,  but  also  because  appropri- 
ate technology  depends  on  their  manual  skill  and  creativ- 
ity." "Software,"  a  term  borrowed  from  computer 
technology,  or  "soft-tech,"  is  the  essence  of  what  is 
appropriate.  It  is  the  human  operations  and  relation- 
ships, the  cooperative  methods,  the  accumulated  experi- 
ence and  know-how,  the  informal  networks  and  organi- 
zational forms.  It  corresponds  to  the  muralists'  interest  in 
the  process  of  producing  their  work.  Soft-tech  is  the 
social  and  cultural  component  of  production.  The  de- 
pendence of  muralists  on  hardware  is  relatively 
modest — the  wall,  scaffolding,  paint,  and  brushes, 
sometimes  a  sandblaster.  Their  software  is  their  complex 


466  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

capacities  and  human  interaction.  In  contrast  to  high 
technology  that  requires  highly  speciaHzed  skills,  soft- 
tech  needs  broad,  generalized  competence  and  sen- 
sitivities. The  professional  muralists  and  their  appren- 
tices have  to  know  art  technique  and  history  as  well  as  be 
street-wise;  they  need  a  theoretical  understanding  of 
politics  and  society  and  practical  knowledge  of  how  to 
deal  with  city  hall,  residents,  and  trade  unionists.  Like 
other  appropriate  technology,  murals  require  a  mix  of 
brain  work  and  manual  skill.  They  call  for  polytechni- 
cians  and  the  interdisciplinary.  While  capital-intensive 
hard  technologies  are  designed  for  mass  production, 
labor-intensive  soft  methods  like  community  murals  are 
craft  industries  that  produce  for  much  larger  audiences 
than  the  fine  arts.  Hard  technologies  structure  work  in 
the  hierarchical  style  of  the  corporation;  mural  groups 
like  other  soft  technologies  develop  participation,  seeking 
to  give  all  workers  a  role  in  the  total  process,  including 
initial  planning  and  design.  The  muralists  organize  in 
relatively  small  decentrist,  self-reliant  groups,  linked  to 
others  by  networks.  In  short,  the  murals  represent  an 
effort  shared  with  other  forms  of  appropriate  technology 
to  make  production  democratic  and  humane.'^ 

THE  CULTURAL  REVOLUTION  OF  WORK 

The  murals  were  among  the  first  and  remain  a  leading 
example  of  the  forms  of  appropriate  technology  and 
community-based  development  that  were  invented  in  the 
inner  city  of  industrial  America.  But  there  have  been 
many  others.  Particularly  in  the  area  of  communications 
they  have  been  created  because  of  the  lack  of  access  of 
ordinary  people — not  only  the  minorities — to  the  cen- 
trally controlled  media.  As  we  have  seen,  the  cultural 
revolution  was  initiated  in  the  1950s  by  the  most 
elementary  and  labor-intensive  form  of  public  media — 
the  demonstration,  the  taking  of  a  stand  by  a  few  people 
or  thousands,  who  employed  no  specialized  skill  but 
improvised  on  their  instinct  to  act  together.  And  from 
this  or  parallel  to  it  followed  an  extraordinary  variety  of 
forms,  contributed  to  by  those  with  technical  know-how. 
These  included  silk-screen  posters,  underground  and 
alternative  newspapers  and  magazines,  guerrilla  and 
agitprop  theater,  movement  films,  community  radio  and 
TV,  and  switchboards  for  alternative  services.  As  in  the 
case  of  murals,  these  media  differed  from  the  mainstream 
because  the  professional  became  a  spokesperson  of  the 
interests  of  ordinary  people  and  frequently  a  facilitator  of 
their  participation  in  public  communications.  And  also  as 
with  the  murals,  equipment  had  to  be  inexpensive  and  its 
use  easy  to  learn.  The  result  has  been  workshops  that 
have  brought  together  the  trained  and  untrained  in 
neighborhood  arts  and  a  high  level  of  socially  conscious 
craftsmanship  and  investigative  reporting.  In  drama 
there  have  been  the  farm  workers'  Teatro  Campesino,  the 
San  Francisco  Mime  Troupe,  Bread  and  Pupf)et  Theater; 
in  radio  there  have  been  the  stations  of  the  Pacifica 


Corporation;  in  the  press,  the  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian, 
Village  Voice,  Great  Speckled  Bird,  Black  Panther,  Rolling 
Stone,  and  In  These  Times.  And  some  of  the  finest  exam- 
ples of  alternative  media  have  not  survived. 

At  the  same  time  as  the  murals  were  done  in  the  inner 
city,  an  abundance  of  small-scale  community  and  self- 
help  services  were  being  developed  by  local  people  be- 
cause needs  were  not  being  met.  The  appropriate 
technology  that  murals  have  been  particularly  associated 
with  has  been  the  "sweat-equity"  rehabilitation  and 
urban  homesteading  that  residents  have  undertaken  to 
redevelop  their  housing  and  neighborhoods  according  to 
their  own  priorities.  The  WAPAC  mural  of  David 
Bradford  in  San  Francisco  was  associated  with  such 
efforts,  and  many  murals  have  been  done  in  areas  like 
Boston's  North  End,  Chicago's  Pilsen  Barrio  and  Logan 
Square,  where  local  people  used  their  skills  to  stave  off 
the  demolition  of  urban  renewal.  When  Alfredo  Her- 
nandez painted  El  Sol  Brillante  as  part  of  community- 
based  efforts  at  producing  food,  housing,  and  energy  on 
the  Lower  East  Side,  the  connection  of  neighborhood 
public  art,  appropriate  technology,  and  meaningful  work 
became  clear. '^ 

Murals  have  been  associated  with  other  forms  of  com- 
munity services  and  economics  that  are  appropriate  in 
their  stimulating  local  initiative  and  cooperation.  This  is 
born  out  by  the  sites  of  the  paintings  that  brighten 
neighborhood  legal  aid  offices,  community-service  and 
model-cities  centers,  clinics,  day-care  facilities,  schools, 
union  locals,  co-ops,  and  housing  projects  with  active 
tenants'  unions.  Los  Artes  Guadalupanos  de  Aztlan 
helped  operate  a  school  that  sought  to  develop  local  life 
based  on  traditional  cooperative  agriculture.  The  murals 
of  San  Diego's  Chicano  Park  were  key  to  the  barrio's 
efforts  at  local  self-reliance  and  home  rule.  While  some  of 
these  projects  have  been  supported  by  centralized  liberal 
welfarism,  the  orientation  of  many  of  the  people  who 
work  in  them  has  been  towards  greater  community  con- 
trol and  larger  government  funding,  which  they  do  not 
see  as  contradictory  but  their  fair  share  of  society's 
wealth. 

The  community  development  corporation  has  been 
another  widely  used  vehicle  by  which  local  people  of 
modest  means  have  sought  to  build  up  and  control  their 
economic,  social,  political,  and  cultural  life.  In  the  largest 
sense  it  is  an  example  of  appropriate  technology  and 
people's  art.  By  1976  there  were  more  than  one  hundred 
in  urban  and  rural  neighborhoods  that  were  formally 
chartered  to  operate  public  services  as  well  as  producers 
and  consumers  cooperatives.'^ 

These  projects  have  been  carried  out  with  the  aid  of 
professionals  often  from  the  neighborhood  who  returned 
after  college  training,  as  in  the  case  of  some  of  the 
muralists.  In  other  instances,  professionals  of  middle- 
class  backgrounds  like  other  muralists  decided  that  these 
communities  were  the  place  where  they  could  do  mean- 
ingful work.  These  included  attorneys,  doctors,  psy- 


chologists,  social  workers,  and  teachers.  Opting  for  in- 
comes below  what  their  training  could  demand,  they  have 
chosen  to  practice  and  live  in  modest  neighborhoods 
where  there  was  some  promise  of  vital  community  life 
and  interpersonal  relationships.  There  they  found  a 
milieu  to  do  work  that  seemed  to  them  more  socially 
creative  than  they  could  find  in  the  corporate  suite 
downtown.  They  have  built  careers  in  public-interest 
law  and  advocacy,  neighborhood  clinics,  recycling,  and 
alternative  energy  engineering.  Others  have  sought 
similar  work  and  experiments  in  small  towns  and  the 
countryside. 

Worker  as  well  as  community  control  is  an  essential 
element  of  enterprises  that  seek  to  make  livelihoods 
appropriate,  and  the  number  of  firms  managed  and 
owned  by  their  personnel  has  multiplied  since  the  sixties. 
There  have  been  retail  shops  and  markets  like  the  Cam- 
bridge Co-op,  wholesale  distribution  centers  like  Book 
People  in  Berkeley,  and  industrial  plants  like  FIGHT  in 
Rochester,  New  York,  which  is  a  neighborhood  owned 
electrical  manufacturing  firm.  There  has  been  public 
discussion  of  government  funding  experimental  corpora- 
tions jointly  owned  and  managed  by  their  workers, 
communities,  and  consumers  both  in  areas  of  high  un- 
employment and  on  public  lands  for  the  extraction  of 
natural  resources.'^  Another  effort  towards  workers' 
control  has  been  the  rank-and-file  drive  in  the  labor 
movement  that  has  sought  to  democratize  unions  domi- 
nated by  self-perpetuating  leaderships  that  develop  cozy 
relations  with  management. 

Community  murals  are  thus  one  of  a  wide  variety  of 
undertakings  by  which  people  have  sought  to  humanize 
their  work,  making  it  appropriate  to  their  economic, 
social,  and  cultural  needs.  And  many  of  these  efforts 
have  demonstrated,  as  the  murals,  that  when  ordinary 
people  organize  and  control  their  labor,  develop  their 
skill,  and  create  opportunities  for  initiative  and  expres- 
sion, then  work  begins  to  assume  the  character  of  art. 
Hence,  a  truly  "people's  art"  would  not  be  exclusively  a 
matter  of  the  fine  arts  at  all.  It  would  be  technology  that 
is  appropriate.'* 

THE  COMMUNITY 


People's  Art  I  ^^61 

sufficiently  large  and  diverse  to  be  a  focus  of  community 
life  and  work.  Each  of  these  is  itself  composed  of  a 
number  of  neighborhoods.  But  the  vitality  of  these 
examples  is  not  shared  by  all  areas  of  comparable  size.  A 
rich  local  existence  depends  on  the  diversity  of  a  district's 
functions  that  support  one  another,  a  complex  mix  of 
industry,  resident  serving  business,  offices  of  profession- 
als, a  few  institutions  that  serve  the  whole  city,  in 
addition  to  local  schools,  community  centers,  libraries, 
facilities  for  the  visual  and  performing  arts,  places  of 
worship,  parks  and  pools,  centers  for  special  groups — 
day  care,  youth,  and  seniors — and  places  where  people  of 
all  ages  can  meet  and  interact  like  community  vegetable 
gardens.  Such  districts  must  not  be  too  large  so  that 
neighborhoods  do  not  count,  but  they  have  to  be  large 
enough  to  maintain  leverage  against  city  hall,  says  Jane 
Jacobs.'^  She  estimates  that  effective  districts  in  a  large 
city  are  about  a  mile  and  a  half  square  and  must  have 
between  thirty  thousand  and  two  hundred  thousand 
inhabitants. 

This  shift  to  a  more  localized  existence  need  not  be 
provincial.  Districts  that  are  made  lively  by  varied  ac- 
tivities and  people  are  usually  cosmopolitan  even  though 
a  particular  ethnic  group  may  bulk  large.  While  com- 
munities need  to  be  self-reliant,  total  self-sufficiency 
would  not  be  desirable  even  if  it  were  possible  in  the 
modern  world.  The  muralists  themselves,  though  at- 
tached to  their  locales,  are  curious  about  what  is  hap- 
pening elsewhere,  work  outside  their  usual  milieu,  and 
participate  in  a  national  network.  And  community  art 
centers  like  the  Galeria  de  la  Raza  exhibit  art  from 
around  the  world. 

The  murals  of  East  Los  Angeles  were  the  topic  of  one 
often  articles  that  the  Christian  Science  Monitor  ran  in  1977 
under  the  title  of  "A  Nation  of  Neighborhoods."  The 
series  saw  a  "new  localism"  sweeping  the  country  and 
described  it  as 

a  groundswell  movement  of  citizens  calling  for  the 
return  of  political  and  economic  power  to  the  local 
level,  largely  in  response  to  neglect  by  big  government 
and  failure  of  such  "top  down"  solutions  as  model 
cities,  urban  renewal,  and  the  war  on  poverty.^" 


The  murals  urge  a  reorientation  of  life,  work,  and  art 
towards  the  community.  They  call  for  a  transfer  of  the 
center  of  gravity  of  production  and  culture  from  the 
international,  national,  and  even  metropolitan  scenes 
with  their  concentrations  of  power  to  where  most  people 
are  and  where  they  can  achieve  control  over  their 
labor — the  locale  of  daily  life.  Increasing  numbers  of 
people  are  seeking  to  live  closer  to  where  they  work,  if 
possible  in  the  same  area,  to  make  for  a  less  fragmented 
life  and  to  integrate  their  work  with  the  social  and 
cultural  milieu.  Urban  districts,  like  the  .Mission  or 
Fillmore  in  San  Francisco,  the  Lxjwer  East  Side  or  East 
Harlem  in  Manhattan,  or  Hyde  Park  in  Chicago  are 


The  new  localism,  the  Monitor  reported,  was  fighting 
against  expressways,  rezoning,  and  speculation  that 
eroded  neighborhoods;  it  lobbied  for  better  public  ser- 
vices and  sweat-equitied  its  own  housing.  And  it  or- 
ganized block  clubs  and  neighborhood  improvement 
associations  and  sometimes  adopted  the  confrontation 
tactics  of  the  sixties.  To  the  Monitor  the  movement 
appeared  to  cut  across  political  affiliations;  it  embraced 
conservatives  and  radicals,  straights  and  the  countercul- 
ture; it  linked  minority  people  and  Whites  of  all  classes 
and  crossed  the  generation  gap.  In  general  the  series  was 
excellent  and  confirmed  what  the  murals  were  all  about, 
but  some  clarification  is  necessary. 


468  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

If  there  is  a  "new  localism,"  it  is  an  extension  of  what 
\\  as  begun  by  the  struggle  of  the  minority  poor  during 
the  sixties  to  preserve  their  urban  neighborhoods;  w  hat  is 
new  is  the  variety  of  people  who  by  the  late  seventies 
were  discovering  the  attractions  of  community  life  or 
fighting  off  threats  to  it.  Moreover,  the  ambiguity  and 
intolerant  side  of  the  neighborhood  movement  needs  to 
be  taken  into  account.  There  is  a  long  history  of  White 
neighborhoods  of  all  income  groups  organizing  to  keep 
Blacks  and  Hispanics  out;  community  control  has  been 
invoked  in  the  name  of  racism  as  well  as  tolerance.  This 
became  particularly  virulent  in  efforts  to  preserve 
neighborhood  schools  and  resist  court-ordered  busing  for 
integration.^' 

Another  ambiguity  of  the  neighborhood  movement 
has  been  gentrification,  the  attraction  of  the  well-to-do, 
particularly  childless  professionals,  from  the  suburbs 
back  to  the  rehabilitated  areas  of  the  inner  city  or  to 
refurbishing  housing  there  themselves.  Moderate  rental 
housing  is  transformed  into  owner  occupied  dwellings 
and  condominiums  with  the  result  that  residents  with 
modest  incomes  are  driven  out.  Thus  the  new  localism 
by  the  mid-seventies  had  already  become  a  battleground. 
To  head  off  developers  and  the  affluent,  neighborhood 
people  of  modest  means  in  Baltimore  organized  a  com- 
munity congress  and  set  up  a  nonprofit  land  bank.  By 
1977  it  had  bought  forty  houses  and  was  renting  them  to 
low-  and  middle-income  people,  a  portion  of  whose  rent 
was  laid  away  against  a  down  payment  and  future  own- 
ership. It  was  such  organized  efforts  that  offered  the  only 
chance  for  people  of  modest  means  to  preserve  their 
neighborhoods  for  themselves. ^^ 

At  the  heart  of  the  struggle  for  the  community  as  for 
appropriate  work  is  the  political  problem — local  people 
gaining  control  over  their  own  lives  by  public  delibera- 
tion and  action.  Fo.r  this  to  occur  and  to  carry  weight  at 
higher  levels,  they  require  their  own  organs  of  self- 
government.  The  community  art  commissions  elected  by 
residents  referred  to  earlier  are  parallel  to  proposals  for 
community  control  over  other  public  services  that  have 
been  discussed  and  in  many  cases  tried  during  the  sixties 
and  seventies.  The  Logan  Barrio  Planning  Association  in 
San  Diego  on  which  muralists  have  participated  and 
community  development  corporations  are  approxima- 
tions. There  are  also  the  neighborhood  associations  and 
block  clubs  with  which  muralists  often  deal.  New  York 
City  alone  has  ten  thousand  block  associations,  and  it, 
like  Pittsburgh,  Atlanta,  Washington,  D.C.,  and  other 
cities  have  given  legal  authority  to  neighborhood  councils 
to  participate  in  the  planning  and  delivery  of  services  to 
their  areas. ^*  Accumulating  experience  points  to  the 
desirability  of  not  only  local  public  boards  composed  of 
elected  residents  to  oversee  particular  services,  but  also 
neighborhood  and  district  assemblies  open  to  the  direct 
participation  of  all  local  people  or  their  representatives. 
Both  the  boards  and  assemblies  could  mobilize  the  coop- 
eration of  people,  give  them  authority  over  the  public 


resources  available  for  their  areas,  and  provide  them  with 
the  political  leverage  to  negotiate  with  higher  echelons  of 
government.  While  guarantees  of  the  right  of  all  local 
people  to  participate  would  be  required  from  above, 
these  organs  would  be  directly  responsible  to  their  con- 
stituencies; they  would  not  be  agencies  of  higher  au- 
thorities. However,  it  would  not  be  such  guarantees  but 
the  vitality  of  local  life  that  would  determine  whether 
community  government  would  work.  And  its  principal 
function  would  be  to  advance  that  liveliness. 

There  is  a  danger  that  the  idea  that  "small  is  beauti- 
ful," which  has  been  associated  w  ith  community  control 
and  appropriate  technology,  w  ill  distract  people  from  the 
fact  that  local  life  is  inescapably  affected  by  decisions 
made  outside  the  community.  As  murals  and  solar 
energy  can  be  co-opted,  so  neighborhood  people  can  have 
their  local  assemblies,  art  commissions,  and  development 
corporations  undercut  by  forces  much  larger  than  they. 
These  include  the  real  estate  market,  urban  renewal, 
zoning,  taxes,  or  the  branches  of  big  corporations  that 
take  their  profits  out  of  the  community.  A  locality  can 
only  gain  control  over  its  life  by  cooperating  with  in- 
creasing numbers  of  like-minded  localities  and  making 
the  political  process  work  for  them  at  all  levels  of  gov- 
ernment. 

One  example  is  the  campaign  in  San  Francisco  for 
greater  representation  of  the  neighborhoods  that  suc- 
ceeded in  1976  over  the  strong  opposition  of  downtown 
interests.  Since  1900  the  Board  of  Supervisors  (the  city 
and  county  council)  had  been  elected  from  at-large  can- 
didates whom  big  business  could  readily  influence.  But 
now  voters  supported  a  proposal  for  the  district  election 
of  their  own  representatives,  and  the  result  was  eleven 
supervisors    representing    about    sixty-five    thousand  . 

people   each.    This   was   the   fruit   of  a   movement   of         I 
neighborhood  organizing  that  had  gone  on  for  years  and  ^ 

resulted  as  well  in  the  appointment  of  community  people 
to  city  commissions  and  agency  work.  In  Atlanta 
neighborhood  councils  have  elected  a  majority  of  the  city 
council. ^^  Another  instance  of  the  cooperation  of  com- 
munity groups  is  National  People's  Action,  a  coalition  of 
neighborhood  organizations  that  has  successfully  lobbied 
in  Washington  against  red-lining  by  savings  and  loan 
institutions.^^  In  1979  low-  and  moderate-income  people 
were  working  together  in  coalitions  like  Massachusetts 
Fair  Share,  which  with  thirty  neighborhood  chapters 
was  fighting  inflated  utility  rates  and  property  taxes. 
Meanwhile  ACORN  (Association  of  Community  Or- 
ganizations for  Reform  Now),  headquartered  in  New 
Orleans  and  operating  in  thirteen  states,  was  campaign- 
ing for  grass-roots  control  over  public  services.'^*  Com- 
munity arts  groups  were  also  building  alliances  and 
among  them  was  the  National  Murals  Network. 

As  the  seventies  were  coming  to  a  close  and  a  new 
decade  was  beginning,  varied  efforts  to  build  a  national 
political  alliance  were  coming  from  neighborhood  or- 
ganizations,   minority    groups,    progressive    trade    un- 


ionists,  activists  pressing  for  alternatives  to  fossil-fuel  and 
nuclear  energy,  a  reviving  antiwar  movement,  demo- 
cratic socialists,  and  unaffiliated  citizens  no  longer  con- 
tent to  remain  disenfranchised.  Whether  this  forming 
coalition  would  function  through  the  party  that  had  been 
the  instrument  for  similar  impulses  in  the  past  or  would 
require  the  creation  of  a  new  political  vehicle  was  being 
thrashed  out  by  a  level  of  debate  and  trials  at  organizing 
that  had  not  occurred  on  the  American  scene  for  more 
than  a  decade.  The  thrust  of  this  new  activity  w  as  a  renew- 
al of  working  people's  effort  to  wrest  the  wealth  and 
power  they  produced  from  those  who  had  appropriated 
it.  Its  perceived  opponents  were  now  the  multinational 
conglomerates  and  local  big  business  along  with  govern- 
ment that  served  their  priorities.  Its  challenge  was  to 
make  viable  national  planning  and  investment  that  sup- 
ports initiative  at  the  grass  roots.  Such  initiative  is  the 
basis  of  a  people's  culture. 

The  tax  revolt  that  began  in  1978  catapulted  into 
public  attention  the  need  to  create  a  just  and  sufficient 
revenue  base  to  support  community  services  that  extend 
from  health  and  safety  to  education  and  culture. 
Homeowners  and  renters  made  it  clear  that  they  were 
unwilling  to  pay  any  more,  but  they  also  wanted  an 
improvement  in  services.  The  waste  in  government  ad- 
ministration of  these  services  was  relatively  small  com- 
pared to  the  subsidies  and  tax  loopholes  for  big  business 
and  expenditures  for  the  military.  The  problem  has  been 
that  much  of  the  wealth  that  people  produce  has  not 
flowed  back  to  them,  either  in  their  wages  or  through 
needed  public  services.  Hence,  the  development  of 
community  life  depends  on  the  concerted  political  action 
of  local  people  at  every  level  of  government. 

Concentrated  power  will  not  willingly  yield  its  au- 
thority or  profits.  The  only  way  to  deal  with  it  is  to 
mount  comparable  power  within  government,  in  the 
community  and  at  the  workplace.  Whether  popular  con- 


People's  Art  I  '\69 

trol  can  be  achieved  without  the  disinvestment  of  soci- 
ety's accumulated  capital  presently  in  corporate  hands, 
and  whether  the  violent  reaction  of  the  establishment  can 
be  avoided,  depends  on  the  numbers  and  organization  of 
people  seeking  change  and  their  careful  movement  from 
stage  to  stage.  It  is  a  process  that  requires  the  cooperation 
of  many  different  kinds  of  groups  and  will  demand 
tremendous  social  imagination  and  invention.  It  means 
building  on  the  new  popular  participation  at  community 
and  municipal  levels  and  making  local  involvement  ef- 
fective at  higher  echelons  of  government.  If  democratic 
control  of  society's  productive  activity  is  to  have  a 
chance,  it  will  have  to  educate  the  public  and  prove  itself. 
Experiments  in  worker-community  owned  enterprises 
must  demonstrate  that  they  can  serve  ordinary  people  far 
better  than  absentee  corporate  ownership  and  top-dov\  n 
management.  Many  of  these  are  well  under  way,  and 
among  these  are  the  mural  groups  themselves.  The  time 
is  ripe  for  muralists  and  community  people  to  use  their 
walls  to  update  their  criticism  of  the  system  and  to 
project  ideas  about  the  kind  of  innovative  institutions, 
work,  and  popular  control  that  are  implicit  in  the  mural 
process. 

The  task  ahead  is  illustrated  by  a  mural  done  on  the 
side  of  the  Food  Garden  grocery  near  the  painted  walls  of 
Ramona  Gardens,  the  public  housing  project  in  East  Los. 
The  painters  took  advantage  of  the  shop  being  built  on  a 
hill  and  the  building's  ascending  ground  line.  They  have 
shown  a  group  of  indios  pushing  a  huge  boulder  up  the 
hill.  Beyond  it  lies  another  boulder  and  yet  another  and 
still  more.  One  boulder  is  painted  around  an  actual  door 
in  the  wall,  and  a  man  is  shown  on  it  behind  bars,  looking 
out.  Another  boulder  is  painted  with  the  straining  fea- 
tures of  a  face.  Chained  naked  figures  huddle  inside  the 
cave  of  another.  It  is  a  very  long  wall.  There  are  many 
boulders.  It  is  a  very  long  painting. 


Richard  Raya  and  others:  Untitled,  1974,  near  Ramona 
Gardens,  East  Los  Angeles. 


470  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


NOTES 

1 .  Jequier,  p.  9. 

2.  Schumacher,  p.  163  ff. 

3.  The  ejido  was  the  traditional  communal  organization  of 
the  Mexican  village  and  its  agriculture.  Zapata  fought  for  its 
preservation  during  the  Mexican  Revolution;  the  Constitution 
of  1917  pledged  its  redevelopment,  but  it  has  had  varying 
support  from  the  government  since  then.  Cf.  John  Womack, 
Jr.,  Zapata  and  the  Mexican  Revolution  (New  York:  Knopf,  1969). 

4.  Satish  Kumar,  "Homespun  Philosophy,"  in  Godfrey 
Boyle  and  Peter  Harper,  ed..  Radical  Technology  (New  York: 
Pantheon,  1976),  p.  254  ff. 

5.  Committee  of  Concerned  Asian  Scholars,  China!  Inside 
the  People's  Republic  (New  York:  Bantam,  1972). 

6.  See  chapter  6,  note  7. 

7.  See  below,  note  14. 

8.  John  F.  C.  Turner  and  Robert  Fichter,  Freedom  to  Build, 
and  Turner,  Housing  By  People. 

9.  Cf.  Petr  Kropotkin,  Mutual  Aid  (Boston:  Extending 
Horizons,  undated). 

10.  Jequier,  p.  21. 

11.  Cf.  .Mumford,  The  Pentagon  of  Power  (New  York:  Har- 
court  Brace  Jovanovich,  1970),  pp.  389-403;  also,  Paul  Good- 
man, "Getting  into  Power,"  People  or  Personnel  and  Like  a  Con- 
quered Province,  (New  York:  Vintage,  1968),  p.  175  ff. 

12.  jequier,  p.  7. 

13.  Ibid.,  p.  11;  and  J.  Baldwin  and  Stewart  Brand,  Soft-Tech 
(Baltimore:  Penguin,  1978),  p.  6. 

14.  .Mumford  makes  a  fruitful  distinction  between  demo- 
cratic and  totalitarian  technologies  in  Technics  and  Human  De- 
velopment, p.  235  ff. 

In  this  and  its  companion  volume,  The  Pentagon  of 
Power,  he  emphasizes  replacing  the  machine  model  of  de- 
velopment with  an  organic  one,  based  on  self-regulation,  a 
balance  of  technics  and  culture,  and  w  holeness  in  the  midst  of 
change,  p.  396  ff.  He  discusses  networks  of  relatively  self- 
sufficient  communities  in  The  City  in  History  (Harcourt  Brace 
&  World,  1961),  p.  563  ff. 

15.  Besides  the  11th  and  12th  Street  Movements  on  the 
Lower  East  Side,  similar  projects  were  under  way  in  East 
Harlem  and  the  South  Bronx  with  the  help  of  small  federal 
grants.  (Stewart  Dill  McBride,  "Tenants  tilting  at 
windmills — and  winning,"  Christian  Science  Monitor,  Sep- 
tember 23,  1977,  p.  14  ff.) 

In  the  bleakest  area  of  San  Bernardino,  the  West  Side 
Community  Development  Corporation  acquired  ten  repos- 
sessed houses  from  government  agencies  and  fitted  them  out 
with  solar  energy  and  greenhouses.  The  work  was  done  by  the 
unemployed,  some  of  them  parolees,  who  received  job  training 
with  the  help  of  CETA  funding.  (Rosa  Gustartis,  "Sun  power: 
Light  and  jobs  for  ghetto,"  San  Francisco  Sunday  Examiner  and 
Chronicle,  July  10,  1977,  p.  16.)  The  gear  used  in  these  projects 
was  typical  of  appropriate  technology — the  labor-intensive 
small  f>ower  tools  of  construction  workers  and  craftsmen, 


energy  efficient  and  nonpolluting  equipment,  and  processes 
that  make  for  local  control. 

As  early  as  1938  coal  miners  in  Penncraft,  Pennsyl- 
vania, built  fifty  houses  for  themselves  with  the  aid  of  the 
American  Friends  Service  Committee,  and  in  1963  the  AFSC 
created  Self-Help  Enterprises,  which  organized  Chicano  farm 
worker  families  in  the  San  Joaquin  Valley  into  small  groups 
that  built  one  another's  homes.  By  the  early  seventies  one 
thousand  homes  had  b>een  constructed  by  cooperating  owner- 
builders,  seven  subdivisions  had  been  developed  and  SHE 
established  a  factory  making  modular  components  and  a 
cabinet  shop  for  its  houses.  Both  industries  looked  to  eventual 
ownership  by  their  workers.  (Julius  Stein,  The  Beginning  of 
Self-Help  Housing  in  the  San  Joaquin  Valley,  Visalia,  Calif.,  1970). 
16.  The  oldest  in  the  nation  is  the  East  Central  Citizens 
Organization  of  Columbus,  Ohio,  which  started  in  1965  and 
has  operated  in  a  square  mile  of  the  inner  city  amidst  a 
population  of  6,500  Black  people.  Originating  with  a  settle- 
ment house  and  with  the  help  of  public  funding,  it  developed  a 
youth  center,  education  and  recreation  programs,  a  day-care 
facility,  clinic,  credit  union,  a  veterinary  clinic,  supermarket 
and  sewing  center  that  sells  its  products.  It  gained  jurisdiction 
over  the  public  library  and  increasing  control  in  the  local 
school.  ECCO  also  has  helped  finance  local  small  business  and 
is  purchasing  rundown  houses  for  refurbishing  and  leasing. 
Legally  incorporated  under  the  state,  ECCO  received  transfers 
of  public  authority  to  local  control.  It  has  a  general  assembly 
open  to  all  residents  of  sixteen  years  or  older  which  legislates 
programs  and  budget  and  elects  an  executive  council.  ECCO 
offers  an  example  of  neighborhood  government  that  makes 
daily  face-to-face  relationships  and  familiar  association  the 
basis  of  economic  and  political  life.  (Kotler,  Milton,  Neighbor- 
hood Government  [Indianapolis  and  New  York:  Bobbs-Merrill, 
1969]  pp.  44-55). 

17.  One  opportunity  arose  with  the  closing  of  the  Campbell 
Works  of  Youngstown  Sheet  and  Tube  in  1977  after  the  Lykes 
Conglomerate  had  bought  the  plant,  milked  it  and  shut  it 
down,  laying  off  4,100.  Workers  and  community  together 
sought  to  buy  the  plant  and  modernize  it  with  a  grant  and  loans 
guaranteed  by  the  Federal  government,  the  kind  of  backing 
given  Lockheed  Aircraft  when  it  was  on  the  verge  of  bank- 
ruptcy. A  government  study  concluded  that  the  plan  was 
feasible,  but  whether  the  project  got  under  way  depended  on 
the  Carter  Administration's  willingness  to  fund  it  and  whether 
Sheet  and  Tube  would  sell.  At  stake  was  a  serious  experiment 
in  nonstatist  economic  democracy.  (David  .Moberg,  "Coalition 
tries  to  reopen  steel  plant," /»  These  Times,  August  9-15,  1978, 
pp.  3,  20.)  In  March,  1979,  the  Commerce  Department  turned 
down  Community  Steel,  Inc.  (.Mobery,  "Shutdown,"  ITT, 
June  27,  1979,  p.  11,  14). 

18.  Cf.  William  Morris'  conception  of  an  "art  of  the  people" 
and  "popular  art"  in  "The  Lesser  Arts,"  "Useful  Work  versus 
Useless  Toil,"  and  "Art  and  Socialism,"  in  Political  Writings  of, 
ed.  A.  L.  Morton  (New  York:  International,  1973). 

19.  Jane  Jacobs,  The  Death  and  Life  of  Great  American  Cities 
(New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1961),  pp.  130-32. 

20.  September  9,  1977,  p.  1. 


21.  Rather  than  directing  the  integration  of  neighborhoods 
and  jeopardize  property  values,  the  liberal  courts  had  ordered 
the  integration  of  schools,  with  the  result  that  it  was  only  the 
children  who  had  to  ride  long  distances,  and  the  function  of  the 
school  as  a  local  center  was  eroded.  The  integration  of 
neighborhoods  would  have  meant  not  only  creating  a  racial  but 
also  an  economic  mix,  which  would  have  required  rent  sub- 
sidies and  a  wide  range  of  fiscal  and  social  measures  that  were 
even  less  acceptable  to  property  owners  than  busing. 

22.  The  community  congress  was  SECO  (Southeast  Com- 
munity Organization)  and  its  land  bank  was  op>erated  by  the 
Southeast  Development  Inc.  (Stewart  Dill  McBride,  "They 
fought  a  highway  and  formed  a  congress,"  Christian  Science 
Monitor,  September  9,  1977,  p.  18  f.) 


People's  Art  /  47 1 

23.  Edward  Schwartz,  "Neighborhoodism:  A  Conflict  of 
Values  "  Social  Policy,  March-April  1979,  p.  9. 

24.  ibid. 

25.  Janice  E.  Perlman,  "Grassrooting  the  System,"  Social 
Policy,  September-October  1976,  p.  4.  Perlman  offers  a  useful 
survey  and  typology  of  grassroots  groups.  Also,  Judy  McLean, 
"Community  Army  Descends  on  D.C.,"  In  These  Times,  June 
22-28, -1977,  p.  5. 

26.  "A  New  Politics  Via  the  Neighborhoods,"  Social  Policy, 
September/ October  1979,  p.  2  and  the  whole  issue,  which  is 
concerned  with  neighborhood  organizing. 


Jose  Delgadillo:  Untitled,  1973,  College  of  Science  and 
Humanities,  Azcapotzalco  District,  Mexico  City. 


APPENDIX: 

CONNECTING  WITH  PEOPLE'S 

MURALISTS  ABROAD 


Community  muralists  in  the  United  States  have  be- 
come increasingly  aware  that  there  have  been  artists 
doing  comparable  work  at  the  same  time  abroad.  There 
have  been  visits  in  both  directions,  sometimes  with 
painters  working  with  their  foreign  counterparts,  and 
there  developed  a  growing  exchange  of  learning  and 
support. 

Mexico 

The  most  extensive  interaction  has  been  with  Mexican 
muralists  who  were  seeking  to  continue  the  mural  tradi- 
tion of  Los  Tres  Grandes  and  the  revolutionary  era.  But 
since  the  fifties  government  support  faded  for  controver- 
sial art  as  popular  dissent  increased  in  the  face  of 
economic  development  that  benefited  a  relatively  small 
middle  class  and  McCarthyism  followed  U.S.  invest- 
ments south  of  the  border.'  The  Mexican  art  establish- 
ment and  ambitious  young  artists  emulated  fashionable 
U.S.  art,  producing  their  own  versions  of  Abstract  Ex- 
pressionism, Pop,  and  their  successors.  Murals  became 
either  conventional  patriotic  gestures  on  public  buildings 
or  were  adulterated  by  hotels,  movie  houses,  and 
drugstores.  In  the  early  seventies  art  students  were  hired 
to  do  supergraphics  on  the  undecorated  sides  of  buildings 
in  the  areas  tourists  frequented  in  .Mexico  City.  Siqueiros 
remained  one  of  the  few  painters  doing  socially  conscious 
art,  but  his  imprisonment  between  1960  and  1964  was  a 
warning  to  others. 

Nevertheless  a  group  of  artists.  La  Nueva  Presencia, 
sought  to  return  social  content  to  art,  and  one  of  their 
number,  Canadian-born  Arnold  Belkin,  painted  We  Are 


All  Guilty  in  a  courtyard  of  a  .Mexico  City  penitentiary  in 
1961  and  did  religious  murals  in  Jewish  centers  in  the 
capital.  Dividing  his  time  between  Mexico  and  New 
York,  he  was  commissioned  in  1972  through  Cityarts 
Workshop  to  paint  Against  Domestic  Colonialism  near 
Times  Square,  and  in  the  following  years  turned  to  three 
related  murals  on  Kent  State,  the  overthrow  of  Chilean 
democracy  and  the  massacre  of  over  325  people  calling 
for  reforms  at  Tlatelolco,  a  Mexico  City  housing  com- 
plex, just  before  the  1968  Olympics.  Meanwhile,  when 
Siqueiros  was  released  from  prison,  he  worked  until  1973 
on  the  enormous  March  of  Humanity,  employing  a  large 
team  of  artists  that  included  Ray  Patlan  and  Mark  Rogo- 
vin,  who  brought  their  experience  home. 

The  Tlatelolco  massacre  and  the  repression  of  the 
following  years  provoked  Jose  Delgadillo  to  do  some  of 
the  first  militant  popular-based  murals  in  Mexico  in 
years. ^  In  1973  he  began  to  take  the  attack  of  the  military 
on  civilians  and  their  resistance  as  his  theme  in  murals  he 
painted  with  the  aid  of  students  at  universities  and 
secondary  schools  around  the  country.  With  his  flat, 
silhouetted  figures  that  combined  Mayan  profiles  with 
modern  graphics,  he  daringly  supported  the  guerrilla 
movement  that  was  active  in  the  cities  and  back  country, 
fighting  for  fundamental  land  and  social  reforms.  He 
painted  also  in  labor  union  halls  and  housing  projects, 
completing  more  than  60  murals  by  1979. 

Another  muralist  working  with  university  students 
was  Leopoldo  Flores,  who  directed  a  mural  on  a  cliff 
above  the  stadium  at  Toluca  during  the  early  1970s.^  At 
a  cultural  center  there  in  1974  and  1975  he  created 
semiabstract    human    figures    that    climb    and    tumble 


473 


474  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Arte  Acd  muralists  directed  by  Daniel  Manrique:  Un- 
titled, 1974,  Tepito,  Mexico  City. 


Secondary  school  students:   Untitled,   1972-73,  pueblo 
near  Lago  de  Chapala,  Mexico. 


through  the  floors  of  the  three  levels  of  the  patio  and 
staircases,  overwhelming  the  architecture  with  their 
struggle. 

During  the  mid-seventies  young  professional  artists 
headed  by  Daniel  Manrique  were  introducing  murals  in 
Tepito,  a  notorious  barrio  of  poverty  and  fencing  opera- 
tions in  Mexico  City.  On  its  street  and  patio  walls  they 
painted  people  naked  and  gaunt  breaking  out  of  their 
walls,  peering  into  bricked-up  windows,  and  refurbish- 
ing their  tenaments.  Alongside  one  image  was  the  in- 
scription Arte  Acd  (Art  Here),  which  was  both  the  name 
of  the  whole  project  and  a  call  to  residents  to  join  in  the 
painting,  as  many  of  the  young  did. 

The  mural  tradition  of  the  Revolution  was  kept  alive 
by  secondary  school  students  who  filled  five  house  fronts 
on  the  main  street  of  a  village  south  of  Guadalajara  with 
memories  of  Los  Tres  Grandes  and  updated  with  rockets,  a 
mushroom-shaped  cloud,  and  interlocked  male-female 
circles. 

As  we  have  seen,  some  Mexican  artists  came  north  to 
do  murals  in  the  United  States,  notably  Gilberto 
Ramirez,  David  Mora,  and  Aurelio  Diaz.  Ramirez  had 
already  painted  one  of  his  most  impressive  works  in  an 
auditorium  of  CLETA,  an  experimental  theater  of  the 
National  University  in  Mexico  City.  In  1977  the  Taller 
Siqueiros  in  Cuernavaca  under  the  direction  of  Luis 
Arenal  offered  mural  classes  that  Judy  Baca  and  other 
Chicano  muralists  attended,  and  the  following  year 
Arenal  and  members  of  the  Taller  made  a  presentation  at 
the  Second  National  Murals  Network  Conference  and 
held  a  weeklong  workshop.  In  the  other  direction,  from 
the  early  seventies  John  Weber,  Dewey  Crumpler,  Lucy 
Mahler,  Mark  Rogovin,  I,  and  others  visited  Mexico  City 
and  through  slide  showings,  public  lectures,  the  TV,  and 
press  spread  the  word  about  U.S.  murals.  In  1974  and 
1975  Jesus  Campusano  studied  art  there  on  a  Mexican 
government  scholarship,  and  sought  unsuccessfully  to  do 
public  murals,  but  in  1979  Patlan,  who  visited  Mexico 
City  regularly,  went  down  to  plan  a  mural  with  Belkin's 


Appendix  I  475 


Untitled  mural,  1972-73,  pueblo  near  Lago  de  Chapala. 


Gilberto  Ramirez:  Untitled,  c.  1973  CLETA  (Centra 
Libre  de  Experimentacion  Teatral  y  Artistica),  Mexico 
City. 


476  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

students   at   the   San   Carlos   Academy   that   was   later 
painted  in  a  nearby  textile  tow  n. 

Cuba 


In  1974  Consucio  Mendcz  of  Las  Mujcres  Muralistas 
visited  C^uba  as  part  of  a  Venceremos  Brigade,  and  the 
follow  ing  year  Graciela  Carrillo,  also  of  Las  Mujeres,  and 
Mike  Rios  were  invited  to  witness  the  results  of  the 
revolutionary  government's  w  ide  sponsorship  of  public 
art.  All  returned  persuaded  that  murals  like  posters, 
which  v\ere  done  by  government  agencies,  were  in  fact 
playing  an  important  role  in  helping  Cubans  gain  control 
of  their  lives.  This  seemed  to  be  the  meaning  of  one 
mural's  caption:  No  Puede  Haber  Valor  Estetico  sin  Contendo 
Humano  (It  Is  Not  Possible  to  Have  Aesthetic  Value 
w ithout  Human  Content).  Cuban  artists  were  borrowing 
from  the  most  imaginative  styles  developed  either  in 
capitalist  or  socialist  countries  for  murals  on  apartment 
blocks,  office  buildings,  and  signboards  along 
boulevards.  Some  were  painted  directly  on  walls,  others 
were  printed  on  billboardlike  sheets  and  pasted  up. 
High-contrast  Photo-Realist  designs  in  brilliant  colors 
showed  an  Angolan  guerrilla  lifting  his  machine  gun 
overhead  or  Che,  who  was  once  economics  minister, 
pushing  a  wheelbarrow  to  demonstrate  the  virtue  of 
volunteer  labor.  Children's  designs  that  illustrated  the 
homolies  of  Fidel  were  printed  on  billboard  paper  and 
mounted  on  neighborhood  walls.  "Walking  murals"  that 
required  two  persons  to  carry  them  were  a  common 
adjunct  of  parades. 

Che,  writing  in  1965,  acknowledged  that  Socialist 
Realism  belonged  to  the  past  and  called  for  experimenta- 
tion in  the  arts  in  order  "to  educate  the  people"  so  that 
eventually  they  would  be  able  "to  achieve  complete 
spiritual  recreation  in  the  presence  of"  their  "own 
work."'*  It  was  an  imf)ressive  goal,  and  Cubans  in  pursuit 
of  it  w  ere  producing  some  of  the  most  handsome  social 
art  of  the  twentieth  century. 

While  Consuelo  .Vlendez  was  visiting,  she  and  her 
fellow  brigadistas  were  provided  a  wall  and  executed  a 
mural,  not  a  common  practice  in  Cuba,  where  wall  art 
was  not  usually  a  collaboration  of  the  trained  and  un- 
trained. And  Rios  on  his  return  borrowed  from  a  Cuban 
poster  in  the  mural  he  did  for  the  Bicentennial  exhibit  at 
the  San  Francisco  Museum  of  Modern  Art. 

The  People's  Republic  of  China 

Two  of  the  U.S.  murals  we  have  examined  borrowed 
from  the  wall  art  that  had  been  done  in  China  since  the 
Liberatitm  in  1949.  One  of  these,  Work,  Education  and 
Struggle:  Seeds  for  Progressive  Change,  was  painted  in  New 
York  in  1975  by  a  local  team  under  the  auspices  of 
Cityarts.  (See  p.  2 1 8  f ).  With  its  scenes  of  exultant  workers 
and  its  swirling  bunting,  it  adopted  conventions  of  the 
Socialist    Realism    that    the    Chinese    themselves    had 


Unsigned:    ''Voluntary  Labor  Is  the  Keystone  of  Our 
Communist  Education,"  1975,  Havana,  Cuba. 


learned  from  Soviet  artists  in  the  fifties.  As  far  back  as 
the  1930s,  official  Soviet  murals  as  well  as  posters,  easel 
work,  and  magazine  illustration  had  expressed  sometimes 
uncritical  optimism  in  this  highly  legible  style.  Although 
the  Lower  East  Side  artists  painted  with  fresh  en- 
thusiasm and  ingenuity,  they  had  chosen  to  work  with 
forms  that  must  have  strained  the  understanding  or 
credibility  of  local  viewers.  However,  this  mural,  in 
contrast  to  its  bureaucratic  models,  grew  out  of  the  free 
decisions  of  community  artists  and  youth,  which  linked 
it  to  a  form  of  muralizing  that  had  been  recently  de- 
veloped at  the  grass  roots  in  China.  In  Huhsien  County 
of  Shenshi  Province,  peasants  in  their  spare  time  had 
been  helped  by  trained  artists  to  revive  their  folk  art  to 
express  their  perceptions  of  their  current  life  and  hopes. 
In  contrast  to  the  often  unconvincing  workers  of  Socialist 
Realism,  those  in  the  peasant  murals  and  watercolors  are 
relatively  small  and  are  absorbed  both  in  their  labor  and 
brightly  patterned  landscapes  or  farmyards.  The  hills 
and  fruit  groves,  the  cultivated  fields,  irrigation  ditches. 


Maria  Fitzgerald:  The  Triumph  of  Nature  over  War, 
(partial  view)  1977,  Simon  Fraser  University,  Van- 
couver. (Photo  Fitzgerald) 

roads,  power  lines,  and  masonry  walls  provide  the  basis 
of  the  lovingly  detailed  patchwork  design,  bringing  art, 
labor,  and  nature  into  close  connection.  The  paintings 
celebrate  a  world  shaped  by  human  hands. 

It  was  reproductions  of  these  works  that  inspired  the 
Precita  Eyes  Muralists  of  San  Francisco  when  they  were 
commissioned  to  do  the  storefront  of  a  bookstore  in 
anticipation  of  an  exhibit  of  the  Huhsien  paintings  that 
came  to  this  country  in  1978.  (See  p.  262)  The  lower  left 
part  of  the  Precita  Eyes  composition  was  in  fact  an 
adaptation  of  a  mural  done  on  the  outside  of  a  rural 
building  in  1972  titled  Spring  Hoeing.^  Painted  by  Li 
Feng-Ian,  it  showed  women  cultivating  winter  wheat 
with  peach  trees  blossoming  in  the  background.  The  San 
Francisco  painters  transformed  the  Chinese  peasants  into 
farm  workers  of  all  nationalities  to  relate  them  to  the 
mixed  population  of  the  Mission  District.  In  1973  when 
her  watercolors  were  exhibited  along  with  other  peasant 
artists'  work  in  Peking,  Li  was  interviewed  and  explained 
that  she  had  been  moved  by  the  beauty  of  the  women 
hoeing  in  the  "garden-like  fields  in  the  early  spring"  and 
the   idea   of  their   creating   "the    new    socialist   coun- 


tryside."" She  said  that  she  had  carefully  watched  her 
fellow  workers  while  they  hoed  and  sketched  them  dur- 
in  rest  breaks.  Responding  to  their  comments  about  her 
drawings,  she  did  four  versions  of  the  scene,  one  the 
mural. 

Li  herself  was  fifteen  at  the  time  of  Liberation.  It  was 
only  when  literacy  classes  were  set  up  afterw  ards  that  she 
learned  to  read  and  write.  In  1958  during  the  rural 
development  program  of  the  Great  Leap  Forward  u  hen  a 
reservoir  was  being  built  in  her  district,  trained  artists 
were  sent  there  to  teach  peasants  after  the  day's  work.  She 
attended  and  recalls  reading  Chairman  Mao's  appeal  for  a 
new  kind  of  art  to  be  created  by  and  for  working  people.^ 
She  first  did  posters,  then  murals,  and  in  time  organized 
an  amateur  art  group.  Over  the  years  more  than  five 
hundred  worker-painters  were  trained  in  her  county, 
and  there  were  some  in  most  of  the  production  brigades. 

While  there  had  always  been  peasant  art  in  China,  it 
was  traditionally  looked  down  upon  by  educated  artists 
and  their  wealthy  patrons.  In  the  late  sixties  and  early 
seventies  cultural  activities  and  performing  troupes  w  ere 
common  in  factories,  offices,  farming  units,  and  schools 
throughout  the  country.  It  seemed  to  be  assumed  that 
everyone  had  a  right  to  participate  in  the  producing  of 
some  kind  of  art,  which  was  largely  an  expression  of  the 


478  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

collective  effort  of  building  a  new  society."  Much  of  this 
art  itself  was  collaborative.  All  of  it  was  public  art,  and 
popular  discussion  and  criticism  were  part  of  its  process. 
Artists  spoke  of  combining  a  revolutionary  romanticism 
and  realism.  While  folk  techniques  were  employed,  the 
old  privileged  culture  was  also  adapted  to  the  new  con- 
tent. There  was  a  new  Chinese  proverb:  "All  art  is 
propaganda  for  something;  the  only  mistake  is  to  believe 
that  all  propaganda  is  art."^  To  prevent  this,  there  was 
intensive  training  of  lay  people  as  well  as  professionals. 
The  amateur,  in  fact,  was  becoming  a  public  artist.  In 
the  early  seventies  the  Chinese  were  concerned  that  those 
who  did  full-time  cultural  work  might  become  an  elite."* 
But  with  the  abrogation  of  the  Cultural  Revolution  later 
in  the  decade,  there  was  reason  to  fear  that  the  experi- 
ment of  grass-roots  worker-artists  might  be  superseded 
by  the  new  drive  for  specialists  and  catching  up  by 
Western-style  modernization. 

Canada 

Supergraphics  and  two-dimensional  visual  jokes  were 
popular  in  Montreal  from  as  early  as  1972  done  by  such 
groups  as  the  Mur-a-.Vlur  (Wall-to-Wall)  Squad,  while 
Northwest  Coast  Native  Peoples  continued  to  paint  their 
community  lodges  with  traditional  clan  symbols. Alter- 
native public  media  in  Vancouver  found  their  most 
widespread  vehicle  in  the  trenchant  graffiti  of  the 
Anarchists,  who  spray-painted  a  telling  reflection  on  the 
contemporary  use  of  art  above  the  entrance  of  the 
Museum  of  Anthropology  at  the  University  of  British 
Columbia,  which  displays  spectacularly  the  best  North- 
west Indian  collection  in  the  world.   The  Anarchists' 


Richard  Tetrault:  Untitled  (partial  view),  1977,  Simon 
Fraser  University,  Vancouver.  (Photo  Tetrault) 


1979  inscription  read,  "Institute  of  Cultural  Necrophilia" 
and  "Primitivism  Lives!  Voyeurism  Sucks!" 

Also  in  Vancouver  at  Simon  Fraser  University  walls  in 
the  lounge  which  had  been  the  center  of  student  activism 
were  embellished  with  professional  murals  in  1977. 
Commissioned  by  the  Student  Society,  Maria  Fitzgerald 
and  Richard  Tetrault  did  a  pair  of  sixty-foot  works  facing 
each  other  that  expressed  their  concern  about  the  Trident 
nuclear  submarine  base  at  Bangor,  Washington,  and  the 
arms  race.  The  installation  had  been  the  target  of  protests 
and  demonstrations  by  students  and  Vancouver  residents 
for  a  number  of  years,  and  Hiroshima  victims  had  spoken 
at  the  university.  On  her  three  walls  Fitzgerald  sketched 
a  chessboard  with  missiles,  a  prone  figure  raising  an 
automatic  rifle  and  an  armed  cowgirl,  a  type  she  says  she 
idolized  when  she  was  a  child.  Surrounded  by  posters 
there  is  also  a  member  of  the  Pacific  Life  Community, 
which  was  active  against  the  base.  Arranging  these  vi- 
gnettes in  a  loose  montage,  she  engulfed  them  in  flowers 
that  are  almost  palpably  fragrant  like  Monet's.  She  titled 
the  work  The  Triumph  of  Nature  over  War.  Compositionally 
it  recalls  the  political  canvases  of  Rauschenberg;  the  free 
pastel  brushwork  is  reminiscent  of  de  Kooning.  Oppo- 
site, Tetrault  depicted  a  seascape  with  a  wave  of  weapons 
and  robots  rising  against  the  sun  while  a  bird  wings 
above  as  a  messenger.  Meanwhile  on  the  shore  vulnerable 
human  forms  are  being  born  from  shells  and  a  woman 
raises  her  arms  hopefully.  Reminiscent  in  part  of  Orozco 
and  Siqueiros,  the  mural  is  powerfuj  in  its  own  right. 
Both  works  are  sophisticated  efforts  appropriate  to  the 
university  that  indicate  how  high  culture  can  become 
relevant. 

Another  location  of  Vancouver  murals  was  con- 
struction-site fences.  In  1976  while  the  Davon  Building 
was  going  up,  the  Pier  Group  Muralists,  who  also  do 
motel  walls,  received  a  $50,000  public  grant  to  decorate 
a  fence,  which  remained  up  for  two  years.  When  it 


Appendix  I  479 


Frank  Lewis  and  others:  Untitled,  1979,  construction 
fence,  Carnegie  Library ,  Vancouver. 


was  dismantled,  sections  were  auctioned  off  for  charity. 
Another  of  the  Pier  Group's  works  was  a  giant  pigeon 
done  by  J.  C.  Scott  in  a  square  beloved  of  pigeons 
and  pigeon  feeders. 

With  the  success  of  the  Davon  wall  behind  them,  the 
Pier  Group  and  Frances  Fitzgibbon  of  the  Vancouver 
Social  Planning  Department  set  their  eyes  on  the  fence 
surrounding  the  old  Carnegie  Library,  which  was  being 
turned  into  a  community  center.  This  was  in  the  Strath- 
cona  area  where  low-income  residents,  Chinatown,  skid 
row,  a  police  station,  and  a  court  for  street  crime  were 
cheek  by  jowl.  Frank  Lewis  of  the  Pier  Group  tried  to  get 
the  involvement  of  local  people  by  painting  a  circle  of 
joining  hands  of  different  hues.  Gradually  trained  and 
untrained  artists  joined  in.  Around  the  hands  were 
painted  magicians  and  spirtualist  figures  of  different 
lands  reaching  toward  each  other  as  they  float  above  the 
earth.  Nearby  an  equally  large  cockroach  with  a  can  of 
Raid  referred  to  the  condition  of  local  housing.  In  the 
panel  to  the  left  a  comfortably  dressed  young  woman 
passes  a  derelict  beneath  Anatole  France's  remark  about 
the  majestic  equality  of  the  law,  and  further  on  a  lonely 
man  waits  on  the  edge  of  his  bed  in  a  barren  room 
surrounded  by  real  newspapers  as  if  to  keep  the  wind 
out.  At  the  far  left  a  row  of  figures  with  their  hands  up 
against  the  fence  waiting  to  be  searched  suggests  the 
nearby  police  and  court.  The  Anarchists  had  inscribed 
their  circled  "A"  on  one.  To  the  right  are  vignettes  of  the 
street,  an  antinuclear  panel,  a  scene  of  people  of  different 
races  with  their  arms  around  each  other,  and  a  display  of 
flowers,  again  by  Maria  Fitzgerald. 


Chile 

The  murals  of  the  Ramona  Parra  Brigades  of  Chile  that 
engaged  nonprofessionals  in  public  communication  have 
already  been  described  (p.  212).  They  also  had  widespread 
impact  outside  Chile,  first  in  the  work  of  the  People's 
Painters  which  Eva  Cockcroft  organized  at  Livingston 
College  and  then  after  the  coup  against  the  democratic 
government  in  1973  when  they  were  carried  on  by 
refugees  and  their  supporters  abroad.  One  group  \\  as  the 
Brigada  Orlando  Letelier,  which  was  painting  in  San 
Francisco,  Chicago,  and  other  U.S.  cities  in  1979. 

The  Netherlands 

In  the  Netherlands  there  were  a  number  of  such 
brigades  that  were  funded  both  by  the  Center  for  Chilean 
Culture  and  local  municipal  councils."  Jose  Balines,  the 
former  director  of  the  Academy  of  Visual  Arts  in  San- 
tiago, led  a  brigade  in  Rotterdam  where  murals  were 
done  on  the  walls  of  factories  and  public  institutions. 
There  were  similar  works  in  The  Hague,  Utrecht,  and 
Dordrecht  and  at  the  University  of  Leyden,  and  the 
Brigada  Luis  Corvalan  created  a  spiraling  kiosk  in  a 
Rotterdam  square  in  1975  with  images  reminiscent  of 
Ramona  Parra. 

During  the  seventies  domestic  murals  were  also  being 
done  in  the  Netherlands.  Images  of  a  huge  child  skipping 
rope  and  a  three-story  parrot,  on  another  wall  were 
typical  of  works  painted  by  professional  artists  in  the 
neighborhoods.  There  were  also  supergraphics  and  sur- 
realist visual  jokes  such  as  a  giant-sized  bedsheet  pinned 
to  a  clothesline  that  offered  a  postcard  view  of  the  sea 
ripped  open  to  show  the  same  scene  continued.  But  in  a 


480  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Local  people  with  assistance  of  Pier  Group  Muralists  and 
Social  Planning  Department:  Untitled,  1979,  construc- 
tion fence,  Carnegie  Library,  Vancouver. 


Local  people:  Untitled,  1979,  construction  fence,  Carnegie 
Library. 


pE.  3^y[^j|j5^o 


rigada  Luis  Corvalan:  ''Down  with  the  Junta,  Free 
'hile,"  1975,  Rotterdam,  Netherlands.    (Photo  Carel 

ermeer). 


suburb  of  Rotterdam  in  1974  Hans  Abelman  organized 
local  people  to  paint  the  outside  of  a  youth  shelter  with  a 
scene  that  pictured  a  demonstration  of  residents  carrying 
a  banner  that  reads  "Visit  Crosswijk  ...  to  see  one  of  the 
largest  open-air  swimming  pools  in  Europe  and  play  with 
rats  in  condemned  houses."  They  are  met  by  police, 
commandos,  and  tanks,  while  Unilever  and  a  bank  loom 
in  the  background. 

After  World  War  II  the  Dutch  government  as  part  of 
its  rebuilding  program  had  authorized  the  setting  aside  of 
a  percentage  of  construction  costs  for  art.*''  This  provi- 
sion was  hardly  complied  with  during  the  next  twenty 


Appendix  I  48 1 
years,  and  in  1968  during  the  worldwide  grassroots 
upsurge  in  politics  and  the  arts,  many  unknown  Dutch 
artists  demanded  a  role  and  insisted  that  the  people 
among  whom  their  art  was  to  be  placed  have  final  say 
about  it.  As  a  result,  ten  years  later  there  were  one 
hundred  murals  in  Amsterdam  and  fifty  in  Rotterdam. 
Some  were  painted  by  artists  in  CE TA-like  programs 
who  did  public-service  murals  in  firehouses,  hospitals, 
and  police  stations;  others  were  done  in  playgrounds 
where  residents  had  to  be  involved  in  carrying  out  the 
project.  Kukuleku  (Cockadoodledoo),  an  Amsterdam 
artists'  collective  that  organized  in  1970,  received  public 
funding  irregularly  since  1972  and  has  done  murals  on 
the  need  for  jobs  and  low-income  housing.  Another 
Amsterdam  muralists'  collective  is  Art  and  Society, 
which  formed  in  1972  and  has  painted  abstract  designs  to 
which  it  added  texts  that  express  neighborhood  feelings. 
Associated  with  an  artists'  trade  union,  it  refused  public 
funds. 

Sweden 

In  Sweden  during  the  seventies  while  muralists 
painted  indoors  in  institutions,  unauthorized  art  squads 
worked  surreptitiously,  mostly  at  night."*  In  1979 
twenty  mural  groups  were  invited  to  participate  in  a 
three-week-long  mural-in-action  exhibit  at  the  Stock- 
holm Museum  of  Modern  Art.  Chilean  muralists  were 
also  active  here. 

France 

In  1978  there  were  three  brigades  of  Chilean  muralists 
in  France  which  were  regularly  invited  by  progressive 
municipal  governments  throughout  Europe  to  paint 
works  that  usually  could  be  completed  in  a  day.'*  On  the 
other  hand,  there  is  no  tradition  of  popular  mural  paint- 
ing in  France,  and  the  outside  decor  of  buildings  is 
strictly  regulated.  But  the  construction  of  working-class 
suburbs  since  World  War  II  moved  some  officials  to 
authorize  the  decorative  painting  of  the  new  concrete 
high  rises  that  sometimes  looked  like  camouflage.  How- 
ever, on  a  wall  along  Rue  Pernety  in  a  working-class 
district  of  Paris,  a  group  of  young  artists  painted  a  scene 
of  local  people  fending  off  a  giant  bulldozer  that  w  as  in 
the  process  of  leveling  their  neighborhood.  The  artists 
were  supported  by  donations  from  passersby,  and  when 
after  a  year  an  attempt  was  made  to  cover  over  the  mural, 
the  neighborhood  would  not  permit  it.  In  1978  a  group  of 
art  students  spent  months  surveying  the  concerns  of  the 
users  of  the  Place  de  la  Re'publique  .Metro  station  as  a 
preliminary  to  working  on  its  walls.  And  there  were 
other  isolated  projects  in  Grenoble.  Community-based 
murals  were  just  beginning  to  come  alive  in  France. 


482  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Hans  Abelman  and  local  people:  ''Visit  Crosswijk  . 
1974,  near  Rotterdam.  (Photo  Carel  Vermeer) 


Italy 

In  1974  the  walls  facing  the  streets  of  San  Sperate,  a 
farming  village  of  5,000  in  the  south  of  Sicily,  showed 
the  work  of  children  and  adults  alike. '^  There  was  a  man 
and  woman  in  folk  costumes,  she  with  a  jar  on  her  head. 
Nearby  was  a  semiabstract  composition  of  harvesters 
picking  oranges  and  a  child's-eye  view  of  the  town  with 
all  the  prominent  buildings.  But  another  scene  showed 
armed  workers  staving  off  the  Chilean  junta,  and  a 
twelve-foot  drawing  in  paint  depicted  a  figure  sitting  on 
the  ground  reaching  forward  with  its  hands  and  a  foot 
enormously  enlarged  by  the  perspective,  which  was  ex- 
plained by  the  caption:  A  Siqueiros,  al  Mexico,  al  Poppolo 
Proletario. 

Great  Britain 

The  sources  of  contemporary  murals  in  Britain  have 
been  mixed.  In  London  as  early  as  1963  along  Carnaby 
Street,  the  center  of  the  psychedelic-Beatle-rtxrk-teenage- 


fashion-and-Levi's  scene,  shop  faces  were  painted  with 
magic  mushrooms  and  other  "head  art."'  Later  in  the  sixties 
there  was  a  ferment  among  young  artists  as  on  the 
Continent  and  in  the  United  States  seeking  to  estab- 
lish a  more  vital  relation  between  art  and  society. 
One  of  the  most  fertile  undertakings  that  came  out 
of  this  was  the  hiring  in  1968  of  David  Harding,  a 
young  sculptor,  as  a  "town  artist"  by  Glenrothes,  a  new 
town  in  Scotland,  a  community  that  had  been  built  from 
scratch  twenty  years  earlier  and  was  close  to  half  way 
towards  its  target  population  of  seventy  thousand.'* 
Harding  carved  out  his  role  as  a  member  of  the  planning 
and  building  team,  regarding  himself  as  responsible  for 
the  visual  environment.  His  idea  was  to  integrate  art  into 
the  daily  life  and  work  of  the  town,  and  he  wanted  to  give 
chances  to  residents  to  share  in  the  shaping  of  their 
milieu.  He  worked  with  young  people  in  schools  and 
adults  in  his  studio  next  to  the  town's  carpentry  work- 
shops where  he  won  the  interest  of  construction  workers. 
He  poured  and  finished  concrete  sculpture  with  their 
help  and  was  impressed  how  important  it  was  to  give 
skilled  people  work  that  was  interesting  and  used  their 
abilities.  He  found  that  construction  workers  were  will- 
ing to  give  time  and  sacrifice  money  to  do  work  drafted 
by   an   artist   rather  than   do   better-paying   mundane 


Appendix  /  4Si 


Ji       J  fl     vu  W|fji«i 


c^/-^^'^^^ 


Aocfl/  dtrfw/;  'To  Siqueiros,  to  Mexico,  to  Proletarian 
People,"  1974,  San  Sperate,  Sicily. 


tasks. '^  While  some  of  the  neighborhood  sculpture  at 
Glenrothes  was  Harding's  design,  the  residents  with  his 
assistance  created  concrete  and  tile  murals  that  combined 
the  robustness  of  the  material  with  elegance  and  humor. 
There  were  monuments  with  Celtic  interlaces,  reliefs 
with  shapes  derived  from  local  mining  machinery,  mush- 
rooms and  hippos  that  kids  could  climb  on,  and  works 
with  quotations  from  Gandhi,  King,  and  Dylan,  as  well 
as  the  current  price  of  whiskey  embedded  in  concrete  for 
perpetuity.  Harding,  who  trained  apprentices  who  went 
to  work  in  other  communities,  in  effect  invented  the  role 
of  town  artist  in  Britain.  After  ten  years  at  this  Harding 
in  1979  was  teaching  in  a  two-year  program  called  "Art  & 
Design  in  Social  Contexts"  in  the  Dartington  College  of 
Arts  in  Devonshire.  The  course  placed  students  in  the 
community  to  work  as  artists  and  to  assist  people  to 
participate  in  the  arts. 

The  efforts  of  young  artists  like  Harding  were  some- 
times preceded  by  arts  activity  initiated  by  residents  of 
working-class  boroughs  like  Tower  Hamlets  in  London 
where  music  hall  originated  long  before  and  local  people 
in  1970  put  on  one  of  the  first  community  festivals  that 
were  soon  to  become  widespread.'*  As  community  and 
youth  workers  began  to  look  for  trained  artists  for  help, 
artists  who  were  disillusioned  by  the  commercialism  of 
their  profession  began  turning  to  these  communities  to 
do  meaningful  work.  They  shared  their  skills  in  the  film. 


^rt: 


^^^^I|;.?t*i5<>-jr  4j 


theater,  music,  and  the  graphic  arts  with  local  people, 
particularly  the  young,  and  by  1979  there  were  more 
than  fifty  murals  in  Tower  Hamlets.'' 

In  1973  Robert  Kershaw  and  Graham  Cooper  were 
painting  outdoor  abstract  and  Pop  murals  celebrating 
labor  and  machines  in  the  working-class  areas  of 
Rochdale  in  the  Midlands,  and  the  following  year  the 
Scottish  Arts  Council  began  commissioning  individual 
artists  to  paint  the  gable  ends  of  row  houses  in  similar 
districts  of  Glasgow.  The  first  by  John  Byrne  was  titled 
Boy  on  Dog  Back  and  offered  in  a  wry  manner  a  four- 
story-high  child  in  old-fashioned  garb  doing  just  that.  In 
the  next  years  this  was  followed  by  a  semi  abstract  frog, 
a  colorful  Celtic  knot,  and  a  jungle  scene — all  on 
monumental  scale  painted  on  gable  ends  by  different 
artists  but  to  a  mixed  response.  Richard  Cork,  editor  of 
Studio  International,  an  important  British  art  magazine, 
wrote  of  these  works: 

The  remorselessly  cheerful  paintings  .  .  .  appear  quite 
inappropriate  for  areas  where  ...  community  life 
"had  been  torn  apart  by  motorway  planning." 
.  .  .  Though  the  artists  involved  surely  did  not  intend 
it,  their  contributions  look  oddly  heartless,  as  if  a  sop 
was  being  offered  to  badly  h»used  Glawegians  in  lieu 
of  the  better  conditions  that  they  deserve.^" 

This  criticism  recalls  that  leveled  by  community 
muralists  in  the  States  against  supergraphics. 

On  the  other  hand,  Cork  cited  the  work  of  David 


484  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


David  Harding:  High  relief  mural  on  pedestrian  under- 
pass, early  1970s,  Glenrothes,  Scotland.  (Photo  Glenrothes 
Town  Artist) 


David  Harding:   Underpass  relief  mural  (detail).   (Photl 
Glenrothes  Town  Artist) 


Cashman  and  Roger  Fagan  at  the  Laycock  School  in 
London's  Islington  as  a  model  of  the  way  to  go  about 
community  murals.  After  early  disagreement  as  to 
whether  the  artists  should  design  a  mural  for  the  stu- 
dents, they  discussed  the  matter  with  the  faculty  and 
youngsters  and  decided  to  draw  the  students  into  full 
partnership.^'  It  was  the  children,  who  were  between 
four  and  eleven,  who  provided  the  designs  for  the  five- 
story  Victorian  facade,  and  each  brick  was  treated  as  a 
separate  unit  so  that  the  result  was  like  a  needlepoint 
tapestry.  Cashman  and  Fagan  had  come  to  Laycock  in 
1974  as  part  of  an  experiment  by  the  Fducational  Au- 
thority and  Gulbenkian  Foundation  to  place  artists  in  the 
schools  and  communities  with  a  view  to  producing  art 
related  to  society.  Some  other  artists  in  the  program  had 
less  success,  and  the  crux  of  the  matter  seemed  to  be  the 
desire  and  ability  of  the  professionals  to  draw  the  un- 
trained into  active  participation. 

Socially  concerned  muralists  in  Britain  found  them- 
selves having  to  come  to  grips  with  many  of  the  issues 
that  their  counterparts  in  the  United  States  had  been 
grappling  with,  particularly  the  struggles  of  working- 
class  people  to  save  their  jobs  and  housing  and  to  develop 
their  own  culture.  These  problems  were  further  aggra- 
vated by  racism,  which  long  had  been  kept  at  a  distance 
in  the  colonies,  but  after  World  War  II  had  come  home 
with  the  migration  of  West  Indians  and  Asians.  The 
government  offered  large  incentives  to  relocate  industry 
outside  London,  which  lost  many  of  its  blue-collar  jobs. 
For  almost  thirty  years  working-class  communities  had 
been  broken  up  because  of  postwar  redevelopment.  Lon- 
don was  becoming  more  than  ever  an  administrative, 
professional,  and  retailing  center  with  a  broad  range  of 
cultural  and  entertainment  amenities  for  the  middle 
class.  Glass  and  steel  office  towers  were  changing  the 
skyline;  Covent  Garden,  the  central  market,  was  being 
turned  into  boutiques,  and  old  dwellings  into  luxury 
townhouses.  It  was  the  British  who  first  gave  the  term 
"gentrification"  to  this  process. 

One  of  the  first  murals  to  address  these  issues  was  The 
People's  River,  which  depicts  racially  mixed  working 
people  literally  taking  possession  of  the  Thames  in  their 
arms  as  dock  cranes  once  again  provide  jobs  and  people 
picnic  and  sail  along  its  banks.  The  rollicking  liberation 
of  the  river  was  painted  in  1975  by  Stephen  Lobb,  Carol 
Kenna,  and  local  people  as  the  first  project  of  the  Green- 
wich Mural  Workshop  located  in  the  economically  de- 
pressed borough.  Lobb  and  Kenna,  trained  artists,  had 
turned  a  small  flat  in  the  Meridian  Estate,  operated  by 
the  Greater  London  Council,  into  a  studio  where  they 
were  teaching  tenants  to  do  silk-screen  posters  for  dances 
and  public  meetings  and  youngsters  to  make  puppets  for 
their  miniature  theater.  Lobb  f)ointed  out  that,  while 
public  housing  was  usually  preferred  to  private  by  low- 
income  people  because  of  its  cheapness  and  the  minimum 
standards  it  had  to  meet,  Meridian  was  regarded  as  the 
bottom  of  the  heap  by  tenants,  who  often  were  single- 


Carol  Kenna,  Stephen  Lobb,  and  local  people  (Greenwich 
Mural  Workshop):  The  People's  River,  1975,  Green- 
wich, London. 


parent  families  and  had  difficulty  getting  jobs  nearby. 
Nevertheless,  the  workshop  had  made  it  possible  for 
residents  of  all  ages  to  brighten  a  low  wall  in  the  parking 
lot  with  images  of  cricket  and  football  (soccer)  matches, 
cats,  fish,  and  flowers,  a  family  at  table,  and  abstract 
designs.  And  in  1979  on  a  nearby  five-story  wall  artists 
and  tenants  had  completed  a  mural  showing  residents  as 
astronauts  working  together  to  propel  their  spaceship 
toward  an  ideal  planet  where  people  of  all  races  pursue 
their  unique  life-styles  harmoniously. 

Some  miles  away  at  Floyd  Road  in  1976  the  workshop 
had  organized  tenants  to  do  a  four-story  gable-end  mural 
depicting  their  fight  against  landlords  who  allowed  their 
houses  to  deteriorate  so  they  could  be  condemned  and 
sold  to  the  borough  council  to  be  replaced  by  new 
structures  while  the  tenants  were  dispersed.  Here  the 
artists  cleverly  followed  the  slanted  roofline  to  dramatize 
the  grasping  arms  of  wrecking  equipment,  which  tenants 
are  resisting  while  others  are  refurbishing  their  building. 
The  workshop  had  also  organized  parents  to  paint  the 
exterior  of  a  kindergarten  with  jungle  images,  and  in 
1979  they  were  helping  teenagers  cover  the  outside  of  an 


486  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


old  mission  that  had  become  their  center  with  scenes  of 
l(x:al  chimney-pot  manufacture  and  street  Hfe. 

In  the  borough  of  Camden  where  the  Labour  party 
members  of  the  council  provided  strong  support  for  com- 
munity arts,  murals  were  widespread  in  the  public- 
housing  estates.  Most  of  these  had  been  done  by  young 
people  with  adult  supervision.  At  the  Lismore  Circus 
Estate  the  Fine  Hearts  Squad  in  1975  and  1976  had 
combined  children's  work  with  more  polished  portraits 
of  residents,  a  scene  of  coster  mongers,  a  view  of  Dick- 
ens's London,  a  Last  Supper,  and  images  of  poor  Blacks 
and  Whites  of  the  U.S.  Depression  borrowed  from  the 
photos  of  Dorothea  Lange.  The  walls  along  bridges  were 
sometimes  continuous  images  by  nearby  residents,  one  of 
them  calling  for  solidarity  with  Chile.  The  outside  walls  of 
the  Abbey  Community  Center  in  Belsize  Road  wel- 
comed visitors  with  life-size  portraits  of  locals  smiling 
from  a  park,  crossing  the  street,  waiting  for  a  bus,  and 
kids  playing  leapfrog. 

In  1976  in  Battersea  on  the  south  bank  of  the  Thames 
across  from  fashionable  Chelsea,  the  Morgan  Crucible 
factory  that  had  employed  three  thousand  had  been  shut 
down,  and  private  developers  were  planning  an  office 
block  and  luxury  housing  on  the  old  site.^^  In  the  nearby 
council  flats  local  tenants'  groups,  which  included  people 
who  had  worked  at  Morgan's,  wanted  the  ten  acres 
devoted  to  new  jobs  for  them,  more  low-income  housing, 
and  a  place  for  recreation.  As  part  of  the  campaign  that 
emerged,  the  Wandsworth  Mural  Workshop  located  in 
the  council  housing  undertook  a  mural  to  explain  their 


Residents  ofColttnan  House  (Meridian  Estate)  coordinated 
by  Carol  Kenna  and  Stephen  Lobb  (Greenwich  Mural 
Workshop):  Untitled,  1977-78,  Greenwich,  London. 


intentions  and  enlist  support.  The  owners  of  the  old 
factory  granted  permission  to  use  a  wall  that  was  178  feet 
long  and  18  feet  high,  and  the  workshop  by  1978  had 
completely  filled  its  surface.  The  project  was  directed  by 
Brian  Barnes,  an  art  teacher  who  had  worked  since  1973 
as  a  volunteer  in  the  area  before  he  was  hired  full-time 
as  community  artist  in  1976.  There  were  public  meetings 
that  generated  a  list  of  agreed-on  images,  and  as  new 
events  broke  in  the  campaign  to  save  the  area,  the  design 
stayed  just  ahead  of  the  painting.  Sixty  people  between 
six  and  sixty-four  participated  either  as  artists  or  as 
sitters  for  portraits;  there  were  forty-five  likenesses  of 
residents  and  also  the  driver  of  the  number  19  bus  and 
officials  from  the  bus  garage  across  the  street.  The 
painting,  Barnes  writes, 

shows  a  huge  broom  sweeping  away  the  "rubbish"  of 
Battersea,  old  factories,  trendy  restaurants,  high  rise 
council  flats,  office  blocks,  heliport,  gentrified  hous- 
ing, Disneyland  once  proposea  for  Battersea  Park, 
luxury  flats,  nightclubs,  and  having  swept  clear  space 
for  adventure  playgrounds,  low  rise  houses  with  gar- 
dens in  the  process  ot  being  built  by  the  councils 
Direct  Work  Dept.,  small  mdustrial  co-operatives, 
swimming  pools,  reliable  bus  service,  traffic  free 
streets  for  play  and  cycling,  allotments,  riverside 
parks.  The  '  rubbish"  is  incinerated  in  a  wall  of  flame 


i 


Appendix  I  487 


Brian  Barnes  and  local  people  (Wandsworth  Mural  Work- 
shop): Battersea,  the  Good  the  Bad  and  the  Ugly  or 
Tenants  and  Workers  United  Sweeping  Away  the 
Evils  of  Capitalism  (partial  view),  1976-78,  Ijondon, 
demolished  1979.  (Photo  H.  J.  Burns) 


which  routs  the  local  Tory  councillors  whose  policies 
are  totally  opposite  to  the  ideas  seen  in  the  mural'. 
Policies  which  will  create  a  wasteland  of  the  Borough, 
as  far  as  working  people  are  concerned. ^■' 

The  title  is  Battersea,  the  Good  the  Bad  and  the  Ugly  or 
Tenants  and  Workers  United  Sweeping  Away  the  Evils  of 
Capitalism.  People  worked  on  the  wall  mainly  on 
weekends  and  holidays.  Funding  that  amounted  to  over 
$1,500  came  from  the  Wandsworth  Borough  Council  and 
a  mural  trust  fund;  paint  and  primer  were  donated  by  a 
paint  company  and  scaffolding  came  from  local  govern- 
ment. The  project  received  considerable  press  coverage 
and  a  film  was  made  about  it,  but  through  spring  1979, 
the  authorities  were  sticking  to  their  decision  to  let 
speculators  develop  the  location. 

Meanwhile  Barnes  was  also  training  residents  to  make 
posters,  letterheads,  and  more  murals.  During  the  winter 
of  1978/79  they  were  doing  a  wall  facing  a  playground 
that  recalled  an  excursion  tenants  took  to  the  beach  the 
previous  summer.  Barnes  continued  to  work  through 
much  of  the  winter  under  a  tarp  because  the  weather  was 
uncertain  through  the  rest  of  the  year.  "I  would  really 
like  to  teach  people  how  to  do  these  things  themselves," 
Barnes  says.  "I  want  me  to  become  redundant." 

During  that  spring  the  general  election  that  had  made 
Mrs.  Thatcher  prime  minister  returned  to  power  the 
Tory  borough  councillors  whom  the  painters  of  the 
Battersea  wall  had  shown  being  swept  out.  While  Barnes 
increased  his  efforts  to  save  the  mural,  .Morgan  Crucible 
finally  decided  to  forestall  further  controversy.  At  3  a.m. 
on  June  3  it  sent  in  wreckers  to  demolish  the  wall  even 
before  the  dismantling  of  the  plant.    Demolition  .was 


almost  completed  before  defenders  could  assemble. 
Barnes  mounted  the  remains,  and  crowds  of  several 
hundred  closed  Battersea  Bridge  during  the  evening  rush 
hour.  Busmen  from  the  depot  opposite  threw  up  a  bag 
containing  a  pork  pie  and  cigarettes  to  Barnes  who  held 
off  the  police  until  they  finally  carried  him  away.  It  was 
hardly  six  months  since  the  completion  of  the  work 
which  was  described  by  a  curator  of  the  Tate  Gallery  "as 
perhaps  the  most  outstanding  mural  in  the  south  of 
England."  Charges  against  Barnes  were  finally  dismissed 
by  a  magistrate,  who  observed  that  "the  demolition  of  the 
wall  .  .  .  was  misfortunate."^"* 

The  feeling  against  officialdom  and  "progress"  by 
people  trying  to  defend  their  communities  was  expressed 
by  a  scene  of  natives  cooking  colonial  types  come  to  take 
up  the  White  man's  burden  that  w  as  painted  on  a  fence 
surrounding  a  large  excavation  in  the  old  central  market 
of  London  in  1977  by  Anne  Margaret  Bellavoine.  Holes 
the  shape  of  trees  in  this  comic  vision  of  Eden  had  been 
cut  in  the  fence  to  allow  passersby  to  see  the  temporary 
playground  and  plantings  inside  that  were  the  work  of 
the  Covent  Garden  Community  Association.  The 
mural's  brightly  lettered  title  was  also  an  appeal:  Bloomin' 
Covent  Garden.  For  overhead  a  large  sign  advertised 
200,000  square  feet  of  air-conditioned  offices  soon  to  be 
constructed  there.  It  was  not  hard  to  guess  who  the  chaps 
being  boiled  and  dismembered  in  Eden  were.  Further 
along  the  fence,  locals  had  painted  favorite  quotations 
or  invented  their  own.  On  similar  fences  nearby  children 
had  made  forays  organized  by  their  schools. 

Also  in  Covent  Garden  that  year  on  a  gable  end  facing 
an  old  bomb  site  on  Earlham  Street,  Stephen  Pusey  did 
Photo-Realist  portraits  of  residents  creating  the  actual 
chess  garden  at  their  feet.  Pusey  says  this  was  his  first 
mural.  It  began  as  a  six-by-eight-foot  canvas  that  he 
photographed,  and  at  night  he  projected  the  slide  on  to 


Battersea  mural  (detail). 


Battersea  mural  (detail). 


Anne  Margaret  Bellavoine:  Bloomin'  Covent  Garden 
(partial  view),  1977,  London. 


Bloomin'  Covent  Garden  (partial  view). 


490  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Stephen  Pusey:  Untitled,  1977,  Covent  Garden,  London. 


the  wall  to  facilitate  a  rough  drawing,  a  method  being 
increasingly  used.  Materials  were  contributed  by  busi- 
nesses, and  the  artist  and  his  assistant  had  to  depend  for 
their  fee  on  passersby  and  a  grant  of  $400  from  the  local 
council.  The  mural,  Pusey  adds,  was  the  product  of  his 
four  year  involvement  with  the  Open  Space  Committee 
of  the  Community  Association,  which  had  transformed  a 
number  of  derelict  sites  into  gardens.  Fruit  and  vegetable 
dealers  had  been  evicted  to  make  way  for  redevelopment, 
and  many  of  the  small  craftsmen  were  closing  up.  Pusey 
himself  was  compelled  to  move.  The  area  was  being 
"upgraded"  by  big  office  blocks,  expensive  flats  and 
trendy  art  galleries  and  wine  bars,  which  raised  the  rents 
of  those  who  remained.  The  Association  had  taken  on 
developers  and  the  Westminster  and  Greater  London 
Councils,  resisting  the  demolition  of  old  buildings  and 
efforts  to  pack  people  in  one  massive  housing  project.  It 
was  renovating  older  flats  and  trying  to  save  Jubilee  Hall, 
abandoned  by  the  market  and  turned  into  a  recreation 
center  by  local  people.  With  the  help  of  architects  the 
Association  made  it  possible  for  locals  to  produce  their 


own  plan  for  the  community,  calling  it  Keep  the  Elephants 
out  of  the  Garden.  As  to  Pusey,  he  went  on  to  a  series  of 
panels  across  the  street  from  his  first  mural  on  the  outside 
of  the  music  store  in  which  he  celebrated  an  innovative 
music  education  program  at  Pimlico  School.  He  followed 
those  with  a  mural  in  a  hospital  and  an  outdoor  work  of 
children  of  all  races  playing  together. 

On  a  massive  pier  that  carried  a  motorway  above  the 
London  working-class  district  of  Paddington  at  Royal 
Oak,  David  Binnington  and  Desmond  Rochfort  com- 
pleted in  1977  a  pair  of  murals  after  fifteen  months  of 
work.  The  painters,  art  academy  graduates,  lived  in  the 
community  and  came  to  know  its  concerns.  They  dis- 
cussed the  theme  with  residents  but  took  the  initiative 
with  the  design,  then  exhibited  an  architectural  model 
and  collected  written  comments  from  passersby. 
Rochfort  painted  a  heroic  celebration  of  construction 
laborers  erecting  a  great  steel  trestle  with  some  workers 
as  big  as  it  because  of  the  Siqueiroslike  perspective  and 
an  ingenious  use  of  the  angled  surfaces.  Rochfort  says 
that  he  "tried  to  express  not  only  the  dignity  but  also  the 
inherent  social  and  political  power,  and  .  .  .  solidarity 
that  comes  from  the  act  of  labor. "^^  Binnington,  on  the 
other  hand,  painted  a  cartoonlike  indictment  of  the  over- 
powering machine  of  the  mixed  capitalist-public 
economy  that  the  British  eagle  presides  over.  Huge  gears 
grind  away  above  managers  and  typists  alike,  while  a 
forearm  reaches  pitiably  out  of  a  pipe.  Massive  letters 
that  spell  out  "SELL"  crush  a  salesman,  and  a  Black 
starlet  with  a  gear  for  waist  occupies  cameramen. 
Everything  is  part  of  the  machine  that  is  capped  by  a 
pathetically  weak  monarch  sealed  in  glass  that  a  worker 
polishes. 

Because  of  the  continuous  British  damp  and  their 
having  to  work  on  concrete,  the  painters  used  a  porous 
paint,  and  this  required  the  jackhammeringof  the  surface 
and  having  plasterers  lay  on  a  '4-inch  base.  Altogether 
the  murals  cost  $28,000,  which  was  provided  by  the  Arts 
Council  of  Great  Britain,  a  mural  fund  administered  by 
the  Royal  Academy  and  private  donations.  The  notoriety 
and  public  success  of  the  works  reached  far  beyond  what 
the  artists  anticipated.  Some  critics  pointed  to  them  as 
indications  of  the  direction  British  art  should  take  if  it 
was  to  make  contact  with  ordinary  people.  Binnington 
says  he  has  been  embarrassed  by  this  because  he  feels  his 
work  is  not  good  enough  to  bear  that  responsibility. 

After  completing  his  portion  of  Royal  Oak,  Rochfort 
traveled  to  Mexico  to  see  its  murals  and  became  increas- 
ingly interested  in  the  polyangular  perspective  of 
Siqueiros,  which  he  had  already  experimented  with  in 
London.  When  he  returned  he  showed  his  slides  at  art 
schools  and  colleges  and  was  planning  to  do  a  book  on  Los 
Tres  Grandes  because  there  was  little  available  about  them 


Appendix  /  49  \ 


David  Binnington:  Royal  Oak  Mural,  1976-77,  Pad- 
ding ton,  London. 


for   Europeans.    He   also   was   hoping  to  get   a   mural 
commission  for  a  trade  union  hall. 

Meanwhile  the  work  of  Binnington  at  Royal  Oak 
brought  him  an  offer  for  a  mural  commemorating  the 
Battle  of  Cable  Street  in  1936  when  Oswald  Mosley 
assembled  3,000  of  his  British  Union  of  Fascists  for  a 
march  into  Whitechapel,  then  the  Jewish  working-class 
quarter  of  London.  They  were  confronted  by  300,000 
residents,  dockworkers,  and  members  of  leftist  organiza- 
tions who  filled  the  streets  and  built  barricades.  Between 
them  the  police  interceded,  it  was  said,  to  protect  the 
civil  rights  of  the  Blackshirts.  It  was  the  Jews  and  their 
supporters  whom  the  police  clubbed;  more  than  a 
hundred  were  injured  and  three  times  as  many  arrested, 
some  spending  six  months  in  jail.  But  the  Mosley  forces 
were  stopped,  and  his  movement  began  to  fade  after  this. 
In  1978  Binnington  was  approached  by  a  Labour  party 
leader  from  the  area  and  the  local  borough  council  to  do  a 
commemorative  mural;  the  British  Arts  Council  and  the 
Royal  Academy  provided  a  $36,000  grant.  A  reunion  of 
veterans  of  the  battle  was  held,  and  Binnington  began 
interviewing  them  and  going  over  press  accounts.  He 
opened  a  workshop  in  the  basement  of  the  town  hall  in 
Cable  Street,-  which  had  housed  community  arts  projects 
since  the  early  seventies,  and  two  of  the  building's  gable 
ends  were  selected  for  the  mural.  The  design  showed  a 
maelstrom  of  people,  police,  horses,  and  upturned  vehi- 


cles at  the  eye  of  which  was  a  placard  with  the  slogan 
resisters  had  borrowed  from  the  forces  then  defending 
Spanish  democracy  against  fascism:  "They  Shall  Not 
Pass."  There  would  be  portraits  of  the  old  participants 
together  with  present  residents,  who  were  increasingly 
Asians  and  Blacks,  who  in  turn  were  being  subjected  to 
the  racism  of  the  new  National  Front.  Binnington 
wanted  to  make  clear  the  similarity  of  the  two  struggles 
and  said  he  felt  a  heavy  responsibility  to  bring  off  the 
project.  To  do  this  he  wanted  to  work  out  a  style  that  was 
more  serious  than  his  cartoon  drawing  at  Royal  Oak.  The 
design  for  the  Battle  of  Cable  Street  recalled  the  violent 
eighteenth-century  street  scenes  of  Hogarth,  but  the 
figures  would  be  ten  feet  high. 

By  September  1979  the  walls  had  been  repaired  and 
readied  so  that  Binnington  and  his  assistants  could  begin 
transferring  the  drawing  to  the  surface  with  the  aid  of  a 
projector  at  night.  Correcting  and  finishing  the  complex 
line  drawing  on  the  wall  would  take  all  winter  and 
spring,  and  he  foresaw  them  beginning  to  add  color  by 
June  1980.  The  paint  to  be  used  was  the  same  porous 
medium  employed  at  Royal  Oak  and  was  expected  to 
stand  up  for  a  century.  Completion  was  projected  for 
1981,  and  a  week-long  festival  of  plays,  music,  dances, 
film,  and  poetry  readings  was  planned.  As  Binnington 
was  transferring  the  design  to  the  wall,  he  was  modifying 
it  because  of  what  he  saw  as  the  wholesale  attack  of  the 
new  Tory  government  on  working  people.  There  were 
heavy  cutbacks  in  social  services  while  the  police  and 
military  were  being  bolstered.  He  would  meet  what  he 


Desmond    Rochfort:     Royal     Oak     Mural     (detail), 


1976-77. 


Appendix  I  493 


David  Binnington:  Design  for  Battle  of  Cable  Street, 
1978-81,  Whitechapel,  London. 


described  as  the  "subtlly  changing  role  of  the  police" 
with  an  increased  emphasis  on  their  role  in  the  Battle  of 
Cable  Street. 

While  murals  and  community  arts  in  general  have 
welled  up  in  Britain  out  of  the  interaction  of  local  artists 
and  working-class  communities,  painters  acknowledge 
the  encouragement  of  the  movement  in  the  United 
States.  In  fact,  Beth  Shadur,  an  American  muralist, 
organized  in  1976  a  project  in  the  Special  Unit  of  Glas- 
gow's Barlinnie  Prison,  where  the  prisoners  regarded 
most  violent  were  sent  but  treated  in  an  innovative  way. 
Their  freedom  to  organize  their  own  time  and  to  move 
about  the  unit  made  possible  the  mural  that  they  and 
Shadur  worked  out  together.  It  is  eighty  feet  long  with 
life-size  men  and  women  on  the  areas  between  cell  doors 
contributing  their  labor  to  a  conveyor  belt  that  feeds  a 
giant  tycoon  lolling  under  a  beach  umbrella.  Inside  his 
belly  minuscule  people  cling  to  his  organs,  while  the 
vicious  circle  of  mutual  dependency  is  witnessed  by  a 
starving  child.  The  artists  called  their  painting  the  Wall  of 
Neglect.  ^® 


In  the  other  direction,  David  Harding  made  a  strong 
impression  at  the  West  Coast  Mural /Graffiti  Conference 
in  Los  Angeles  in  1976  and  left  U.S.  muralists  thinking 
about  how  to  import  the  concept  of  town  artist.  In  1978 
Stephen  Lobb  and  Carol  Kenna  of  the  Greenwich  Mural 
Workshop  participated  in  the  Second  National  Mural 
Network  Conference  in  Chicago,  and  the  following  year 
Gloria  Mark  from  Cleveland  painted  with  them  in  Lon- 
don. Also  in  1979  Pedro  Silva,  who  was  responsible  for 
organizing  hundreds  of  New  Yorkers  to  create  the  mosaic 
benches  around  Grant's  Tomb,  was  in  Craigmillar, 
Scotland,  working  with  local  people  on  a  monumental 
nymph  and  fountain  sheathed  in  mosaics  that  not  only 
was  a  delight  for  children  to  scramble  over  but  also  lay  in 
the  path  of  a  projected  roadway  opposed  by  residents. 
This  was  the  second  of  such  works  in  Craigmillar  where 
the  previous  year  a  one-hundred-foot  Gulliver  was  con- 
structed again  by  locals  with  the  help  of  an  American 
artist,  Ken  Wolverton,  who  had  been  working  for  a 
number  of  years  in  community  arts  in  Scotland. ^^  This 
was  an  earthwork  covered  by  concrete  that  was  shaped 
into  the  features  of  the  gentle  giant.  The  idea  had  come 
from  Jimmy  Boyle,  a  convict  at  Barlinnie  Prison  who  had 


494  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


worked  on  the  mural  there  and  was  making  a  reputation 
as  a  sculptor. 

Both  these  earthworks  were  projects  of  the  Craigmillar 
Festival  Society,  a  community  arts  program  in  the  im- 
poverished outskirts  of  Edinburgh.  It  was  in  Craigmillar 
fifteen  years  earlier  that  Helen  Crummy  became  in- 
censed when  her  son  could  not  get  violin  lessons  at 
school  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  opulently  endowed 
international  music  festival  was  flourishing  nearby.^*  She 
organized  her  neighbors,  and  in  1965  they  mounted  the 
first  of  Craigmillar's  self-help  arts  festivals  that  have 
continued  every  year  since  then.  In  time  they  were  able 
to  hire  professional  assistants  and  received  substantial 
funding  from  the  European  Economic  Community.  The 
festival  society  helped  launch  additional  organizations  for 
youth  and  older  people,  and  its  newspaper  offers  news  on 
tenants  and  planning  issues.  All  of  these  activities  pro- 
vided not  only  socially  valuable  employment  in  an  area 
where  joblessness  runs  to  30  percent,  but  also  cohesion 
and  meaning  to  community  life. 

Some  sixty  outdoor  sites  in  London  had  been  given 
murals,  it  was  estimated  in  1977.^'  Two  years  later  as 
many  again  were  counted  in  Tower  Hamlets  alone,  and 
murals  had  been  done  across  Britain — in  Plymouth, 
Brighton,  Luton,  Swindon,  Liverpool,  Manchester, 
Bury,  Oldham,  Heywood,  and  undoubtedly  many  other 
places.^"  Community  arts  in  general  had  expanded  tre- 
mendously so  that  by  1977  there  were  five  hundred 
projects  exchanging  information  as  members  of  the  Asso- 
ciation of  Community  Artists.'"  Tower  Hamlets  had  its 
own  democratically  elected  Arts  Committee  with  repre- 
sentatives of  both  residents  and  local  arts  groups,  and  it 
was  authorized  by  the  British  Arts  Council  to  allocate  all 
public  funds  for  the  arts  in  the  borough.  Funding  for  the 
community  arts  throughout  the  country  was  still  rela- 
tively modest,  but  precedents  had  been  established. 
Professional  artists  had  begun  finding  new  supportive 
publics  and  a  new  relevance,  and  working-class  com- 
munities were  seeking  out  artists  to  work  with  them  and 
were  forming  their  own  art  committees  to  organize  pro- 
grams and  pursue  funding.  Community  arts  were  re- 
garded by  some  observors  as  the  principal  new  direction 
of  British  culture  during  the  seventies,  and  murals  were 
an  important  part  of  this.^^  As  Su  Braden  in  her  study 
f>oints  out,  this  was  not  a  popularization  of  the  estab- 
lishment fine  arts,  a  filtering  down  of  the  art  patronized 
by  the  middle  and  upper  classes,  but  the  emergence  of  a 
culture  shaped  by  community  people  out  of  their  own 
experience — a  democratic  culture. 

However,  by  the  winter  of  1979-80,  the  situation  had 
changed  dramatically.  Although  the  new  Conservative 
government  had  created  the  post  of  rriinister  of  cultural 
arts  with  cabinet  rank,  public  funding  for  art  was  being 
slashed  along  with  support  for  education  and  health, 
while  the  trade-union  movement  was  also  under  fire. 
David  Binnington  reported  that  the  art  world  was  re- 
sponding in  unprecedented  ways  by  organizing  to  fight 


the  cutbacks.  Artists,  he  said,  had  been  politicized  over 
the  past  three  to  four  years,  and  "the  community  arts 
organizations  have  taught  them  a  lesson,  that  individuals 
by  themselves  do  not  stand  a  chance." 

The  similarities  of  community  murals  in  the  United 
States  and  abroad  make  clear  that  they  are  part  of  parallel 
efforts  at  community-based  development.  This  art  has 
been  created  almost  exclusively  in  working-class  areas  as 
a  result  of  varied  kinds  of  collaboration  between  local 
people  and  professional  artists,  who  not  infrequently 
come  from  middle-class  backgrounds.  The  murals  have 
arisen  out  of  the  need  of  those  who  were  deprived  of  a 
public  voice  to  speak  out — mainly  to  their  neighbors, 
fellow  workers  and  students,  as  a  means  of  meeting  the 
practical  and  spiritual  needs  of  daily  life.  This  art  has 
strengthened  local  bonds  and  often  promoted  social  ac- 
tivism. The  issues  it  has  addressed  have  much  in 
common — discrimination  based  on  ethnic  origin  and  in- 
come, particularly  in  employment,  housing,  education, 
and  other  necessary  services.  Women's  issues  seem  only 
to  have  been  dealt  with  extensively  by  wall  art  in  the 
United  States.  There  is  a  clear  link  between  murals  on 
both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  that  have  resisted  the  rede- 
velopment of  the  cities  at  the  expense  of  middle-  and 
low-income  people.  Wall  art  on  behalf  of  urban  trade 
unions  is  connected  with  that  supporting  the  organizing 
of  farm  workers  as  well  as  land  reform  where  big  hold- 
ings and  industrial  farming  have  created  a  rural  pro- 
letariat. Murals  have  become  weapons  where  the  conflict 
between  self-determination  and  exploitation  has  emerged 
from  silence.  The  murals  have  served  as  instruments  of 
communities  survival  and  growth  in  the  face  of  oligarchic 
forms  of  development  that  have  been  able  to  count  on 
government  and  public  media.  The  struggle  over  how  the 
wealth  of  a  society  is  produced  and  distributed  has 
frequently  been  the  subject  of  the  murals,  and  the  pursuit 
of  funds  for  community  art  has  been  part  of  that  struggle. 

In  Europe,  China,  and  the  Americas,  murals  have 
been  reinvented  as  one  of  the  technologies  by  which 
people  have  sought  to  create  a  democratic  economy  and 
culture.  These  processes  of  independent  production  and 
communication  have  also  been  means  to  local  political 
power.  As  a  new  decade  was  beginning,  the  murals  and 
other  forms  of  appropriate  technology  that  came  from  the 
ingenuity  of  the  exploited  and  alienated  of  "advanced" 
and  "underdeveloped"  societies  provided  examples  to  all 
people  seeking  meaningful  work  and  community. 


NOTES 

1.  Alan  W.  Barnett,  "The  Resurgence  of  Political  Art  in 
Mexico?"  San  Jose  Studies,  May  1976,  pp.  5-30. 


2.  Alan  W.  Barnett,  "Jose  Hernandez  Delgadillo:  The  New 
Art  of  the  Mexican  Revolution,"  Praxis  4,  1978,  pp.  268-82. 

3.  For  this  and  the  next  two  paragraphs,  cf.  Barnett,  "Re- 
surgence." 

4.  Che  Guevara,  "Man  and  Socialism  in  Cuba,"  reprinted  in 
Venceremos!  The  Speeches  and  Writings  of  Che  Guevara,  ed.  John 
Gerassi,  New  York:  Macmillan,  1968,  p.  394  ff. 

5.  The  Precita  Eyes  Muralists  probably  saw  this  and  other 
images  they  borrowed  in  Peasant  Paintings  from  Huhsien  County 
(Peking:  Foreign  Language  Press,  1974),  pp.  25  and  64. 

6.  Li  Feng-Ian,  "How  I  Began  to  Paint  the  Countryside," 
China  Reconstructs  (VcV\n%),]2inu2iTy,  1974,  p.  17-23.  Also,  A^^w 
China  (New  York),  Spring  1978,  p.  20. 

7.  New  China,  Spring   1978,  p.  18  f. 

8.  Committee  of  Concerned  Asian  Scholars,  China!  Inside 
the  People's  Republic  (New  York:  Bantam,  1972),  p.  256  f. 

9.  Ibid.,  p.  262  f. 

10.  Ibid.,  p.  257. 

11.  Sybrand  Hekking,  "HoWand,"  International  Newsletter, 
National  Murals  Network,  1979,  p.  6. 

12.  Ibid.,  p.  4f. 

13.  Stellan  Lindblad,  "Sweden,"  International  Newsletter,  p. 
2. 

14.  Herv6  B&hy,  "France,"  International  Newsletter,  p.  8  ff. 

15.  "Homenaje  a  Siqueiros  en  Italia,"  Excelsior  (Mexico 
City),  January  19,  1975. 

16.  David    Harding,    Glenrothes    I'own    Artist    (Glenrothes 


Appendix  I  495 

Development  Corporation),  1975,  also  Su  Braden,  Artists  and 
People,  (London:  Routledge  &  Kegan  Paul,  1978),  p.  39  ff. 

17.  Reports  Stephen  Lobb,  codirector  of  the  Greenwich 
Mural  Workshop. 

18.  Braden,  p.  17  f. 

19.  "Murals  in  Tower  Hamlets,"  checklist  distributed  by 
Whitechapel  Gallery,  London,  1979. 

20.  Richard  Cork,  "Painting  goes  public,"  New  Society  (Lon- 
don), August  25,  1977,  p.  399. 

21.  Braden,  p.  140  ff. 

22.  Annual  Report,  Wandsworth  Arts  Resource  Project, 
London,  1978. 

23.  Ibid.,  from  widely  distributed  letter,  Wandsworth 
.Mural  Workshop. 

24.  Aileen  Billantyne,  "Artist  goes  to  the  wall,"  London: 
The  Guardian,  June  4,  1979. 

25.  Ian  Walter,  "The  Royal  Oak  Murals,"  (Interview  with 
Rochefort  and  Binnington),  Artery  (London),  spring  1978,  p. 
23. 

26.  NMN,  no.  2,  1978,  p.  3  and  Stephen  Lobb's  description. 

27.  Neil  Cameron,  "The  Gentle  Giant,"  and  Michael 
Greenlaw,  "Scotland,"  International  Newsletter,  p.  7  f. 

28.  Braden,  p.  25  ff. 

29.  Cork,  p.  398. 

30.  Checklist,  Greenwich  Mural  Workshop,  197. 

31.  Braden,  p.  24  f. 

32.  Braden,  pp.  xiv,  3,  8,  153. 


GLOSSARY 


AztlAn.  Legendary  and  perhaps  historical  place  of  ori- 
gin of  the  migrating  indios  who  settled  in  the  present 
site  of  Mexico  City  and  became  known  as  the  Aztecs. 
Thought  to  be  in  the  Southwest  of  the  present  United 
States.  During  the  late  1960s  the  term  was  recovered 
by  Chicanos  and  used  with  reference  to  their  social, 
economic,  political,  and  cultural  development  in  this 
country. 

Barrio  (varrio,  variant).  A  Chicano  neighborhood. 

Calavera.  a  skull  or  skeleton  symbolic  of  death  or 
human  mortality  and  regarded  with  fear,  humor,  sa- 
tire, and  tenderness,  particularly  in  iMexico  where  on 
All  Souls'  Day  (La  Dia  de  Los  Muertos)  calaveras  are  used 
as  decorations  and  appear  on  cakes  and  candies. 

Carnausmo.  The  sense  of  common  flesh,  brotherhood, 
and  sisterhood  shared  by  Chicanos. 

Chicano.  In  the  late  sixties  the  term  implied  a  militant 
ethnic  fellowship.  Brown  Pride  and  Power,  but  by  the 
mid-seventies  it  was  widely  accepted  by  most 
Mexican-Americans  as  a  way  of  characterizing  them- 
selves. 

CoRAZON.  Literally  the  heart  and  frequently  symbolized 
by  it,  but  indicating  the  spirit,  soul,  and  depth  of 
feeling  of  Raza  people  for  one  another;  based  on  the 
ancient  indio  conviction  that  the  heart  was  the  seat  of 
life  and  the  Catholic  belief  in  the  Sacred  Heart. 

Counterculture.  A  range  of  life-styles  seeking  more 
supportive  relations  among  people  and  between  them 
and  their  environment  than  are  to  be  found  in  techno- 
cratic, mass  society.  Participants,  alienated  from  the 
work  and  sociability  of  middle-class  existence  from 
which  most  derive,  chose  a  more  modest  standard  of 
living  in  communitarian  arrangements  that  often  use 
appropriate  technology. 

Dashiki.  a  loose-fitting  blouse  worn  by  Africans  that 
became  popular  in  the  United  States  during  the 
flourishing  of  Black  Pride. 

La  Gente.  The  people. 

Hispanic.  A  person  of  Spanish-American  heritage,  in- 


cluding Chicanos,  but  particularly  a  Puerto  Rican. 
Indio.  An  "Indian"  or  person  of  indigenous  stock  from 

Latin  America. 
Latino.  A  Latin  American,  generally  equivalent  to  a 

member  of  La  Raza. 
Mestizo.   A  Mexican  or  Chicano  of  mixed  indio  and 

Spanish  heritage.  Mestizaje:  The  three-faced  image 

symbolizing  this. 
Native  American.  "Indian"  of  the  United  States.  Also 

Native  Peoples. 
North  American.  A  Mexican  term  for  a  person  from  the 

United  States. 
Olmec.  An  ancient  indio  culture  of  the  Gulf  Coast  of 

Mexico  that  flourished  between   1500  and  600  B.C. 

Famous  for  its  monumental  stone  heads. 
Pachuco.  a  Mexican-Americanzoot-suiterof  the  1940s. 
Placa.  Chicano  graffiti.  Also,  Logo. 
PuLQUERiA.   A  Mexican  tavern  that  serves  pulque,   the 

fermented  extract  of  the  maguay. 
Quetzalc6atl.  The  feathered  serpent,  the  god  of  life, 

fertility,  and  civilization  worshipped  by  various  indio 

cultures  of  Mexico. 
La  Raza.  All  Latin  Americans,  including  iWjo^,  Whites, 

and  mestizos.  Filipinos  are  sometimes  associated  with 

La  Raza  because  of  their  Spanish  heritage. 
Rebozo.  a  shawl  worn  by  Mexican  women. 
Salsa.  Popular  Chicano  music. 
Santo.   A  painting  or  sculpture  of  a  saint  used  as  a 

devotional  image  by  Mexicans  and  Puerto  Ricans. 
Soul.  A  quality  of  being,  a  sense  of  inwardness  shared 

by  Black  people  in  their  interpersonal  relations  and 

expressed  by  their  culture. 
ToNANTZiN.   Ancient  mother  of  indio  deities,  who  be- 
came associated  in  the  minds  of  Mexicans  with  the 

Virgin  Mary. 
Undocumented  worker.  A  person  who  has  been  unable 

to  secure  a  U.S.  visa  and  has  crossed  into  this  country 

illegally;  particularly  used  with  reference  to  Mexicans. 


496 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


CONTEMPORARY  COMMUNITY  MURALS 
IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 

1.  Books 

Abrahamson,  Joan,  and  Woodbridge,  Sally  B.  The  Aharado 
School  Community  Art  Program.  San  Francisco:  Alvarado 
School  Workshop,  1973.  Account  of  the  pioneering  program 
that  revived  murals  in  the  schools. 

Beautiful  Walls  of  Baltimore.  Baltimore  Museum  of  Art,  April 
30-June  18,  1978.  Catalog  of  mural  exhibition. 

Riggers,  John,  and  Simms,  Carroll,  with  Weems,  John  Edward. 
Black  Art  in  Houston.  College  Station:  Texas  A  &  M  Univer- 
sity Press,  1978.  Includes  history  of  mural  curriculum  at 
Hampton  Institute  and  Texas  Southern  University. 

Cockcroft,  Eva;  Weber,  John;  and  Cockcroft,  James.  Towards  a 
People's  Art.  New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.,  1977.  First 
comprehensive  study  of  the  community  mural  movement. 

Cry  for  justice.  Chicago:  Amalgamated  Meatcutters  and 
Butcher  Workmen  of  North  America,  1972.  Album  of  early 
works  of  current  mural  movement  in  Chicago. 

Fine,  Elsa  Honig.  The  Afro-American  Artist.  New  York:  Holt, 
Rinehart,  and  Winston,  1973.  Chapters  on  current  commu- 
nity murals  and  earlier  Black  muralists. 

Garcia,  Rupert.  Raza  Murals  &  Muralists:  An  Historical  View. 
San  Francisco:  Galeria  de  la  Raza,  1974.  Study  of  early 
Mission  District  murals  and  their  Mexican  precursors. 

Greenberg,  David;  Smith,  Kathryn;  and  Teacher,  Stuart. 
Megamurals  &  Supergraphics:  Big  Art.  Philadelphia:  Running 
Press,  1977.  Album  of  color  photos  of  a  wide  variety  of 
recent  murals. 

Hieronimus,  Robert.  America's  Bicentennial  Mural  Guide  Book. 
Baltimore:  Savitariaum,  1974.  Analysis  of  imagery  of 
Hieronimus's  Bicentennial  mural. 

Apocalypse  Mural  Guide.   Baltimore:  Hopkins  Union, 


1974. 


Lewis,  Samella.  Art:  African  American.  New  York:  Harcourt 


Brace  Jovanovich,    1978.   Includes  chapters  on  murals  by 
Black  artists  since  the  thirties. 

Morrison,  Rhoda;  Peugh,  Karen;  and  Rogovin,  Mark. 
Silhouette  Murals.  Chicago:  Public  Art  Workshop,  1976. 
Manual  on  how  to  do  an  important  form  of  murals. 

Rodriguez,  Patricia.  Selected  Readings  on  Chicano  Art.  Berkeley: 
Associated  Students,  University  of  California,  1977.  Re- 
printing of  many  articles  on  murals,  graffiti,  and  other  art, 
collected  for  a  university  course. 

Rogovin,  Mark;  Burton,  Marie;  and  Highfill,  Holly.  Edited  by 
Tim  Drescher.  Mural  Manual.  Boston:  Beacon  Press,  1975. 
Most  comprehensive  how-to-do-it  work. 

Schmidt-Brummer,  Horst.  Venice,  California:  An  Urban  Fan- 
tasy. New  York:  Grossman  Publishers,  1973.  Murals  figure 
in  this  photographic  study  of  the  town. 

,  and  Lee,  Feelie.  Die  bemalte  Stadt.  Cologne:  Verlag  M. 

Du.Mont  Schauberg,  1973.  Album  mainly  on  U.S.  murals 
but  with  examples  of  European  work. 

Sommer,  Robert.  Street  Art.  New  York:  Links  Books,  1975. 
Essay  and  photos  of  early  community  murals  and  impro- 
vised outdoor  sculpture. 
Sorell,  Victor  A.  Guide  to  Chicago  Murals:  Yesterday  and  Today. 
Chicago:   Chicago  Council  on   Fine  Arts,    1978.    Revised, 
1979.  New  Deal  and  recent  murals. 

2 .  A  rticles  and  Pamphlets  of  General  Interest 

"Artistic  Applications  of  CETA."  Oakland:  Alameda  County 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program,  1976  and  1977. 

Bamett,  Alan  W.  "Southern  Journey."  National  Murals  Network 
Community  Newsletter,  Fall,  1980,  pp.  22-32. 

Bloom,  Janet.  "Changing  WaWs."  Architectural  Forum  138,  no. 
4  (.May  1973):  20-27. 

Brunazzi,  Ceci.  "Portrait  of  a  .Muralist"  [Dewey  Crumpler]. 
Cowwo/7  5'ewf  (San  Francisco),  June  1975,  pp.  12-13. 

Castellanos,  Leonard.  "Chicano  Centros,  Murals,  and  Art." 
Arts  in  Society  12,  no.  1  (Spring-Summer,  1975):  38-43. 


497 


498  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


Cockcroft,  Eva,  ed.  "Walls  and  Other  Spaces— An  Alternative 
Art  World."  Special  supplement  with  articles  by  Tim 
Drescher,  Shifra  M.  Goldman,  and  Ann  Kronenberg. 
Artworkers  News  (New  York),  May  1980,  pp.  13-22.  Recent 
murals  throughout  the  nation. 

Cockcroft,  Eva  and  James.  "Cityarts  Workshop — People's  Art 
in  New  York  City."  Left  Curve,  no.  4  (Summer  1975),  pp. 
3-15. 

"People's  Art  and  Social  Change:  The  Community 


Mural  Movement."  Radical  America  12,  no.  2  (March-April 

1978):  7-14. 
Coffelt,    Beth.    "A   Transformation:    Chicano   Art,    Chicano 

Power:  A  Park  and  a  Bridge."  San  Diego  Magazine,  December 

1973. 
Drescher,  Tim.  "Our  History  Is  No  Mystery."  Common  Sense 

(San  Francisco),  July- August  1976,  pp.  1-18. 

Drescher,  Tim,  and  Garcia,  Rupert.  "Recent  Raza  Murals  in 
the  U.S."  Radical  America  12,  no.  2  (March-April  1978): 
15-32. 

Eda,  Eugene;  Walker,  William;  Weber,  John;  and  Rogovin, 
Mark.  The  Artists'  Statement.  "Murals  for  the  People"  exhibit. 
Museum  of  Contemporary  Art  (Chicago),  February-March 
1971.  Reprinted  by  the  Public  Art  Workshop  (Chicago). 

Garcia,  Rupert.  "The  Legacy  and  Significance  of  'Pulqueria 
Art.'  "El  Tecolote  (San  Francisco),  March  1977. 

Gardiner,  Henry  G.  "Painted  Exterior  Walls  of  Southern 
California."  C«rrfl«?  (San  Francisco),  June-July  1975,  16-23. 
(Corrected  in  Letter,  Currant  December,  1975-January 
1976,  pp.  6-7. 

Goldfarb,  Al.  "The  Los  Angeles  Mural  Phenomenon."  Parks 
&  Recreation  (Los  Angeles),  December  1975-January  1976, 
p.  9. 

Gregory,  Jules,  and  Lewis,  David.  "City  into  Art."  Process: 
Architecture,  no.  3  (1977).  The  entire  issue,  titled  "Commu- 
nity Design:  By  the  People,"  is  relevant. 

Holtz  Kay,  Jane.  "Artists  as  Social  Reformers."  Art  in  America, 
January-February  1969,  pp.  44-47. 

Horowitz,  Tem.  "Muralizing  in  Chicago."  Chicago  Express,  July 

19,  1972,  p.  5. 
Hoyt,    Roger,   "The   Explosion   of  a    Dormant   Art   Form: 

Chicago's  Murals."  Chicago  History,  Spring-Summer  1974, 

pp.  28-35. 

Kahn,  David.  "Chicano  Street  Murals:  People's  Art  in  the  East 
Los  Angeles  Barrio."  Aztldn  6,  no.  1  (Spring  1975):  3-8. 

King,  Alice  J.  "Omowale:  The  Black  Experience."  Ewewce,  July 
1973,  pp.  50-67.  Murals  of  Curtis  and  Royal  Barnes. 

Kobren,  Gerr,  and  Hutchins,  Paul.  "Hieronimus:  Bicenten- 
nial Muralist  and  Free  Spirit."  The  Sun  Magazine,  Baltimore 
Sun,  Juna23,  1974,  pp.  7-10. 

Kroll,  Eric.  "Folk  Art  in  the  Barrios."  Natural  History  82,  no.  5 
(May  1973):  56-65.  Reprinted  as  "Murals  in  New  Mexico," 
Artforum,  September  1973,  pp.  55-57. 


Kunz,  Thomas.  "The  Haight-Ashbury:  Culture  and  Commu- 
nity." Common  Sense  (San  Francisco),  May  1975,  p.  9. 

Lewis,  Samella.  "The  Street  Art  of  Black  America."  Exxon 
USA  12,  no.  3  (Third  Quarter,  1973),  pp.  2-9. 

McBride,  Steward  Dill.  "Mexican  American  Street  Gangs 
Take  Up  Brushes."  Christian  Science  Monitor,  October  28, 
1977,  pp.  15-18. 

Macdonald,  Douglas.  "Mural  Defended  on  Basis  of  Freedom 
of  Expression."  The  Brief  {Chicago:  American  Civil  Liberties 
Union)  28,  no.  5  (November  1974):  1. 

"Murals  over  America."  In  These  Times  (Chicago)  1,  no.  19 
(March  30-April  5,  1977):  11-15. 

"Object  Diversity."  Time,  April  6,  1970,  p.  80.  Black  murals  in 
Boston. 

"Painting  the  Town."  Life,  July  17,  1970,  pp.  60-63. 

Quirarte,  Jacinto.  "The  Murals  of  El  Barrio."  Exxon  USA  13, 
no.  4  (Fourth  Quarter,  1974):  2-9. 

Schoettler,  Carl.  "Painter  Finds  Images,  Themes  in  Ghetto 
Streets."  Baltimore  Evening  Sun,  (January  28,  1977),  p.  81. 
About  James  Voshell. 

Solorzano,  Julio.  "Pintando,  Las  Minorias  Ganan  la  Calle." 
Revista  de  Revistas,  Excelsior  {Mexico  City),  October  18,  1972, 
pp.  24-29. 

Sommer,  Robert.  "People's  Art."  Natural  History  80,  no.  2 
(February  1971):  40-45. 

Sorell,  Victor  A.  "Barrio  Murals  in  Chicago."  Revista  Cbicano- 
%«e»a  4,  no.  4  (Fall  1976). 

"Street  Art  Explosion."  5a»ye^,  April  1973,  pp.  110- 

Thompson,  Rich,  and  Alexander,  Ron.  "  'Public  Art' — The 
Aesthetics  of  the  People."  Drum  (Amherst:  University  of 
Massachusetts)  6,  no.  1  (Winter  1975):  19-24.  Interview 
with  Nelson  Stevens. 

Wagner,  Kathie,  and  Lujan,  Lori.  "Public  Works:  San  Fran- 
cisco." California  Living  Magazine,  San  Francisco  Sunday 
Examiner  &  Chronicle,  September  21,  1975,  pp.  26-33. 

.  "Public  Works:  Beyond  the  City."  California  Living 

Magazine,  San  Francisco  Sunday  Examiner  &  Chronicle,  Sep- 
tember 28,  1975,  pp.  26-35. 

"Wall  of  Respect."  £*o«jy,  December  1967,  pp.  48-50. 

Weber,  John.  "Chicago's  Wall  Paintings:  An  Artist  Sounds 
Off."  Panorama,  Chicago  Daily  News,  March  15-16,  1975,  p. 
17. 

.  "Community  Murals:  An  Update."  New  Art  Examiner 

(Chicago),  May  1978,  p.  7. 

'Murals  As  People's  Art."  Liberation  16,  no.  4  (Sep- 


tember 1971):  42^9. 

-.  "Two  Letters  on  Revolutionary  Art."  TRA  (Toward 


Revolutionary  Art),  no.  2  (1972),  pp.  7-14. 

'A    Wall    Mural    Belongs    to    Everybody."    Youth 


(Philadelphia)  23,  no.  9  (September  1972):  58-66. 

Zucker,  Martin.  "Walls  of  Barrio  Are  Brought  to  Life  by 
Street  Gung  An."  Smithsonian,  October  1978,  pp.  105-110. 


3.  Periodicals  Dealing  with  Murals  and  Community  Arts 

Arts  Biweekly  (formerly  Bicentennial  Arts  Biweekly).  San  Fran- 
cisco, 1975-77.  Continuing  coverage  of  murals  and  commu- 
nity arts  in  San  Francisco. 

Artworkers  News  (formerly  Art  Workers  Newsletter).  New  York, 
1970-.  Socially  conscious  analysis  of  local  and  national  art 
news. 

Bulletin  on  Federal  Economic  Programs  and  the  Arts,  Public  Alter- 
natives for  the  Arts  Project,  National  Endowment  for  the 
Arts,  1975-79.  Includes  news  of  federal  funding  for  murals. 

Intercom.  Newsletter  of  National  Center  for  Urban  Ethnic 
Affairs.  Frequent  information  about  funding  for  murals. 
Address:  1521  16th  St.  NW,  Washington,  DC  20036. 

National  Murals  Newsletter,  (NMN)  1977-.  Previously  published  in 
New  York  and  Chicago.  Currently:  Tim  Drescher,  P.  O.  Box 
40383,  San  Francisco,  CA  94140.  (Retitled  Community  Mural- 
ists' Magazine  in  1981). 

Off  the  Wall!  Newsletter  of  Cityarts  Workshop,  current.  Ad- 
dress: 417  Lafayette  St.,  New  York,  NY  10003. 

Recobrando.  Publication  of  Centro  de  la  Raza,  Seattle,  1978-. 
Address:  2524  16th  Ave.  So.,  Seattle,  WA  98144. 

4.  Checklists  of  Local  Murals 

Boston:  Public  Art  in  Open  Spaces.  Institute  of  Contemporary 
Art,  1968-74. 

Chicago:  Sorell,  Victor  A.  Guide  to  Chicago  Murals:  Yesterday  and 
Today.  Chicago  Council  on  Fine  Arts,  1978,  Revised,  1979. 
"Wall  Paintings  of  Chicago."  Amalgamated  Meat  Cutters 
and  Butcher  Workmen,  1973. 

Los  Angeles:  Comprehensive  mural  listings.  Social  and  Public 
Art  Resource  Center  (SPARC),  Venice,  Calif. 

New  York  and  New  Jersey:  "New  York-New  Jersey  Murals 
Listing,"  Cityarts  Workshop,  New  York. 

Philadelphia:  Listing,  1971-1978,  Environmental  Art  Pro- 
gram, Department  of  Community  Programs  (formerly,  De- 
partment of  Urban  Outreach),  Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art. 

San  Francisco:  Listings  maintained  by  Galena  de  la  Raza  for 

Mission  District  and  rest  of  city. 
Seattle:  Listing  maintained  by  Seattle  Arts  Commission. 


AESTHETICS,  CULTURE,  AND  SOCIAL 
HISTORY  OF  ART 

Almaraz,  Carlos.  "The  Artist  as  a  Revolutionary."  Cbismearte 
(Los  Angeles),  Fall  1976. 

Baxandall,  Lee,  ed.  Radical  Perspectives  in  the  Arts.  Baltimore: 
Penguin  Books,  1972.  Especially,  Baxandall's  essay,  "Spec- 
tacles and  Scenarios:  A  Dramaturgy  of  Radical  Activity," 
pp.  371-88. 


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Blum,  Paul  Von.  The  Art  of  Social  Consciousness.  New  York: 
Universe  Books,  1976. 

Berger,  John.  Ways  of  Seeing.  Baltimore:  Penguin  Books,  1973. 

.  The  Look  of  Things.  New  York:  Viking  Press,  1974. 

.  Permanent  Red.  London:  Writers  and  Readers  Pub- 
lishing Cooperative,  1979. 

Cassirer,  Ernst.  An  Essay  on  Man.  New  Haven:  Yale  University 
Press,  1964. 

Dewey,  John.  Art  as  Experience.  New  York:  Capricorn  Books, 
1958. 

Egbert,  Donald  Drew.  Social  Radicalism  and  the  Arts.  New 
York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1970. 

Dover,  Cedric.  American  Negro  Art.  Greenwich,  Conn:  New 
York  Graphic  Society,  1960.  Includes  chapter  on  muralists 
from  1930  to  1960. 

Finkelstein,  Sidney.  Realism  in  Art.  New  York:  International 
Publishers,  1958. 

Freire,  Paulo.  Education  for  Critical  Consciousness.  New  York: 
Seabury  Press,  1974. 

.  Pedagogy  of  the  Oppressed.   New  York:  Seabury  Press, 

1973. 

Gayle,  Addison  Jr.  The  Black  Aesthetic.  New  York:  Doubleday 
Anchor  Books,  1972. 

Gans,  Herbert  J.  Popular  Culture  and  High  Culture.  New  York: 
3asic  Books,  1974. 

luser,  Arnold.  The  Social  History  of  Art.  2  vols.  New  York: 
Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1951. 

Lang,  Berel,  and  Williams,  Forrest,  ed.  Marxism  and  Art: 
Writings  in  Aesthetics  and  Criticism.  New  York:  David  McKay 
Co.,  1972. 

Marcuse,  Herbert.  One-Dimensional  Man.  Boston:  Beacon 
Press,  1964. 

Popper,  Frank.  Art — Action  and  Participation.  New  York:  New 
York  University  Press,  1975. 

Read,  Herbert.  To  Hell  with  Culture.  New  York:  Schocken 
Books,  1964. 

Schapiro,  Meyer.  Modem  Art:  19th  and  20tb  Centuries.  New 
York:  George  Braziller,  1978. 

.  "Style."  \n  Aesthetics  Today,  ed.  .Morris  Philson.  New 

York:  Meridian  Books,  1961. 

Solomon,  Maynard,  ed.  Marxism  and  Art:  Essays  Classic  and 
Contemporary.  New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1974. 

Vizquez,  Adolfo  Sanchez.  Art  and-  Society.  New  York: 
Monthly  Review  Press,  1973. 

Williams,  Raymond.  Culture  and  Society.  New  York:  Harper 
Torchbooks,  1966. 

.  Keywords:  A  Vocabulary  of  Culture  and  Society.   New 

York:  Oxford  University  Press,  1976. 

.  The  Long  Revolution,  Baltimore:  Penguin  Books,  1973. 


500  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 


-.  Marxism  and  Literature.  New  York:  Oxford  University 


Press,  1977. 

EARLIER  U.S.  MURALS 

Bush,  Martin  H.  Ben  Shahn:  The  Passion  of  Sacco  and  Vanzetti, 
Syracuse,  N.Y.:  Syracuse  University,  1968. 

Chariot,  Jean.  Chariot  Murals  in  Georgia.  Athens:  University  of 
Georgia  Press,  1945. 

McKinzie,  Richard  D.  The  New  Deal  for  Artists.   Princeton, 
N.J.:  Princeton  University  Press,  1972. 

.Morse,  John  D.,  ed.  Ben  Shahn.  New  York:  Praeger  Publishers, 
1972. 

O'Connor,  Francis  V.,  ed.  Art  for  the  Millions.   Greenwich, 
Conn.:  New  York  Graphic  Society,  1973. 

.  Federal  Support  for  the  Visual  Arts:  The  New  Deal  and 

Now.  Greenwich,  Conn.:  New  York  Graphic  Society,  1971. 

-,  ed.  The  New  Deal  Art  Projects:  An  Anthology  of  Memoirs. 


Washington:  Smithsonian  Institution  Press,  1972. 

Quirarte,  Jacinto.  Mexican  American  Artists.  Austin:  University 
of  Texas  Press,  1973. 

Refregier,  Anton.  "Government  Sponsorship  of  the  Arts."  In 
Public  Ownership  in  the  U.S.A.  New  York:  Peace  Pub- 
lications, 1961.  Reprinted  by  Public  Art  Workshop, 
Chicago. 

Shahn,  Ben.  The  Shape  of  Content.  Cambridge,  Mass.:  Harvard 
University  Press,  1957. 

Shahn,  Bernarda  Bryson.  Ben  Shahn.  New  York:  Harry  N. 
Abrams,  1972. 

Shapiro,  David,  ed.  Art  for  the  People — New  Deal  Murals  on  Long 
Island.  Catalog  for  exhibit:  Emily  Lowe  Gallery,  Hofstra 
University,  Hempstead,  Long  Island,  New  York,  1978. 

,  ed.  Social  Realism:  Art  as  a  Weapon.  New  York:  Fred- 
erick Ungar  Publishing  Co.,  1973.  Articles  and  essays  by 
artists  and  critics. 

Snipper,  .Martin,  and  Koningsberg,  Joyce.  Survey  of  Art  Work 
in  the  City  and  County  of  San  Francisco.  San  Francisco:  Office 
of  the  .Mayor,  1975.  List  of  public  works  of  art  including 
murals. 

MEXICAN  MURALS  (1921-60) 

Arroyo,  Antonio  Luna.  Juan  O'Gorman,  Autobiografia,  An- 
tologia.  .  .  .  Mexico  City:  Cuadernos  Populares  de  Pintura 
Mexican  Moderna,  1973. 

Brenner,  JKniU.  Idols  behind  Altars.  Boston:  Beacon  Press,  1970. 

Chariot,  Jean.  The  Mexican  Mural  Renaissance  1920-25.  New 
Haven,  Conn.:  Yale  University  Press,  1967. 

Dickerson,  Albert  I.,  ed.  Orozco  Frescoes  at  Dartmouth. 
Hanover,  N.H.:  Dartmouth  Publications,  1962. 

Garcia,  Rupert.  "The  Mexican  Muralists  and  the  School  of 
Paris."  L</>  Curve,  no.  6,  pp.  4-21. 


Goldman,  Shifra  M.  Contemporary  Mexican  Painting  in  a  Time  of 
Change.  Austin:  University  of  Texas  Press,  1981. 

.  "Siqueiros  and  Three  Early  Murals  in  Los  Angeles." 

Art  Journal  33  (Summer  1974):  321-27. 

Helm,  .MacKinley.  Modem  Mexican  Painters.  New  York:  Dover 

Publications,  1974. 
Hurlburt,  Laurence.  "David  Alfaro  Siqueiros'  'Portrait  of  the 

Bourgeoisie.'  "  Artforum,  February  1977,  pp.  39—45. 
Kozloff,  Max.  "The  Rivera  Frescoes  of  .Modern  Industry  at  the 

Detroit  Institute  of  Art."  Artforum,   November  1973,  pp. 

58-63. 

Micheli,  .Mario  de.  Siqueiros.  New  York:  Harry  N.  Abrams, 

1968. 
Mural  Painting  of  the  Mexican  Revolution  1921-60.  Mexico  City: 

Fondo  Editorial  de  la  Plastica  Mexicana,  1960. 
Orozco,  Jose  Clemente.  An  Autobiography.  Austin:  University 

of  Texas  Press,  1962. 

Plenn,  Virginia  &  Jaime.  A  Guide  to  Modern  Mexican  Murals. 
Mexico  City:  Ediciones  Tolteca,  1963.  Descriptive  list  of 
most  murals  done  by  .Mexican  artists  in  Mexico  and  U.S. 

Reed,  Alma  M.  The  Mexican  Muralists.   New  York:  Crown 

Publishers,  1960. 
Rivera,  Diego,  My  Art,  My  Life.   New  York:  Citadel  Press, 

1960. 
Rodriguez,  Antonio.  A  History  of  Mexican  Mural  Painting.  New 

York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons,  1969. 

Siqueiros,  David  A.  Art  &  Revolution.  London:  Lawrence  and 

Wishart,  1975.  Essays. 
.    Como    Se    Pinta    Un    Mural.     Ciiernavaca:    Taller 

Siqueiros,  1977. 

Me  Llamaban  el  Coronelazo.   Mexico  City:  Biografias 


Gandesa,  1977.  Memoirs. 

Suarez,  Orlando  S.  Inventario  del  Muralismo  Mexicano  Sigh  VII  a 
de  C.  1968.  Mexico  City:  Universidad  Nacional  Autonoma 
de  Mexico,  1972. 

Wolfe,  Bertram  D.  The  Fabulous  Life  of  Diego  Rivera.  New  York: 
Stein  and  Day,  1969. 


ART  INSTITUTIONS  AND  FUNDING 

Baranik,  Rudolf,  et  al.  an  anti-catalog.  New  York:  The  Catalog 
Committee  of  Artists  Meeting  for  Cultural  Change,  1977. 
Written  in  protest  to  the  Bicentennial  exhibition  of  Ameri- 
can art  from  the  collection  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  John  D.  Rocke- 
feller 3rd. 

Bogart,  Beth.  "Taxpayers  Meet  Artists."  In  These  Times,  May 
23-29,  1979,  p.  23. 

Burnham,  Sophy.  The  Art  Crowd.  New  York:  David  McKay 
Co.,  1973. 


California  Arts  Council,  Announcements  of  "Community 
Arts,"  "Arts  in  Social  Institutions,"  "Alternatives  in  Educa- 
tion Grants,"  1975-76;  "Guide  to  Programs,  1977-78"; 
"Artists  in  Residence  in  Schools  and/or  Community  Or- 
ganizations, 1979-80."  Sacramento. 

Cultural  News  Service,  State  of  the  Arts  (Sacramento),  1977-78. 
This  was  an  independently  edited  periodical  funded  by  the 
state.  Proposition  1 3  put  an  end  to  it,  and  a  newsletter  by  the 
same  name  became  the  house  organ  of  the  California  Arts 
Council. 

Cameron,  Elsa.  "The  San  Francisco  Art  Commission's 
Neighborhood  Arts  Program."  Unpublished  MS,  1974. 

Cockcroft,  Eva.  "Art  Wars:  Community  Arts  Projects  Fight 
for  Federal  Funds."  Seven  Days,  February  23,  1979,  pp. 
27-28. 

Gallagher,  Nora;  McEldowney,  Ken;  Singer,  Michael;  and 
Weinstein,  Henry.  "Art  for  Harold's  Sake."  San  Francisco 
Bay  Guardian  10,  no.  8  (November  21-28,  1975):  6-10. 

Geracimos,  Ann,  and  Marzorati,  Gerald.  "The  Artocrats."/lr? 
in  America,  July-August  1978,  pp.  100-108. 

National  Endowment  for  the  Arts.  Annual  Reports.  Washing- 
ton, D.C.  1970-.  Details  of  grants. 

.  "Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places."  Visual  Arts  Pro- 
gram. Washington,  D.  C,  1970-1978.  List  of  grants. 

O'Doherty,  Brian.  "Public  Art  and  the  Government:  A  Prog- 
ress Report."  Art  in  America,  May-June  1974,  pp.  44—49. 

"San  Francisco's  Art  Bureaucracy  &  How  to  Change  It."  Arts 
Biweekly  (San  Francisco),  May  15,  1977,  pp.  1-3. 


WORK,  ART,  AND  APPROPRIATE 
TECHNOLOGY 

Aronowitz,  Stanley.  False  Promises.  New  York:  McGraw-Hill 
Book  Co.,  1973. 

Baldwin,  J.,  and  Brand,  Stewart.  Soft-Tech.  New  York:  Pen- 
guin Books,  1978. 

Benello,  C.  George,  and  Roussopoulos,  Dimitrios,  eds.  The 
Case  for  Participatory  Democracy.  New  York:  Grossman  Pub- 
lishers, 1971.  Articles  on  workers'  control. 

Boyle,  Godfrey,  and  Harper,  Peter.  Radical  Technology.  New 
York:  Pantheon  Books,  1976. 

Braverman,  Harry.  Labor  and  Monopoly  Capital.  New  York: 
Monthly  Review  Press,  1974.  Working  conditions  under 
capitalism. 

Coomaraswamy,  Ananda  K.  Christian  &  Oriental  Philosophy 
of  Art.  New  York:  Dover  Publications,  1956. 

Darrow,  Ken,  and  Pam,  Rick.  Appropriate  Technology  Source- 
book. Stanford,  Calif.:  Volunteers  in  Asia,  1977. 

Gorz,  Andre.  Strategy  for  Labor.  Boston:  Beacon  Press,  1968. 
Toward  workers'  control. 


Bibliography  I  501 

Hunnius,  Gerry;  Garson,  G.  David;  and  Case,  John,  eds. 
Workers'  Control,  a  Reader  on  Labor  and  Social  Change,  New 
York:  Vintage  Books,  1973. 

Illich,  Ivan.  Tools  for  Conviviality.  New  York:  Harper  &  Row, 
1973. 

The  Right  to  Useful  Unemployment  and  Its  Professional 


Enemies.  London:  Marion  Boyars,  1978. 

Jequier,  Nicolas.  Appropriate  Technology:  Problems  and  Promises. 
Stanford,  Calif:  Appropriate  Technology  Project,  Volun- 
teers in  Asia,  1976.  (Reprint  of  first  part  of  book  of  same 
title,  Paris:  Development  Centre  of  the  Organisation  for 
Economic  Co-Operation  and  Development,  1976.) 

Marx,  Karl.  "Alienated  Labour."  \r\  Early  Writings,  ed.  T.  B. 
Bottomore.  New  York:  .McGraw-Hill  Book  Co.,  1964,  pp. 
120-34. 

.  Communist  Manifesto,  1848. 


Morris,  David,  and  Hess,  Karl.  Neighborhood  Power.  Boston: 
Beacon,  1975. 

Morris,  William.  "The  Lesser  Arts,"  "Art  under  Plutocracy," 
"Useful  Work  versus  Useless  Toil,"  and  "Art  and 
Socialism."  In  Political  Writings  of  William  Morris,  ed.  A.  L. 
.Morton.  New  York:  International  Publishers,  1973. 

Mumford,  Lewis.  Art  &  Technics.  New  York:  Columbia  Uni- 
versity Press,  1960. 

.  The  Pentagon  of  Power.    New  York:  Harcourt  Brace 

Jovanovich,  1970. 

.  Technics  and  Civilization.  New  York:  Harcourt,  Brace 


&  World,  1963. 

.  Technics  and  Human  Development .  New  York:  Harcourt 

Brace  Jovanovich ,  1 967 . 

Read,  Herbert.  Art  &  Industry.   Bloomington:  Indiana  Uni- 
versity Press,  1961. 

Schumacher,  E.  F.  Small  Is  Beautiful.   New  York:  Harper  & 
Row,  1973. 

Special  Task  Force  to  the  Secretary  of  Health,  Education,  and 
Welfare.  Work  in  America.  Cambridge:  MIT  Press,  1973. 

Terkel,  Studs.  Working.  New  York:  Avon,  1974. 

Turner,  John  F.  C.  Housing  by  People,  New  York:  Pantheon 

Books,  1976. 
and  Fichter,  Robert,  eds.  Freedom  to  Build.  New  York: 

Macmillan  Co.,  1972. 


SOCIAL  ANALYSIS  AND  COMMUNITY 
ORGANIZING 

Arendt,  Hannah.  Crisis  of  the  Republic.  New  York:  Harcourt 

Brace  Jovanovich,  1972. 
.  The  Human  Condition.  Chicago:  University  of  Chicago 

Press,  1958. 
: — .  On  Revolution.  New  York:  Viking  Press,  1963. 


502  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Beagle,  Danny;  Haber,  Al;  and  Wellman,  David.  "Turf  Power 
and  the  Tax  Man."  Leviathan  (San  Francisco  and  New 
York),  April  1969,  pp.  26-33.  Urban  renewal  and  the  limits 
of  community  control. 

Bergman,  Lincoln,  et  al.  Puerto  Rico:  The  Flame  of  Resistance. 

San  Francisco:  People's  Press,  1977. 
Brugmann,  Bruce,  and  Ristow,  William.  "Stop  the  Highrise 

WAAntss.^'  San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian,  October  17-26,  1979. 

(Series  of  articles.) 

Brugmann,  Bruce,  and  Sletteland,  Greggar,  eds.  The  Ultimate 
Highrise;  San  Francisco's  Mad  Rush  toward  the  Sky.  San  Fran- 
cisco: San  Francisco  Bay  Guardian  Books,  1971. 

Buber,  Martin.  /  and  Thou.  New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons,  1970. 

.  Paths  in  Utopia.  Boston:  Beacon  Press,  1958. 

Camus,  Albert.  The  Plague.  New  York:  Modern  Library,  1948. 

Carmichael,  Stokely,  and  Hamilton,  Charles  V.  Black  Power. 
New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1967. 

Carranza,  Eliu.  Pensamientos:  On  Los  Chicanos:  A  Cultural  Revo- 
lution. Berkeley;  California  Book  Co.,  1969. 

Commoner,  Barry.  The  Poverty  of  Power.  New  York:  Bantam 
Books,  1977. 

"Community  Program  for  Change  in  San  Francisco."  Positions 
adopted  at  the  June  1975,  San  Francisco  Community  Con- 
gress. 

Domhoff,  G.  William.  Who  Rules  America?  Englewood  Cliffs, 

N.J.:  Prentice-Hall,  Inc.,  1967. 
Dowd,  Douglas  F.  The  Twisted  Dream.  Cambridge:  Winthrop 

Publishers,  1974. 

Fromm,  Erich.  The  Sane  Society.  London:  Routledge  &  Kegan 
Paul,  1956. 

Gettleman,  .Marvin  E.,  and  Mermelstein,  David.  The  Failure  of 
American  Liberalism:  After  the  Great  Society.  New  York:  Vin- 
tage Books,  1971. 

G<x)dman,  .Mitchell,  ed.  The  Movement  toward  a  New  America. 
New  York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  Inc.  1970. 

Goodman,    Paul.   Growing  Up  Absurd.    New   York:    Vintage 

Books,  1960. 
.  New  Reformation:  Notes  of  a  Neolithic  Conservative.  New 

York:  Random  House,  1970. 

.  People  or  Personnel  and  Like  a  Conquered  Province.  New 

York:  Vintage  Books,  1968. 

Goodman,  Paul  and  Percival.  Communitas.  New  York:  Vintage 

B(K)ks,  1960. 
Hartman,  Chester.   Yerba  Buena:  Land  Grab  and  Community 

Resistance  in  San  Francisco.  Berkeley:  National  Housing  and 

Economic  Development  Law  Project,   Earl  Warren  Legal 

Institute,  University  of  California,  1974. 

Heins,  .Marjoric.  Strictly  Ghetto  Property.  Berkeley:  Ramparts 
Press,  1972.  I>os  Siete  de  la  Raza  and  the  Mission  District  of 
San  Francisco. 


Jacobs,  Jane.  Death  and  Life  of  Great  American  Cities.  New  York: 
Vintage  Books,  1961. 

Jacobs,  Paul,  and  Landau,  Saul.  The  New  Radicals.  New  York: 
Vintage  Books,  1966. 

Kotler,     .Milton.    Neighborhood    Government.     Indianapolis: 
Bobbs-.MerrillCo.,  1969. 

Kramer,  Ralph  .M.  Participation  of  the  Poor.  Englewood  Cliffs, 
N.J.:  Prentice-Hall,  1969. 

Kropotkin,   Petr.  Mutual  Aid.    Boston:  Extending  Horizons 
Books,  undated.  (Originally  published  in  London,  1902.) 

Malcolm  X.  Autobiography  of  Malcolm  X.   New  York:  Grove 
Press,  1966. 

.  By  Any  Means  Necessary:  Speeches,  Interviews  and  a  Letter. 

Edited  by  George  Breitman.  New  York:  Pathfinder  Press, 
1970. 

.  Malcolm  X  on  Afro-American  History.  Edited  by  George 


Breitman.  New  York:  Pathfinder  Press,  1970. 

.McBride,  Stewart  Dill.  "A  Nation  of  Neighborhoods."  Chris- 
tian Science  Monitor.  (Series  of  twelve  articles  on  the  "new 
localism,"  in  Friday  issues,  September  9-November  18,  and 
December  23,  1977.) 

Mollenkopf,  John  H.  "The  Fragile  Giant:  The  Crisis  of  the 
Public  Sector  in  American  Cities."  Socialist  Revolution, 
July-September  1976,  pp.  11-38. 

"The  Port  Huron  Statement."  Drafted  by  Tom  Hayden  and 
adopted  by  the  Students  for  Democratic  Society,  1962. 

Rendon,  Armando  B.  Chicano  Manifesto.  New  York:  Collier 
Books,  1971. 

Report  of  the  National  Advisory  Commission  on  Civil  Disorders 
("Kerner  Report").  New  York:  Bantam  Press,  1968. 

"Special  Issue  on  Organizing  Neighborhoods."  Social  Policy^ 
September-October  1979. 

"Special  Self-Help  Issue."  Social  Policy,  September-October 
1976.  (Includes  Janice  E.  Perlman,  "Grassrooting  the  Sys- 
tem.") 

Wirt,  Frederick  M.  Power  in  the  City:  Decision  Making  in  San 
Francisco.  Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,  1974. 


CONTEMPORARY  COMMUNITY  MURALS 
ABROAD 

1.  Books 

Art  for  Whom?  London:  Arts  Council  of  Great  Britain,  1978. 
Statements  by  artists  and  selector  of  exhibition  at  Serpentine 
Gallery,  including  David  Binnington,  Desmond  Rochfort, 
and  Richard  Cork. 

Braden,  Su.  Artists  and  People.  London:  Routledge  &  Kegan 
Paul,  1978.  Murals  play  a  large  role  in  this  study  of  commu- 
nity art  in  Great  Britain  during  the  sixties  and  seventies. 


Cooper,  Graham,  and  Sargent,  Doug.  Painting  the  Town.  New 
York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.,  1979.  Color  photo.s  with  brief 
commentary  on  current  British  community  murals. 

Harding,  David.  Artists  and  Buildings.  Edinburgh:  Scottish 
Arts  Council,  1977.  Booklet  on  relation  of  murals  to  archi- 
tecture in  Europe  and  the  U.S. 

.  Glenrothes  Town  Artist.  Glenrothes,  Scotland:  Glen- 
rothes Development  Corporation,  1975.  Booklet  about 
Harding's  experience  as  town  artist  doing  murals  and 
sculpture. 

Peasant  Paintings  from  Huhsien  County.  Peking:  Foreign  Lan- 
guage Press,  1974. 

Roodnat,  Bas.  Wij  Zun  Gek:  Nederlandse  Straatkunst  in  dejaren 
Zeventig.  Baarn,  Netherlands:  Erven  Thomas  Rap,  1977. 
Street  murals,  graffiti,  and  sculpture  in  the  Netherlands 
during  the  seventies. 

2.  Articles 

Barnett  Alan  W.  "Jose  Hernandez  Delgadillo:  The  New  Art  of 
the  Mexican  Revolution."  Praxis  4(1978),  pp.  268-82. 

.  "The  Resurgence  of  Political  Art  in  .Mexico?"  San  Jose 

Studies  (San  ]ose  State  University),  May  1976,  pp.  5-30. 

Cockcroft,  Eva  and  James.  "Murals  for  the  People  of  Chile." 
TRA  (Toward  Revolutionary  Art),  no.  4  (1973),  pp.  2-11. 

Cork,  Richard.  "Painting  Goes  Public."  New  Society  (London), 
August  25,  1977,  pp.  398-99. 


Bibliography  /  503 
Kunzle,  David.  "Art  in  Chile's  Revolutionary  Process:  Guer- 
rilla .Muralist  Brigades."  New  World  Review  41,  no.  3  (1973): 
42-53. 

.    "Uses   of  the    Portrait:    The   Che   Poster."  Art  in 


America,  September-October  1975. 
Li  Feng-Lan,  "How  I  Began  to  Paint  the  Countryside."  China 
Reconstructs  (Peking),  January  1974,  pp.   17-23.  Also,  New 
China  (New  York),  Spring  1978,  p.  20. 

"The  Peasant  Painters  of  Huhsien."  New  China  (New  York), 
Spring  1978,  pp.  17-33. 

"The  State  of  British  Art."  Studio  International  (London)  194, 
no.  989  (February  1978).  Edited  transcript  of  debate  of 
artists  and  art  professionals  held  at  the  Institute  of  Contem- 
porary Arts,  London,  February  10-12,  1978. 

Walters,  Ian.  "The  Royal  Oak  Murals."  Artery  14  (Spring 
1978):  17-23.  Interview  with  Desmond  Rochfort  and  David 
Binnington. 

3.  Checklists 

England:  List  prepared  by  Greenwich  Mural  Workshop  and 
distributed  through  Arts  Council  of  Great  Britain.  Address: 
105  Piccadilly,  London,  Wl. 

"Murals  in  Tower  Hamlets,"  distributed  through  Whitechapel 
Art  Gallery.  Address:  80  Whitechapel  High  Street,  London 
El. 


MURAL  WORKSHOPS, 
RESOURCE  CENTERS,  AND 
CONTACTS  ACTIVE  IN  1980 


UNITED  STATES  Los  Angeles: 

SPARC  (Social  and  Public  Art  Resource  Center),  685 

^^Ijjj^jg.  Venice  Blvd.,  Venice,  CA  90291. 

Neighborhood  Arts  Center,  252  Georgia  Ave.   SW,  Goe^  Gallery,   3757  E.   First  St.,  Los  Angeles,  CA 

Atlanta,  GA  30312  ^0063.                                                ^            ,    o       x 

y^ygjjj^.  Watts  Towers  Arts  Center,   1727  E.   107th  St.,  Los 

CentroCulturaldeLucha,  715  E.  First  St.,  Austin,  TX  Angeles,  C A  90002. 

ygyQj  Brockman  Gallery  Productions,  4334  Degnan  Bl.,  Los 

Inter  Art  Works,  309  E.  4th  St.,  Austin,  TX  78701.  Angeles,  CA  90008. 

Baltimore-  Memphis: 

Mayor's   Advisory  Committee  on  Art  and  Culture,  Art   Dept.,   Shelby   State  Community   College,   737 

Baltimore  Arts  Tower,  21  S.  Eutaw  St.,  Baltimore,  Union  Ave.,  Memphis,  TN  38107. 

MD  21201.  New  York: 

AUM    Center    (Robert    Hieronimus),    4801    Yellow  Cityarts  Workshop,  417   Lafayette  St.,   New  York, 

Wood  Ave.,  Baltimore,  .MD  21209.  New  York  10003. 

Berkeley:  Philadelphia: 

Commonarts,  22 18  Action  St.,  Berkeley,  CA  94702.  Environmental  Art  Program,  Department  of  Commu- 

Boston:  "'ty  Programs,  Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art,  P.O. 

Mayor's  Office  of  Cultural  Affairs,  City  Hall,  Boston,  Box  7646,  Philadelphia,  PA  19101. 

VIA  02201.  Portland: 

Institute   of  Contemporary   Art,  .955    Boylston   St.,  Albina  Mural  Project,  c/o Isaac  ShamsudT)in,  4550  N. 

Boston    MA  02115.  Mississippi  Ave.,  Portland,  OR  97217. 

Chicago:  Sacramento: 

Public  Art  Workshop,  5623  W.  Madison  St.,  Chicago,  Rebel    Chicano    Art    Front,    Graphics    and    Design 

IL  60644.  Center,  2906  Franklin,  Sacramento,  CA  95818. 

Chicago    .Mural    Group,    2261     N.     Lincoln    Ave.,  San  Antonio: 

Chicago,  I L  60614.  Community  Cultural  Arts  Organization,  P.  O.  Box 

Fresno:          '  7917,  San  Antonio,  TX  78207. 

La  Brocha   Del  Valle,   Suite   103,   3164  N.   Marks,  San  Diego: 

Fresno,  CA.  Chicano    Park    Steering   Committee,    1960    National 

Houston:  Ave.,  San  Diego,  (^A  921 13. 

Art  Dept.  Texas  Southern  University,  3201  Cleburne,  Centro  Cultural  de  la  Raza,  Balboa  Park,  P.  O.  Box 

Houston,  TX  77004.  8251,  San  Diego,  CA  92102. 

504 


Mural  Workshops,  Resource  Centers,  and  Contacts  I  505 

Galeria  de  la  Raza,  2851  24th  St.,  San  Francisco,  CA  ENGLAND 

94110.  London- 
Mural   Resource  Center,   South  of  Market  Cultural  r>            •  u  v*       i  n;     ■   u        -.r,  ..•           ■      ^,      . 
Center,  934  Brannan  St.,  San  Francisco.  Greenwich  .Mural  Workshop,  78  Kmveachy  Gardens, 
c      T  Charlton,  London  SE  7. 
oan  lose:  ,,,      ,           ,    . .       ,.,,,, 

El  Centro  Cultural  de  la  Gente,  2050  Kamera  Ave.,  ^^'^'''^w  «              ^"''kshop,  69  Condell  Rd.,  Lon- 

c      T         /^A  don,  SW  8. 

San  Jose,  CA.  r-            r^     ^       r^             •       . 

ra  Rai-hara  Covent  Garden  Community  Association,  45   Shorts 


Santa  Barbara: 

Casa  de  la  Raza,  601  E.  .Montecito,  Santa  Barbara,         a^^   /-  i    fr^      »d  •    •      lor  n-       ju      i 

CA93103  Arts  Council  of  Great  Britain,  105  Piccadilly,  London 

Seattle: 


Gardens,  London  WC  2. 

rts  C( 

Wl. 


Centro  de  la  Raza,  2524  16th  Ave.  South,  Seattle,  WA  SCOTI  AND 

Daybreak  Star  Arts  Center,   United  Indians  of  All     irj„K       u. 

Tribes   Foundation,    Seattle,    WA   98199  (in    Dis-        r-  -ii      r-      •     i  c     •         <-  •      ^ 

cov  r    P    k)  Craigmillar  Festival  Society,  Community  Centre,  63 

XT  •   1  .  ^  ujA^n  c        lA         r^  Niddrie  Mains,  Terrace  Fxlinburgh  16. 

Neighborhood  Arts  Program,  Seattle  Arts  Commis-    Glenrothes- 

sion,  305  Harrison  St.,  Seattle,  WA  98109.  r-i^.,..  .^i,„     r»      i  »    /-  •         r>i  u 

tjlenrothes    Development    Corporation,    Glenrothes, 

CANADA  ^'^^ 

Vancouver: 

Social  Planning  Department,  City  Hall,  453  W.  12th 
Ave.,  Vancouver,  BC,  Canada  V5Y  1V4. 


INDEX 

Page  numbers  in  italics  indicate  illustrations. 


Abelman,  Hans,  481,  482 

Abstract  Expressionism,  23 

Academic  murals,  29ff,  33 

Acevedo,  Mario  "Torero,"  107,  136,  155,  159f,  293 

Ackerly  Communications  (Seattle  and  Portland),  298,  308 

ACORN.  See  Association  of  Community  Organizations  for  Reform 

Now 
Activism  and  commitment  of  muralists,  242,  343,  345ff,  366,  376ff 
Adame,  Felipe,  293 

Adams-.Morgan  mural  (Washington,  D.C.),  324,  383 
Adelita  (Lx)s  Angeles),  283,  284 
Aeronaves  de  Aztldn  (Sacramento),  207 
Aesthetics,  17f,  383ff,  387f 
Africa  Is  The  Beginning  (Boston),  79 
African  (West  and  Central)  motifs  in  murals,  53,  54,  55,  56,  57,  82, 

83,  84,  86,  87,  117,  118,  119,  254,  255,  258,  326,  329,  334,  335, 

338,  393,  394,  395 
Afro- American  Historical  Society  mural  (San  F"rancisco),  254,  255 
Afro-American  history  panel  (Portland),  305,  307 
Afro-American  Unity  (Cleveland),  326 
Afro-Occidental  frojections  (Miami),  326 
Against  Domestic  Colonialism  (New  York),  lOOi,  403,  473 
Aguayo,  Kmilio,  3()1 

Albin'a  Mural  Project  (Portland),  303,  304,  306,  307i 
Albizu  Campos,  Don  Pedro,  6 If,  89,  93 
Albuquerque  High  School  mural,  311,  312 
Alewives  and  Mercury  /•'«/>  (C'hicago),  230f,  232,  233 
Alice's  Restaurant  mural  (L.)s  Angeles),  181,  183 
Aliseo,  Eddie,  319f,  342 
All  American  City  (Baltimore),  323 
All  Power  to  the  People  (Chicago),  59,  60 
Allende  mural  (Piscatawav,  N.J.),  212f,  214 
Alley-Barnes,  Roval,  116!  117,  118( 
Almaraz,  Carlos, 'l79ff,  182,  222,  283,  284,  381  n.  11,  400 
Alonzo,  Ricardo,  205 
Alston,  Charles,  24,  101 
Alurista,  Alberto,  64 

Alvarado  School  mosaic  mural  (San  Francisco),  119,  120,  121,  131 
Alvarado  School  painted  mural  (San  Francisco),  1 20,  122 
Alvarez,  John,  185 
Alvarez,  Marcia,  288f,  290 

Amalgamated  Meat  (Gutters  and  Butcher  Workmen  (Chicago),  7 
American  (^ivil  Liberties  Union  (A(]LU),  432 
America's  Bicentennial  (Baltimore),  237 
Anarchists  and  art  (Canada),  478f,  480 
Anti-Drug  Abuse  Mural  (New  York),  98 
Apocalypse  Mural  (Baltimore),  75,362 


Appropriate  technology,  8,  19,  20  n. 9,  56,  73,  162,  322,  343,  464ff 

Arai,  Tomie,  11,  219,20,  318,  i/9,J2/,  342,  345,360 

Aranda,  Guillermo,  106{,  108i,  159f,  161,  165,  237,  399f 

Arenal,  Luis,  474 

Arenivar,  Robert,  71,  179,  180,  417 

Arise  From  Oppression  (New  York),  99f,  218,  352,  365,  391 

Arnautoff,  Victor,  150 

Art  and  Society  (Amsterdam),  48 1 

Art,  concepts  of,  18,  384,  452 

Art  in  Public  Buildings  (Californai),  430f 

Art,  reintegration  with  work  and  community,  8,  17ff,  227f,  322,  347, 

383ff,  385ff,  398,  406,  467ff,  476ff,  482 
Art  Workers  Coalition  (New  York),  425 
Art  Workers  Coalition  (San  Francisco),  425 
Arte  Acd  (Mexico  City),  474 
Los  Artes  Guadalupa'nos  de  Aztlin,  65,  115,  116,  192,  193,  194,  310, 

365,  379,  389,  399,  403,  405f,  466 
Asawa,  Ruth,  120ff 
Asian-American  mural  themes  and  styles,  11,  94f,  97,  98f,  151,  152i, 

176,  177,  203,  204,  210,  218{,  il9,' 320,  321 
Association    of    Community     Organizations     for     Reform     Now 

(ACORN),  468 
Augttsto  Sandino  walking  mural  (San  Francisco),  249,  250 
Avant-garde  art  and  murals,  35,  40f,  452ff 
"Avoid  Junk  P'ood"  (San  Francisco),  243 
Aztldn,  64f,  134,  237 

Baca,  Judy,  14,  16,  38,  109f,  131,  173,  174,  175,  176,  177,  230,  236, 
241,  279f,  281,  282,  286,  287i,  291,  343,  353,  354,  362,  365f,  379, 
417f,  419,  421,  427,  434,  438,  474 

Bach,  Penny,  323,413 

Balaciosos,  Rosalinda,  164,  165,  166 

Balines,  Jos6,  479 

Balmy  Alley  murals  (San  Francisco),  133,  134,  135,  136,  262 

Bank  of  America  mural  (San  Francisco),  141f,  143,  144,  387,  399, 
435f 

Bircenas,  Jorge,  329,  332 

Barnes,  Brian,  486,  487,  488 

Barnes,  Curtis,  116,  117,  118i 

Barnett,  Alan,  366f,  368ii,  371,  372,  373 

Bar6n,  Carlos,  324,  382,  383 

Baroque  design  in  murals,  389,  402,  405f 

Barrie,  Don,  298 

BART  mural  (San  Francisco),  146,  147{{,  242 

Battersea,  the  Good  the  Bad  and  the  Ugly  (London),  486,  487,  488 

Battle,  William,  15,  103,  395 

Battle  of  Cable  Street  design  (London),  491,  493 


506 


Index  I  507 


Beardon,  Romare,  395f,  423 

The  Beauty  of  Our  People  Is  Our  Culture  (Los  Angeles),  287,  288 

"Beautiful  Walls  for  Baltimore,"  (BWB),  206,  207,  208,  322f,  345, 

413,422 
Bejerano,  Bill,  172 

Belkin,  Arnold,  17,  26,  lOOf,  273,  4()3,  474f,  476 
Bellavoine,  Anne  Margaret,  487,  489 
Bemalte  Stadt,  8 
Bend,  John,  30,  ii,  71 
Bergman,  Miranda,  43,  131,  153,  154,  ISS,  245,  246i,  248,  Ul,  264, 

342,416 
Bernal,  Antonio,  66,  67{,  111 

Bernal  Housing  mural  (San  Francisco),  258,  259,  260 
Beverly  Hills  Siddhortha  (Los  Anseles).  237.  454.  455 
Bicentennial  murals,  240,  242ff,  342,  366ff,  432 
Bicentennial  Murals  (Mmti  Co.,  Calif.),  243,  244 
Biddle,  Jr.,  Livingston,  425,  438 
Big  Art,  8 

Biggers,  John,  24,  25 
Billboard  murals,  242,  243 
Billboards,  26,  4() 
Binnington,  David,  490,  491,  493i 
The  Birth  of  Our  Art  (Los  Angeles),  70,  71 

Black  Light  Explosion  murals  (San  Francisco),  123,  124,  125,  424 
Black  Love  (Chicago),  86,  88,  344,  389,  396f 
Black  Man's  Dilemma  (Chicago),  84i 
Black  Panthers,  45,  59f,  72,  76  n.29,  79,  1(H,  340 
Black  Power  and  Pride,  44,  48ff,  63,  75,  86,  98,  122,  131,  222,  229, 

369,  374f,  410 
Black  Women  Emerging  (Chicago),  338,  339,  342 
Black  Women  of  America  Today  (New  York),  98,  99 
Black  Women  or  Racism  (Chicago),  82,  84 
Black  Wor/^fr  (Boston),  13,  14,  111,,  387 
Blacks  from  Egypt  to  Now  (San  Francisco),  25Si,  342 
Blind  Justice  (U^s  Angeles),  185,  187 
Bloom,  Gary,  103,  104 
Bloomin'  Covent  Garden  (London),  487,  489 
Boca,  Walter,  194 
Bonnett,  Wilma,  61 

Book's  Memory  (Santa  Barbara),  1 13,  114 
Bored  of  Education  (Chicago),  85 
Boston,  Mavor's  Office  of  Cultural  Affairs,  428 
Botello,  David,  71,  167,  168,  179,  180,  181,  283,  284,  285i,  417 
Boyle,  Jimmy,  493f 
Braden,  Su,  494 

Bradford,  David,  50,  62i,  257,  258,  342,  395,  466 
Bradlev,  David,  311 
Bravo,'joe,  286,  287,  290i,  343 

Break  the  Grip  of  the  Absentee  Landlord  (Chicago),  11,  199,  405 
Breeze,  Camille,  123,  124,  255,  256 
Brice,  Bruce,  104,  105 

Brigada  Luis  Corvalan  (Netherlands),  479,  481 
Brigada  Orlando  Letelier  (U.S.),  263,  264,  479 
Brigada  Ramona  Parra  (Chile),  59,  212,  479 
British  Arts  Council,  491 
Brocha  del  Valle,  Fresno,  297,  298 
Brockman  Gallery  (Los  Angeles),  187,  424 
Brooks,  Gwendolyn,  52f,  82 
Brooks  St.  Painting  (Venice,  Calif.),  34 
Brown,James,  95,95f,  405 
Brown,  Jr.,  Edmund  G.  ()errv),  429f,  441  n.ll5 
Brown,  Selma,  43,  154,  155 
Brown  Berets,  67ff,  72,  89,  107,  127 

Brown  Power  and  Pride,  44,  72,  75,  106,  131,  164,  222,  229 
Bruner,  Barrv,  225,  226,  339,  344,  359 
Bryan,  M.  T.,222 
Burciaga,  Gilberto,  27 3f 
Burton,  Marie,  8,  85{ 
Butler,  Bill,  111,  112,  113,401 


BWB  see  "Beautiful  Walls  for  Baltimore" 
Byrne,  John,  483 

Cabrillo  Village  mural  (Saticov,  Calif.),  298,  299 

Cagri,  Behan,  263,  264 

Caigoy,  Faustino,  177,  178 

California  Arts  Council  (formerly  Art  Commission),  418f,  430,  437f, 

460 
California  Coalition  de  .Artistas,  240 
Callejo,  Carlos,  185,  187 
Cambern,  Wayne,  208,  209,  345,  346 
Campusano,  Jesus  "Chuv",  126,  127,  128,  129,  130(,  141f,  143,  144, 

145,  273,  398,  400,  406,  414,  435,  474 
Cardboard  Eront  (Sausalito,  Calif.),  274 
Cdrdenas,  Rogelio,  265,  267,  268,  402 

Carlo's  Transmission  Service  mural  (San  Rafael,  (^alif.),  229,  387 
Carmichael,  Stokely,  49ff 
Camalismo,  65,  375f 

Carnegie  Library  Construction  Fence  mural  (Vancouver,  B.C;.),  479 
Carranza,  Eliu,  65 
Carrillo,  Graciela,  134,  136,  137,  138,  139,  155,  245,  258,  259,  260, 

310,  i//,  342,  i6/,  476 
Cartoon  styles  in  murals,  14,  16,  22,  24,  80,  81,  123f,  126,  127,  181, 

182,  183,  184,  185,  404 
Caruso-Green,  Susan,  13,  98ff,  352,  410,  437f 
Casa  Aztlan  (Chicago),  89ff,  205,  222f,  329,  330,  378,  4(M),  412,  422 
Casa  de  la  Raza  (Santa  Barbara),  1 1 3 
Cashman,  David,  483,  485 

Cassiano  Homes  murals  (San  .Antonio),  313f,  315 
"Cast  Down  Your  buckets  Where  \'ou  .Are"  (Houston),  25 
Castaneda,  Tomas  "Coyote,"  136,  159ff,  162 
Castellon,  Rolando,  123f,  413f 
Castillo,  Mario,  68,  69,  70,  89,  205 
Castro,  Rene,  263,  264 
Caton,  Mitchell,  79,  80,  86,  87(,  131,  199,  200,  205,  334,  335,  339, 

340,  342,  344,  360,  364,  390,  392ff,  395,  405,  433 
Causa,  La  (Chicago),  92 

Causa,  La/ Peace,  Love  and  Perfection  (Oakland),  61 
Cave  murals,  18,  }S},384f 
Cazarez,  Ismael,  171(,  185,  186 
Celebration  in  Central  Park  (New  ^'ork),  320 
Censorship,  23,  97f,  148,  345f,  43 Iff 
Centennial  Vision  (Tuskegee),  326,  327 
Central  Lakeview  Tapestry  ((Chicago),  334,  335 
Centro  Cultural  de  la  Raza  (San  Diego),  107,  159,  237,  399,  41 6( 
Centro  de  .Artistas  Chicanos  (Sacramento),  163,  409 
Centro  de  la  Raza  (Seattle),  299,  300,  399 
Centro  de  la  Raza  mural  (Seattle),  300 
Centro  Para  Justicia  (Denver),  64,  69 
Cervantes,  Juan,  276,  277 

Cervantes,  Susan,  133,  134,  137,  155,  259,  26H,  342,  363,  416,  434 
CETA.  See  Comprehensive  Employment  and  Training  .Act 
Chandler,  Dana,  13,  14,  17,  57,  58^59,  78,  79,  86,  95,  220,  364,  387f, 

405,  410 
Charbit,  Esther,  334,  335 
Chavez,  Cesar,  44,  64,  66,  (57,  89,  113,  141,  159, /60,  222f,  298,  iW, 

372,  435 
Chavez,  Robert,  167,  168,  181f,  183,  184,  4(K) 
Chester,  Perci,  120f,  122,  155,  156 
Chi  Lai-Arriba-Rise  Up!  (New  York),  319,  358,  359 
Chicago  .\lural  Group  (C,\1G),  80,  88,  132,  200,  201,  202,  203,  204i, 
224,  225,  226,  227,  231,  235,  333,'334,  335(,  337,  338,  339,  345, 

352f,  356,  364f,  378,  386,  402,  404,  41  If,  422,  424,  427,  433 
Chicano  Cultural  Revolution,  63ff 
Chicano  History  (Los  .Angeles),  72 
Chicano  Moratorium  72,  164,  241 
Chicano  Moratorium  (Los  Angeles),  172,  173,  288 
Chicano  Park  (San  Diego),  107,  159,  160,  161,  162,  165,  166,  292(, 
296{,  342f,  360,  366,  379,  402f,  416f,  422,  434,  466 


508  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Chkuno  Park  Stoiy  (San  Diego),  293,  294 

Chkano  Time  Trip  (iMf.  Angeles),  283,  2S4 

Chicanos,  social  conditions,  63ff 

Chilean  murals,  59,  2/2f,  214,  263,  479,  481,  482,  486 

Chin,  Michael,  415 

C;hina,  People's  Republic  of,  art  in,  262,  476tY 

(;;hina  B(X)ks  mural  (San  Francisco),  262,  343,  J6J 

Chinato'ivn  Today  (Nev\  York),  12,  344 

Chiquita  Flowers  (Ixts  Angeles),  26,  28 

C^hirlton,  Sondra,  I49( 

C:id,  Armando,  163,  274,  275t',  402 

Citvarts  Workshop  (New  York),  11,  /2,  98,  99,  100,  215,  217,  218, 

219,  220,  221,  2.?,;,  234,  24()f,  316,  318,  319,  320,  321,  342ff,  345, 

352,  357,  358{,  365,  410,  422,  424,  428f,  434,  473,  476 
City  Terrace  Park  mural  (Los  Angeles),  /// 
C:ity  Walls  (New  York),  36,  37i,  298,  452,  453 
Citvwide  Mural  Project  (Denver),  309 
Citvwide  Mural  Project  (1^)S  Angeles),  176,  177,  178,  240,  279,  281, 

282,m,288i,290,  344,  347,  353f,  357,  386,417,422,428,431 
Classic  design  in  murals,  389 
Classic  Dolls  (Los  Angeles),  177,  366,  405 
CMC  See  Chicago  Mural  CJroup 
Coatlique,  Diosa  de  la  Tierra  (San  IJiego),  293,  360 
Cockcroft,  Eva,  8,21 2ff,  231,  320,  328,  343,  345,  377,  425f,  437f,  479 
Coggeshall,  Bruce,  236f 
Cole,  Andrea,  131 

Collaborations  of  trained  muralists,  2()3f 
College  Art  Association  conference  (Chicago),  241 
Commercial  murals,  345,  346 

Commercial  product  design,  packaging  and  advertising,  40 
Commonarts  (Berkeley),  270,  342ff,  400,  406,  42()f,  427 
Community-based  culture,  15,  403,  436,  467,  494 
Community  development  corporations,  466,  470  n.  15  and  16,  471 

n.22 
Comprehensive  Employrhent  and  Training  Act  (CETA),  148,  155f, 

206,  240,  242,  262,  264,  267f,  272f,  279,  298,  303,  308,  310,  328, 

336,  339,  343ff,  346,  378,  409,  41 1,  414,  416-421,  426ff,  431,  433f, 

436,  438f,  440n.53,481 
Communicative  Arts  Academy  (Compton,  Calif.),   189,  191,  111, 

420,  424 
Community-based  development,  19,  44,  342,  347,  386,  445ff,  467ff, 

494 
Concha,  Jerry,  127,  138,  139,  414 
Concilio  de  Arte  Popular  (Calif.),  379,  430 
Conferences  of  muralists,  241,  343f,  347,  379,  411,  438,  474,  493 
Congreso  de  Artistas  Chicano  en  Aztlan  (San  Diego),  107f,  134,  136 
Connections  with  muralists  abroad,  473ff 
Conquest  of  the  Americas  .  .  .  (San  Diego),  106 
Container  Corporation  of  America,  448,  449 
Contemporary  crisis,  muralists'  view,  445 
Contribution  of  Blacks  to  Louisiana  History  (New  Orleans),  327 
C(K)k,  Rodney,  323 
Cool-out  and  co-optation,  434ff 
Cooper,  Graham,  483 
Co-operatives,  269f,  276,  298 
Corazdn  por  la  Gente  (Los  Angeles),  40,  41,  179,  287 
Cork,  Richard,  483f 

(Corporate  liberal  development,  19,  64,  445ff,  463  n.3 
Corporate  liberalism  and  the  arts,  19,  448ff,  452f 
Correa,  Felix,  371 
Cortazar,  Luis,  138f,  140,  143,  144 
Cosmic  Clowns  (Sin  Diego),  160,  165 
Counterculture  and  murals,  18,  72ff,  237ff,  466f,  482 
Covent  (larden  mural  (I^)ndon),  487,  490 
Coyote,  Peter,  430,  437f 
Oaigmillar  Festival  Society  (Edinburgh),  494 
Crear  una  Sociedad  Sueva  (New  York),  318,  319,  342 
Creativity  nxrtcd  in  labor,  383f,  406  n.  1  and  2 
Crucifixion  of  Don  Pedro  Albizu  Campos  (Chicago),  93,  391,  405 


Crum,  Jason,  35f,  37 
Crumb,  Robert,  127 
Crumpler,  Dewey,  122,  123,  150,  151,  245,  257f,  342,  393,  397,437, 

474 
Crusade  for  Justice  (Denver),  64f,  69,  72,  89,  107 
Cruz,  Manuel,  170,  171,  176 
Ouz,  Robert,  297f 
Cry  for  Justice,  7,  84,  224 
Cuba,  art  in,  245,  476 
C:uff,  Bob,  126 

Cultural  Black  Folks  (San  Francisco),  123,  124 

Cultural  revolution,  19,  20  n.9,  45,  48ff,  63ff,  66f,  347,  385,  466f,  478 
Cultural  work  and  workers,  18,  20  n.7,  227f,  386f,  406  n.  1 1 
Culture,  18,45,66,  78,  384 
Culture  Rhythm  (Cleveland),  328,  329 
Curry,  Robert,  189,  191 

Danzig,  Phillip,  328 

Dartington  College  of  Arts  (P^ngland),  483 

Davis,  Alonso,  187,  188,  189,  190,  278,  365,  377,  420,  435f 

Davis,  Charles,  326 

Davis,  Gene,  102f 

Daybreak  Star  Arts  Center  (Seattle),  301,  itf2,  303,  304 

de  Anda,  Ruben,  106{ 

Dedication  of  murals,  360f,  363 

Deer  Hunter  (Sem\e),  302,  303 

Defacement  of  murals,  17,  84,  365f 

Defend  the  Bill  of  Rights  (Chicago),  230,  231 

de  Leon,  Anna,  270,  27/f 

Delgadillo,  Jose,  472( 

Delgado,  Richard,  298,  299 

Deming,  Kent,  229 

Democratic  art  and  culture,  15,  494 

Democratic  technology,  8,  466,  470  n.l4 

Demonstrations  and  murals  as,  19,  42,  43{,  46  n.l3f,  55f,  66f,  131, 
406 

dePaul,  Ernesto  "Neto",  159 

de  Siega,  Daniel,  300,  399 

DeSilva,  Vernell,  278 

Desire  mural  (New  Orleans),  105 

Destruction  of  Nature  (New  York),  231,  233 

Detroit  Industry  (Detroit),  397 

De  Van,  Justine,  101,22Sf,  235f,  334,  ii5,  338,  ii9,  364 

de  Vargas,  Antonio,  292f,  342 

Dewey,  John,  20  n.2,  387,  406  n.2 

Diaz,  Aurelio,  329,  330,  331,  332,  412,  474 

Diop,  Cheikh  Anta,  407  n.I7 

Doctors'  Hospital  murals  (Los  Angeles),  33,  172 

Doliente  de  Hidalgo  (Los  Angeles),  281,  282,  400 

Dong,  James,  152,  153,  247,  263,  415 

Douglas,  Aaron,  24 

Douglas,  Emory,  45,  59 

Douglass  Street  Mural  (Brooklyn),  3 1 8 

"Down  with  the  Junta,  Free  Chile"  (Rotterdam),  481 

The  Dragon  Wall  (Philadelphia),  210 

Dreams  of  Flight  (Los  Angeles),  167,  168 

Drescher,  Tim,  8,  241,  258 

Drugs  as  mural  theme,  1 1,  84,  95f,  98,  1(X),  127,  128,  160,  309,  393f, 
395 

Dualidad  (San  Diego),  108i 

Duarte,  Regelio,  157,  158i,  402 

Dufresne,  Hilaire,  23 If,  234,  236 

Dunn,  Sharon,  95,  96 

DUO.  See  Philadelphia  Museum  of  Art,  Department  of  Urban  Out- 
reach 

Dvorak  Park  murals,  1 1,  72,  329,  331,  342 

Earle,  Susan,  208,  209 

Earth  Belongs  to  Those  Who  Work  It  with  Their  Own  Hands  (San  Diego), 


295 
I£ast  Bay  Skills  Center  mural  (Oakland),  272i 
E^st  Central  Citizens  Organization  (ECCO;  Columbus,  Ohio),  470 

n.l6 
EB  1942  (San  Francisco),  4S9i 
Eda,  Eugene,  45,  50,  52f,  54,  56,  72,  78ff,  82,  83,  88,  122,  134,  340, 

341,  364,  392f,  395,  405 
Eddy  and  Divisadero,  (San  Francisco),  149i 
Education  as  topic  of  murals,  78f,  85,  150f,  218,  265,  316,  318,  339, 

340,  342 
Educational  Participation  in  Communities  (EPIC),  239  n.l4,  420 
Edwards  Harry,  372,  373 
Edwards,  Peggy,  281,  282,  288,  290 
Egypt  as  a  Black  culture,  49,  53,  78,  82,  122, 123,  255,  256,  326,  392f, 

407  n.  17 
/;/«<fo,  464,  470n.3 

Elderly  as  mural  theme,  151ff,  175,  177,  178,  179,  414 
Elementary  school  murals,  1 19ff,  485 
1 1th  Street  Movement  (New  York),  320ff 
Emergence.  .  .  .  (Sacramento),  67,  68 
Espiritu  Latino  (Brooklyn),  320,  342 

En  Decoto  Si  Se  Puede  (.  .  .  It  Is  Possible;  Decoto,  Calif.),  265,  267 
En  La  Lucha  Punte  Trucha  (In  the  Struggle  Get  Yourself  I'ogether; 

Hayward,  Calif.),  267,  268 
Entelequia  (E\  Paso),  194,  195 
Environmental  theme  in  murals,  230f,  232,  233,  234,  254,  288,  290, 

292,  342 
Elsparza,  A.,  418 
Estrada  Courts  (Los  Angeles),  162,  166,  167,  168,  169,  172,  173,  179, 

222,  242,  288 
Exodus  Building  mural  (Boston),  58 
Expansion  Arts  (NEA),  424 

Fagan,  Roger,  485 

Fall  of  Icarus  (Venice,  Calif.),  460 

Family  Life  and  Spirit  of  Mankind  (San  Francisco),  259,  261{ 

Family  Place  mural  (Los  Angeles),  26,  28 

Farabaugh,  Laura,  274 

Farrell,  Kathleen,  206,  332,  340,  34H 

Favela,  Ricardo,  68 

Federal  Art  Project,  20  n.9,  24,  392,  408 

Felix,  Charles  W.,  161(,  166,  169,  222 

Fernandez,  Roger,  300 

Ferro,  Frank,  169 

Fiesta  {Los  Angeles),  167,  168 

Fine  arts:  and  high  culture,  17ff;  isolation  from  the  arts  of  everyday 

life,  17f,  41;  market,  18f,  35,  40 
Fine  Hearts  Squad  (London),  486 
Fire  Next  Time  (Sin  Francisco),  257f,  342 
Firestone,  Shulamith,  320 
Fitzgerald,  Marie,  477i 
Flood  (Ponlind),304{ 
Flor  en  la  Comunidad  (San  Jose),  268 
Flores,  Antonio,  313 
Flores,  Leo|X)ldo,  47  3  f 
Floyd  Road  Mural  (London),  485 
Flying  Cross  (Los  Angeles),  39 

For  the  Complete  Sefety  of  All  Mexicans  at  Work  (Mexico  City),  399 
Forward  Together  (Lancaster,  S.C.),  325 
Four,  Los,  (Los  Angeles),  283,  284 
Fourteen  Stations  of  the  Cross  (San  Francisco),  123,  125 
France,  murals  in,  481 
Frankel,  Sam,  243,  2-^-^ 
Franklin's  Footpath  (Philadelphia),  102i 
Fraternity,  375f 
Frazin,  James,  454,  456i 

Freedom  and  Peace  Mural  Project  (New  York),  214,  2/5 
Freedom  vs.  Exploitation  =  Revolution  (San  Jose),  366f,  368ii,  371,  372, 

373 


Index  I  509 

Freimark,  Robert,  366f,  368ii,  371,  372,  373 

Friendly  Talking  Wa// (Philadelphia),  210,  211,  365 

Friere,'  Paolo,  356,  380  n.7f,  406  n.2 

Frison,  Henrv,  305.iO(J 

From  My  Father  and  Yours  (Chicago),  89,  90 

Frost,  Jack,  155,  244f 

Fruits  of  Our  Labor  (Chicago),  33 3i 

Fuapopo,  Sekio,  258,  259,  260,  4(X) 

Fuller,  A.strid,  88,  200,  201,  202,  203,  336,  337,  338,  342,  390 

Funding,  57f,  88,  97f,  101,  103,  109,  115,  117,  120,  127,  131f,  185, 
206,  240f,  250,  264,  270,  279f,  295,  303,  310,  316,  328,  336f,  340, 
344f,  352f,  408ff,  4I8ff,  422-31,  469,  479,  482f,  485ff,  49()f,  494 

Funk,  Joe,  177,  77* 


Galdn,  Mario,  76n.31,  93,205,  391,405,  413 

Galeria  de  la  Raza  (San  Francisco),  40,  127,  149,  155,  242,  243,  263f, 

343,  345,  352,  413,  414,  42 If,  424,  427,  429,  467 
Galivez,  Mia,  133,  134 
Gallegos,  Felipe,  194,  195 
Gallico,  Neal,  323 

Galvez,  Daniel,  249,  250,  251,  252,  253{,  268,  269,  270,  364 
Gandhi,  Mohandas  K.,  483 
Gangs  and  gang  murals,  11,  12,  38,  89,  91,  111,  112,  113,  177,  178, 

179,  182,  185,2/7,  218,  242 
Garcia,  Loraine,  276 
Garcia,  Margaret,  288f,  290 
Garcia,  Rupert,  293,  294 
Garduno,  Geronimo,  115,  116 
Garza,  Artemio  Guerra,  197,  198,  199 
Gaspardde  la  Nuit  (Minneapolis),  453,  454 
Gatchel,  David,  288f,  290 
Gathering  (Baltimore),  206,  207 
Gayton,  Robert,  123,  124,  255i,  264,  342 
Gentrification,  19,  94,  324,  346,  468 
George  Washington  Ethnic  Mural  (Sin  Francisco),  150,  151 
Geraldi,  Randv,  288f,  290 
Ghetto  Ecstasy  (New  York),  2/7f 
Ghost  Town  (Thousand  Oaks,  Calif.),  456,  457 
Ghosts  of  the  Barrio  (Los  Angeles),  169,  770,  283 
Glen,  Niki,  341f,  353 

Goez  Gallery  (Los  Angeles),  30f,  40,  70,  71,  179,  180,  417,  427,  431f 
Gold  Star  Mothers  (Santa  Fe),  310 
Golden,  Jane,  281,  282,  288,  290 
Goldman,  Shifra,  77  n.57,  192,  241,  402f 
Gomez,  Gerardo,  323 
Gomez,  Joseph,  194 
Gonzales,  Bobby,  39 
Gonzales,  Luis  "The  Foot,"  277 
Gonzales,  Rodolfo  "Corky,"  64ff,  89,  127,  294f 
Gonzalez,  John,  7r,  179,  180,  417 
Gonzalez,  Jose,  71,  179,  180,  417,  43  If 
Gonzalez,  Jose  G.,  206 
Gonzalez,  Manuel,  167 
Goss,  Monique,  206,  345 
Graffiti,  38,  iP,  4/,  46  n.l  1,  lOlf,  111 
Graffiti  Alternatives  Workshop  (Philadelphia),  103,  424 
Graham,  Gary,  264f 

Grant's  Tomb  Benches  (New  York),  219f,  221,  352,  434 
Great  Arm  of  Friendship  (Los  Angeles),  177,  178 
Great  Britain,  murals  in,  482ff 
Green,  Vanita,  82,  84,  365 

Greenway  Recreation  Center  mural  (Philadelphia),  13,  14,  209( 
Greenwich  Mural  Workshop  (London),  485,  486 
Grimes,  Les,  32f,  34 
Gro-Between  (Santa  Monica),  2i*f 
"Gronk,"///,  172,  173,  288 
Growing  Together  {LAnczsier ,  S.C.),  325 
Grupo  de  Santa  Ana,  161( 


510  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Guerra,  Art,  320 

Guerrero,  Jos^,  223,  224,  225,  JiJf,  339f,  4()4 

Guevara,  Che,  61,  73,  159,  164,  245,  246,  476 

Gulbcnkian  Foundation  (London),  483 

Gupta,  Kathleen,  319,  343,  345 

Gutierrez,  Gustavo,  4()4 

Guzman,  Gilberto,  115,  116,  310,  311 

Guzman,  Ruben,  126,  127,  128,  129 

Haight-Ashburv  District  (San  Francisco),  74f 

Haight  Ashburv  Muralists,  43,  75,  131,  153,  154,  155,  2^5,246,  247, 

248,  342,  365,  415f 
Hall,  Chico,  15,  103,  395 
Hamlin,  Vicky,  245,  246U  248 
Hammons,  David,  326,  327 
Hampton,  Fred,  60,  79 
Hampton  Institute  (Virginia),  24,  46 
Haozous,  Robert,  301,  i02 
Harata,  Jenny,  305,  J07 
Hardin,  Helen,  312 
Harding,  David,  379,  482f,  484,  493 
Hardman,  Chris,  274 
Haro,  Richard,  278 

Harriet  Tubman  Memorial  Wall  (Detroit),  55,  56,  393 
Hay  Cultura  en  Nuestra  Comunidad  (Chicago),  90 
Havden,  Tom,  47  n.l7 

Health  care  murals,  192,  193,  235i,  258,  259,  265,  266 
Health  of  the  People  (Chicago),  235,  404 
Healy,  Wayne  Alaniz,  169,  170,  283,  284,  285( 
Henderson,  Chonitia,  305,  307 
Henderson,  Vic,  34{,  454,  455,  456,  457 

Hernandez,  Alfredo,  29,  219,  316,  318{,  320(,  322,  342f,  345,  466 
Hernandez,  Judith,  436 
Herndndez-iVujillo,  Manuel,  62f,  63 
Herr6n  III,  William  F.,  38,  110,  HI,  131,  172,  173,  281,  282,  287f, 

289,  291,  342f,  400,  4()4ff 
Hicks  Street  mural  (Philadelphia),  210 

Hieronimus,  Robert,  75,  206,  237,  238,  323,  345,  362,  404,  413 
Highfill,  Hollv,  8,  339,  i-^O 
Hing  Hay  Park  mural  (Seattle),  298,  299 
Historia  Chicana  (San  Antonio),  197,  198 

History  of  Chinese  Immigration  to  the  United  States  (New  York),  98,  99 
History  of  Mexican  American  Workers  (^\\ic  Island,  111.),  432i 
History  of  the  Packinghouse  Wor/ter  (Chicago),  224,  350f,  395ff 
Hoffer,  Heidi,  230',  2J/ 
Hog  Heaven  (Los  Angeles),  32,  34i 
Horn,  Nancy,  247 

Homage  to  Ruben  Salazar  (Los  Angeles),  72,  171i 
Homenaje  a  Diego  Rivera  (Chicago),  4(K),  402 
Horizons  Unlimited  exterior  mural  (San  Francisco),  126{,  131,  133, 

136 
Horizons  Unlimited  interior  mural  (San  Francisco),  145 
Hoskins,  Nathan,  326 
Housing,  self-help  and  sweat-equity,  89,  95,  318,  i/Pff,  464f,  470 

n.l5,  474,  485,490 
Huang,  Arlan,  316,  i/* 
Hubbard,  Jean  Paul,  327 
Hueng,  Dan,  97 
Hunt,  George,  326 
Hunter,  Tad,  229 

I  Am  the  People  (Chicago),  225,  226i( 

If  There  Is  No  Struggle,  There  Can  Be  No  Progress  (New  York),  230 
Ife  and  Benin  sculpture,  53,  393,  394 
Immediacy  of  images,  connecting  art  and  life,  406 
In  Defense  of  Ignorance  ((Chicago),  339,  340 
Indio  and  ethnic  imagery,  criticism  of,  343,  402f 
Indio  imagery  in  Chicano  murals,  29f,  33,  64,  66,  69,  70,  71,  73,  89, 
90,  91,  //Of,  //2f,  114,  115i,  127,  134,   I35i,  137{,  139,  140,  141, 


142,  157,  158U  160,  161,  164,  165,  167,  169,  170,  171,  176(,  185, 

186,  265,  266,  268,  275,  309,  329,  332,  3981 
In  Homage  to  Puerto  Rican  Historical  Figures  (Hartford,  Conn.),  328 
Inner  City  Mural  Program  (NEA),  132,  423 
Institute  of  Contemporary  Art  (Boston),  240 
Interart-Public  Art  (Austin,  Tex.),  314 
International  Hotel  outside  mural  (San  Francisco),  43,  152,  153,  249, 

415 
International  Hotel  "V"  mural  (San  Francisco),  247 
Irish  Pub  mural  (Berkeley),  274 
Isle  of  California  (Santa  Monica),  454,  456i 
Isrowuthakul,  Santi,  88,  203,  20^f,  243,  345,  364,  393f,  395 
Italy,  murals  in,  482 
/.  V.  Riots  (Smti  Barbara),  113,  114 

Jackson,  Nathan,  303,  304 

Jacobs,  Jane,  467 

Jamerson,  Judy,  259,  26/f,  342,  416 

Jamestown  Community  Center  murals  (San  Francisco),  128,  129, 

130i,  133 
Jannuzzi,  James,  98ff,  215,2/7f,  219,220,  231,25-?,  319f 
Jaramillo,  Juanita,  329,  ii/ 
Jarvis-Gann.  See  Proposition  13 
Javacheff,  Christo,  460,  46li 
Java  Collective  (Venice,  Calif.),  175,  431 
Jeffries,  Chip,  197 
Jenks,  Timothy,  427 
Jewish  Ethnic  Mural  (New  York),  13,  224 
Joan  X,  61 
Jobson,  Joanna,  74{ 
John,  Michael,  461,  462 
Johnson,  Amos,  326,  327 
Johnson,  Truman,  326,  327 

Johnston  Square  Social  Services  murals  (Baltimore),  206,  207 
Jones,  Calvin,  334,  335,  339,  340,  342 
Jones,  Fay,  298 
Jordan,  Arno,  32,  34f 
Jordan, Jack,  327 
Judging  murals,  388ff 
Justice  on  the  Job  QoViei),  340,  34  If 
Justice  Speaks  (Chicago),  336,  337,  396 

Kahn,  David,  239  n.  14 

Kaiser,  Don,  101,  /02f,  210,  323,  356,  376f,  413 

Katzive,  David,  413 

Kearny  Street  Workshop  (San  Francisco),  152f,  414,  415,  422 

Kenna,  Carol,  485,  486,  493 

Ken's  Market  mural  (Los  Angeles),  111,  112 

Kershaw,  Robert,  483 

Kim,Jac-hi,  230,  2i/ 

Kingjr.,  Martin  Luther,  14,  52,  55,  56,  60,  79{,  81,  82,  86,  103,  122, 

209,  305,  i07,  326,  334,  Ji6 
King  Tutankhamun  exhibition,  ^50f 
Kiosko  (San  Diego),  292f 
Kleihauer,  Joan,  278 

Knowledge  Is  Power:  Stay  in  School  (Boston),  79,  405 
Krakar,  Valerie,  206 
Kramer,  Hilton,  425 
Kreidler,  John,  155,426 
Kressel,  Eileen,  308 

Kreuzberg,  Janet,  249,  250,  251,  252,  253f 
Kriegstein,  Zara,  310,  311 
Kukuleku  (Amsterdam),  48 1 
Kunz,  Thomas,  43,  154,  155,  247,  248 


Labor  as  mural  theme,  203,  218,  222,  223,  224,  225,  226,  227,  229, 
230,  247,  248,  300,  301,  308,  329,  330,  331,  332,  333,  340,  341, 
4S5,  490,491,  492 


Index/  511 


Labor  unions'  suppwrt  for  murals,  7,  13,  14,  84,  224,  225,  226,  345 

Lady  cf  Justice  (Santa  Fe),  1 1 5 

LaFebre,  Francisco,  194,  195,  311,  312 

Lago  Chapala  village  murals  (Mexico),  474,  475 

Land  Distribution  (Chapingo,  Mexico),  389 

Land  of  Laputa  {Los  Angeles),  184 

Lara,  Armand,  300 

Larin,  Alfred,  292{ 

Latinoamirica  (Szn  Francisco),  136,  137 

Latino  and  Asian-American  History  (Chicago),  203,  204,  364 

Lawrence,  Jacob,  40,  119,  235,  395,  403 

Lawrence  Sign  Co.  (Minneajwlis),  453,  454 

Laycock  School  murals  (London),  485 

Leaders  and  Martyrs  (Oakland),  60,  92 

Lebr6n,  Lolita,'93,  214,2-^9 

Lee,  Don  L.,  52 

Uger,  Fernand,  58,  86,  212,  225,  404 

Lemont  Bicentennial  Mural  (hevnont,  111.),  227,  404 

Lennox,  Terry,  328 

Let  a  People,  Loving  Freedom,  Come  to  Growth  (New  York),  214,  215,  403 

Let  Our  People  Grow  (New  York),  316,  318 

Letelier,  Jos6  and  Francisco,  263,  264 

Leverage  (New  York),  452,  453 

Levine,  Jack,  40 

Lewis,  Frank,  479 

Lewis,  Samella,  24 

Lexington  Market  mural  (Baltimore),  237,  238,  345,  346 

Leyba  brothers  (Samuel,  Albert  and  Carlos),  115,  116,  194 

/Liberacionf  (New  York),  214f,  216 

Liberal  political  coalition  and  the  welfare  state,  431,  441  n.92,  446f 

Liberation  Through  Education  (Oakland),  265{ 

"Libertad  Pa'los  Presos  Politicos"  (Free  Political  Prisoners;  New 

York),  214f,  2;(J 
Li  Feng-Ian,  477 

Life  of  Washington  (Sun  Frincisco),  150 
Limon,  Leo,  418 
Lindsay,  Arturo,  328 

Livingston  Experience  (Piscatawav,  N.J.),  2/i 
Lobb,  Stephen,  485,  486,  493  ' 
Local  872  Longshoremen  (Houston),  25 
Logan  Barrio  (San  Diego),  107f,  159ff,  292ff,  343,  366,  378f,  416f, 

468 
Lolita  Lebrin  walking  mural  (San  Francisco),  249 
Lomahaftewa,  Linda,  311 
Lomos  Doradas  Mural  Gang  (San  Diego),  293 

Los  Angeles  Fine  Arts  Squad,  34i,  237,  286,  454,  455,  456,  457,  458{{ 
Los  Angeles  Street  Graphics  Committee,  187,  420,  435f 
Louis  Ouis  Lou  (New  Orl<ians),  327,328 
Lowe,  Sharton,  210 
Lowenfeld,  Viktor,  24 
Lowry,  Carlos,  314,  316 
Lucas  Valley  View  (Marin  Co.,  CaliO,  23 li,  234 
Lucio  Cabanas  walking  mural  (San  Francisco),  249 

Machado,  Anthony,  14,  16,  138f,  140,  141,  142,  146,  147,  148(,  245, 

246{,  342,  400,  414 
Maciel,  Alfonso,  249,  250,  342 
Maddox,  Robert,  206 
Madres  (Los  Angeles),  113 

Mahler,  Lucy,  214,  215,  316,  317,  343,  345,  357,  365,  403,  474 
Maitin,  Sam,  102 
Malcolm  X,  20  n.9,  49f,  52f,  54(,  56,  60,  79f,  */,  82,  103,  122,  123, 

208,209,  218,  247,  257,327,  386,  395,  407  n.l7 
Man  and  Killerwhales  (Seattle),  303,  304 
Man  of  Fire  (Guadalajara),  401 
"Mandate  for  State  Involvement,"  429f 
Mann,  David,  278 
MaoTse-Tung,  381  n.  11,  477 
Manrique,  Daniel,  474 


MARCH.  See  Movimiento  Artistico  Chicano 

Mark,  Gloria,  328,  329,  493 

Martin,  Avon,  323 

Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.,  panel  (Portland,  Ore.),  305,  307 

Martin,  Vival,  293 

Martinez,  Ernesto,  196 

Martinez,  Frank,  171  f 

Martinez,  Manuel,' 26,  69,  70,  308,  309 

Martinez,  Oscar,  203,  204,  224,  230,  231,  334f,  364,  403,  405 

Mask  of  God,  Soul  of  Man  (San  Francisco),  262 

Mason,  Pontella,  206,  207f,  323 

Marx,  Karl,  406  n. 2,  448 

Massachusetts  Council  of  Arts,  429 

The  Masterpiece  (Seattle),  301,302 

Matamoros,  Alfredo,  26,  27 

Maternity  (Boston),  95,  96 

Maya,  Alex,  167 

McCloskey,  Kevin,  254 

Mcllvaine,  Don,  84{,  132  n.4 

McNeff,  Catherine,  298 

McNeilles,  John,  341f 

MCO  mural  (San  Francisco),  16 

Mead,  George,  155 

MECHA.  See  Movimiento  Estudiantil  Chicano  de  AztlSn 

Mechicano  Art  Center  (Los  Angeles),  40,  169,  172,  417,  418,  422,  424 

Medina,  J.  D.,i/2 

Meehan,  Denise,  262 

Melchert,  James,  425 

Memorial  to  John  Daniels  (Portland),  305 

Mendez,  Consuelo,  29,  127,  128(,  136,  137,  228,  242,  476 

Mendoza,  Antonia,  164,  165,  166 

Mendoza,  Roberto  and  Veronica,  245 

Mendoza,  Vincente,  432( 

Merrick,  James  Kirk,  210 

Merritt  College  murals,  60,  61( 

Metaftsica  (Chicago),  69 

Mexican  historical,  popular,  and  religious  imagery,  12,  16,  26,  27,  28, 
29,  33,  62,  63,  64,  89,  90,  91,  92,  137,  138,  143,  151,  157,  160, 162, 
170,  173,  180,  182,  185,  186,  192,  266,  267,  268,  269,  275,  276, 
283,  284,  292,  300,  309,  311,  315,  402 

Mexican  mural  renaissance,  397f,  408f,  428 

Mexican  murals  in  U.S.,  398f 

Mexican  murals  of  the  sixties  and  seventies,  473ff 

Mexican  murals'  stylistic  influence,  396ff 

Meza,  Jos6  Reyes,  '29f,  ii,  71 

Mi  Abuelita  (Los  Angeles),  109 

Michael,  John,  461,  462 

Miller,  Aaron,  123,  i25f 

Mills,  Lev,  326 

Mineta,  Norman,  371 

Mini-Park  murals  (San  Francisco),  138ff,  142 j  398 

Miotto,  Steve,  320 

Mission  Rebels  facade  (San  Francisco),  127 

Mi  Vida  (San  Antonio),  197 

Monroe,  Arthur,  244f,  254,  255,  342 

Montage  design,  402,  404 

Montana,  Anna,  135 

Montez,  Richard,  14,  16,  138f,  140,  141,  142,  146,  147ii 

Montoya,  Emmanuel,  274 

Montoya,  Jos6,  68,  163f,  164,  276,  409,  433 

Montoya,,  Malaquias,  45,  46,  47  n.  18,  62i,  156,  436 

Montoya,  Robert,  302,  303 

Moonscapes  (C\x\\ex  City,  Calif.),  283,  285{ 

Mora,  David,  123,  124,  125,  131,  474 

Mora,  Elizabeth  Catlett,  150,  392 

Morales,  Pat,  177,  /7S 

Morris,  William,  470  n.  18 

Mortimer,  Arthur,  35,  36,  173,  174 

Mosaic  murals,  119,  120,  121,  131,  219f,  221 


512 /COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Motyka,  Judith,  339f 

Movement,  The,  45 

Movimicnto  Artistico  Chicano  (MARCH),  206,  329,  412,  432 

Mouvimiento  Kstudiantil  C^hicano  de  Aztlan  (MECHA),  72,   106, 

2951" 
Moya,  Oscar,  329,  332 
Mujer  Cosmka  {San  Diego),  16S 
Mujeres  Muralistas  (San  Francisco),  29,  136,  137,  138,  139,  364,  414, 

476 
Multi-Cultural  Mural  C^aniA  Fe),  311 
Mumford,  Lewis,  470  n.l4 
Mur-a-Mur  Squad  (Montreal),  478 
Mural,  defined,  23,  26 
Mural  de  la  Raza  (Chicago),  89,  91 
Mural  Manual,  8,  367,  412,  421 
Mural  of  the  American  Workman  {San  Francisco),  396 
Mural  process  as  a  form  of  community,  374 
Murals  as  a  livelih(K)d,  345 
Murals  as  communications  technology,  18,  464 
Murals  as  performance,  373f 
Museo  del  Barrio  mural  (New  York),  215,  217 
Museums,  19,  57,  439  n.39,  449,  450{t' 
My  Life  in  the  Projects  (l^)s  Angeles),  172 
Myring,  Samuel,  288f,  290 

Nacimiento  de  Aztlan  (C>\stal  City,  Tex.),  313 

NAP.  See  \eighlx)rh(Kxl  Arts  Program 

N  APNOC.  See  Neighborhood  Arts  National  Organizing  Committee 

Nario,  Jose,  432{ 

Nast,  Carol,  155,  156 

Nation  7V/«f  (Chicago),  86,  87,  132  n.6,  344,  391,  393,  405 

National  Endowment  for  the  Arts,  38,  101,  132,  187,  206,  240f,  336, 
344,  409,  41  If,  414f,  419,  423ff,  431,  434,  437ff,  439  n.26,  447, 
449f 

National  Farm  Workers  (NFW).  See  United  Farm  Workers 

National  Murals  Newsletter  (NMN;  later  Community  Muralists'  Maga- 
zine), 229,  241,436f,  468 

National  People's  Action,  468 

Native  American  movement,  44,  30lff 

Native  American  murals  and  imagerv,  69,  194,  195,  301,  302,  303, 
304,310,311,312,478 

Navarro,  Jesse,  185,  186 

NEA.  See  National  Endowment  for  the  Arts 

Neighborhood  Arts  Center  mural  (Atlanta),  326,  327 

Neighborhood  Arts  Program  (NAP,  San  Francisco),  44,  155,  413ff, 
424,  426ff 

Neighborhood  Art  Programs  National  Organizing  Committee  (N  AP- 
NOC), 438,  441  n.ll4 

Neiss,  Exlgar,  437 

Nelson,  Walter  and  Joe,  227 

Netzer,  Dick,  425 

Neumann,  Osha,  250,  251,  252,  253{,  268,  269,  270,  271,  272,  273, 
361,  364,421 

Nevel,  Raymond,  265,  266,  342 

Nevel,  XochitI,  265,  266,  342 

New  Birth  (New  York)  231,  234 

New  Deal  murals,  23,  375,  426,  428,  433 

New  Democracy  (Mexico  City),  45,  89,  156,  256,  267f,  389,  390 

New  Emergence  {1ms  \nge\es),  177,  178 

New  Realist  (also  Photo-Realist)  murals,  32,  34,  35,  36,  60, Ml,  173, 
174,  177,  179,  187,  207,  208,  249,  269,  286,  287,  288,  316,  325, 
326,  328',  334,  335,  346,  371,  392,  450,  454,  455,  456,  457,  458, 
459,  460,  476,  487,  490 

Newton,  Huey,  59f,  73,  92 

New  York  State  Councilon  the  Arts,  429 

Nicaraguan  Revolution,  249,  263,  264 

Nikkeijin  No  Rekishi  (History  of  Japanese  America),  203,  204 

Niiios  del  Mundo,  166  169 

No  Compre  Vim  Gallo  (Don't  Buy  Gallo  Wine;  Los  Angeles),  181,  182 


No  Somos  Esclavos  de  la  Migra  (We  Are  Not  Slaves  of  the  Immigration 

Service;  Los  Angeles),  181,  182 
Norling,  Jane,  43,  131,  153,  154,  245,  246i,  248i,  264,  357 
North  Valley  Community  Center  mural  (Albuquerque),  194,  195 
Nudity  in  murals,  67f,  165 
Nuestras  Vidas — Our  Lives  {Chicago),  339 
Nueva  Presencia  (Mexico),  473 
,V«r/«ra«cc  (Venice,  Calif.),  288,  289 


O'Cadiz,  Sergio,  191,  192 

Ocean  Park  Pier  (Santa  Monica),  281,  282 

Ochoa,  Victor,  39,  107,  159ff,  292,  293,  294{,  343,  366,  379,  416f 

O'Doherty,  Brian,  42 3f,  434 

Of  Breaking  Chains  {Los  Angeles),  185,  186 

O'Higgins,  Pablo,  150,  300,  iO/ 

Okada,  Alan,  II,  /if,  98,  99,  2/*,  220,  241,  344f,  357f,  J59,  410,  435 

Old  Woman  of  the  Freeway  (Los  Angeles),  179 

Oliver,  Marvin,  iO\,  302 

Olivo,  Miriam,  136,  137 

Owowfl/f  (Seattle),  116,  117,  H8i 

On  the  Wall  Productions  (St.  Louis),  231 

Op  Art,  35 

Orale  Raza  (Los  Angeles),  169 

Organization  of  Black  American  Culture  (OBAC,  Chicago),  50,  409 

Organizingofmuralists,  50,  58,  68,  70f,  88,97f,  101,  106f,  109f,  115, 

127,  175ff,  206,  212,  242f,  262,  314,  408ff 
Orona,  Lee,  m,114 
Orona,  Mago,  1)1,314 
Orosco,  Juanishi,  68,  I61ff,  165,  276 
Orozco,  Jos6  Clemente,  24,  29,  35,  106,  110,  149,  155,  293f,  370, 

397ff,  400,  401,  403f,  428,  478 
Otero,  Pancho,  324 

Our  History  Is  No  Mystery  (San  Francisco),  43,  342,  365,  387,  415f 
Our  Search  for  Knowledge  in  an  Ever-Changing  Universe  (Madison), 

353,  i77 
Outterbridge,  John,  29,  191,  111 

Pacific  Telephone  Building  mural  (Los  Angeles),  286,  287 

Packard,  Emmy  Lou,  141 

Padgett,  James  Arthur,  235,  395 

Padilla,  Stan,  276 

Painterly  styles,  400f 

Painting  the  Town,  8 

Palomino  Ernesto,  113,  114i,  297f 

Pan-American  Bank  murals  (Los  Angeles),  29f,  ii,  71 

Pan-American  Hillside  Theatre  murals  (Austin,  Tex.),  314,  315 

Pappy's  Bar-B-Q  murals  (Los  Angeles),  29,  31 

Paradise-Hawaii  Theater  Restaurant  mural  (San  Francisco),  259,  260, 

400 
Para  El  Mercado  (To  the  Market;  San  Francisco),  26f,  137,  138,  352 
Park,  Nan,  256 
Parks,  Vera,  326 
Parrinello,  Tony,  416 
Participatory  team  mural  process,  352ff 
Passion  ofSacco  and  Vanzetti  (design),  22 
Paterson,  Past  and  Future  (N.J.),  328 
Patlin,  Ray,  11,  26,  88f,  90,  91,  92,  165,  222,  225,  243,  258,  265i, 

267(,  271,  272i,  329,  342,  356i,  364f,  378,  400,  412,  421,  432i, 

473f,  476 
Patton,  Mary,  318 
PAW.  See  Public  Art  Workshop 
Pazos,  Antonio,  199,  200 

Peace  and  Salvation:  Wall  of  Understanding  {Chicago),  45,  80,  81,  86,  405 
Pellett,  Don,  404 
La  Pena  (Berkeley),  270ff 
People,  The,  as  a  concept,  15,  227,  374f 
People  ofLakeview  Unite  (Chicago),  355,  374 
People  of  Venice  vs.  the  Developers  (Venice,  Calif.),  175 


People  to  the  University,  the  University  to  the  People  (Mexico  Citv),  399 

People'a  art,  8,  11,  I5f,  55,  464ff,  467,  469,  470  n.l8 

People's  Game  Mural  (San  Francisco),  256 

People's  History  of  Telegraph  Avenue  (Berkeley),  38,  74,  249,  250,  251, 

252,  25i f,  342,  i«,4()0f 
"People's  Murals:  Some  Events  in  American  History,"  Bicentennial 

exhibit,  (San  Francisco),  244,  245,  246 
People's  Painters  212,  213,  214,  479 
People's  Park  (Berkeley),  73,  107,  252 
People's  River  (London),  4S5 
People's  Wfl// (Berkeley),  73,  74,  76,  250 
People's  Wall  Murali'sts,  73f,  250,  251,  252,  253{ 
Perez,  Irene,  135,  136,  137,  139,  245 
Periods  of  community  murals,  7,  344 
Permanence  and  impermanence  of  murals,  344,  491 
Perretti,  Joe,  256 
Philadelphia    Museum   of  Art,    Department   of   Urban   Outreach 

(DUO),  renamed  Department  of  Community  Programs  (DC>P),  13, 

14,  101,  102,  103,  208,  209,  210,  323,  356,  376f,  413,  422f 
Phoenix  (New  York),  219,  220 
Photo-Realist  murals.  See  New  Realist  murals 
Pier  Group  Muralists,  478f,  480 
Pierce,  Ron,  lOli 
Pietri,  Pedro,  92f 
Pilsen  Barrio  (Chicago),  68,  89 
Pinkney,  Elliot,  29,  31,  \9\,278,  279 
Pioneer  Social  Work  (Chicago),  336,  337,  338 
Plan  of  the  Barrio,  64ff 
Plan  of  Delano,  44 
Planar  styles,  404f 

Plaza  Caribe  murals  (New  York),  214,  215,  216 
Plaza  Cultural  Mural  (New  York),  320,  342 
Plumed  Serpent  (Lx)s  Angeles),  110 
Point  San  Quentin  (Calif.),  236 
Pop  Art,  23,41,  230,  2i/,  483 
Popular  Arts  Workshop  (Lansing),  328 
Popular  shop  murals,  26,  27,  28,  30,  3 1 
"Populism"  and  "elitism"  in  arts  funding,  425,  440  n.46 
Por  Libre  Vida  de  Mi  Raza  (Sacramento),  274,  275 
Por  los  Ninos  (New  York),  316.318 
iPorque  Se  Pelean?  Que  No  Son  Camales.  (Why  Fight  Each  Other?  So 

there  will  be  no  brothers;  Lx)s  Angeles),  183f 
Port  Huron  Statement,  44,  47  n.  17 
Portable  murals,  262 
Portraits  in  murals,  13,  14,  35,  36,  51,  52,  58,  59,  60,  61,  66,  67,  79, 

80,  81,  82,  89,  91,  92,  109,  110,  149,  150,  190,  209,209,215,  218, 

259,261,  334,  ii5,  392 
Posada,  Jos6,  397f 

Positively  Fourth  Street  (San  Francisco),  459f 
Posters,  45,  242 

Precita  Eyes  Muralists,  262f,  342f,  363,  416,  477 
Prescription  for  Good  Health  Care  (Chicago),  364 
Pride  Inc.  mural  (Washington,  D.C.),  13,  15,  387,  395 
Prison  and  juvenile  hall  murals,  236f,  262,  263,  265,  297,  298,  341f, 

368,  373,  473,  493f 
Process  and  visual  form  of  murals,  361ff 
Process  of  producing  murals,  17,  19,  351ff,  460ff 
Professionalism,  15,  17,  347,  376ff,  379f,  465ff 
Prophecy  (Chicago),  337,338 

Proposition  13  yarvis-Gann  ballot  initiative,  Calif.),  431,  441  n.87f 
Protect  the  People's  Homes  (Chicago),  94,  344,  374 
Prussing,  Hank,  215,  316 
Public  Art  Workshop  (PAW,  Chicago),  88,  94,  206,  332,  340,  341, 

352f,4/2f,  421,427 
Public  housing  art  workshops  (London),  485,  486{ 
Public  media  as  source  of  style,  404 
Pueblo  Cultural  Center  murals  (Albuquerque),  312 
Pueblo  Revolt  (Santa  Fe),  310 
Puerto  Rican  Congress  murals,  93,  205 


Index  /  5 13 

Puerto  Rican  Heritage  Mural  (Neu  York),  219 

Puerto  Rican  swiety  and  politics,  61f,  92f,  214ff,  218f 

Puerto  Rican  themes  in  murals,  29,  32,  61,  89,  91,  92f,  94   214  2/5 

216, 217, 218, 219, 3\S, 319, 320 
Pulqueria  murals,  26,  46  n. 2 
Pusey,  Stephen,  487,  490 

Quevedo,  Abran,  159 

Racism  and  murals  dealing  with,  48ff,  75f,  78ff,  H8ff,  109   HI    ?04f 

346,  485 
Radek,  Celia,  226f,  228{,  235f,  333(,  364 
Radycki,  Lucyna,  228{',332 

Rainbow  People  (San  Francisco),  43,  75,  131,  154,  155,  239  n.7,  415 
Ramirez,  Arnold,  286,  287 

Ramirez,  Gilberto,  106i,  148{,  165,  400,  406,  474,  475 
Ramona  Gardens  murals  (Los  .'\ngeles),  38,  169,  171,  172,  283,  405 

4\7,469 
Rampley,  John,  459{ 
Raven/Eagle  and  Bear  Clan  Symbols  of  Northwest  Coast    Tribes 

(Seattle),  301,  i02 
Raya,  .Viarcos,  205,  329,  330,  331,  4(K),  402,  412 
Raya,  Richard,  469 
■    Raygoza,  Mardoqueo,  329,  332 
Raza  Unida  Party,  312 
Razem  (Chicago),' 22 *f,  387,  402,  405 

RCAF  (Rebel  Chicano  Art  Front/ Royal  Chicano  Air  Force;  Sac- 
ramento), 68,  161{,  163,  164,  165,  166,  276,  277,  300,  379,  409,  422 
Read  Between  the  Lines  (hos  Angeles),  179f,  181 
Reagan  presidency,  439,  447 
Rebirth  (Chicago),'202 
Rebirth  of  Our  Nationality  (Houston),  25f 
Redwoods  (Santdi  .Monica),  288,  290 
Reformay  Libertad  {Chicago),  91,  205 
Refregier,  Anton,  23,  229,  230,  403 
Remkowicz,  Pamela,  155,  156 
Renaissance  style,  396f 
Resnick,  Ruth^  328 
Rickson,  Gary,  57,  58,  59,  78,  79,  86,  95,  237,  352,  353,  356f,  364, 

404,  410 
Riddle,  John,  326 
Rios,  .Michael,  14,  16,  127,  138f,  140,  141,  142,  143,  144,  146,  147f{, 

242,  245,  246f,  258,  259,  260,  261,  342,  398,  4(K),  405f,  414,  476 
Rios,  Thomas,  127,  I29{ 
Rip-Off  (Chicago),  80 
Rising  of  the  Mujeres  (Los  Angeles),  354 
Rivera,  Diego,  24,  26,  29,  141,  224,  239  n. 2,  247,  259,  293f,  367,  370, 

389,  396,  397,  400,  404f,  406  n.  1 1 ,  408,  428,  435 
Rivera,  Domingo,  62,  138,  139 

Rivera,  Orozco,  Siqueiros  and  Kahlo  mural  (San  Diego),  293,  294 
Rivers,  Larry,  23 
Roach,  Clement,  328 
Rochfort,  Desmond,  490f,  492 
Rockefeller,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  John  D.  3rd  Bicentennial  Exhibition  of 

American  Art,  425 
Rodia,  Simon,  189,  191,  219 
Rodriguez,  Celia,  164,  165,  166 
Rodriguez,  Gilberto,  27 3f 

Rodriguez,  Patricia,  133,  134,  136,  I37i,  139,  155,  268 
Rodriguez,  "Spain,"  /26f 
Rodriguez,  Tony,  231,  233 
Rogovin,  Mark,  8,  18,  26,  53,  85ff,  94,  199,  206,  241,  329,  340ff,  344, 

354ff,  365,  377,  379,  405,  4m,  421,  437,  473f 
Rojas,  Anibal,  206 
Roloff,  Ulf,  295 

Romero,  Frank,  40,  41,  179,  287 
Romero,  Pedro,  310 

Rompiendo  las  Cadenas  (Break  the  Chains;  Chicago),  339 
Roots  and  Wings  (Chicago),  332,  333,  342 


514  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Rosas,  Carlos,  194,  195 

Rosenberg,  Lilli  Anne,  428 

Rosie  (Venice,  Calif.),  36 

Royal  Oak  Murals  (Lx)ndon),  490,  491,  492 

Running  Fence  (Sonoma  and  Marin  Counties,  Calif.),  460,  46li 

Russum,  Barbara,  340f,  379,  413 

Sacramento  State  College  (later  University),  68,  163,  277 

St.  Charles  Painting  (Venice,  Calif.),  458 

Saint  Klmo's  Village  (Lx)s  Angeles),  187,  189,  190,  279,  420,  424 

St.  Francis  Road  Mural  (Sinn  Fe),  116 

St.  Martin  Luther  King  (Chicago),  3  34,  336 

Salazar,  Carlos,  324 

Salazar,  Renato,  324 

Salazar,  Ruben,  72,171,172 

Salgado,  David,  60 

San  Diego  economic  and  social  conditions,  105f 

Sandison,  Hamish,  433 

Sandoval,  Carlos,  309 

San  Francisco:  Art  Commission,  430,  433,  438,  452;  Black  com- 
munities, 122ff,  149f;  Community  Congress,  437;  Mime  Troupe, 
154,  466;  Mission  district,  18,  126f,  1 3  3ff,  242;  Museum  of  Modern 
Art,  244,  245,  246;  Performing  Arts  Center  (Davies  Hall),  428f, 
452;  State  College  (later  University)  44f,  258 

San  Jose:  social  and  economic  conditions,  156;  State  University,  158, 
366ff 

San  Sjjerate,  murals  (Sicily),  482,  483 

Santa  Ana  College  mural  (Calif.),  191,  192,  374 

Santana,  Clyde,  328 

Save  the  Whales  (Venice,  Calif.),  288f,  290 

Scale  of  murals,  133ff,  185,  218,  222 

Schlesinger,  Christina,  174,  175,  176,  177,  236 

Schnorr,  Michael,  293f,  295,  296{,  342,  360 

Schoonhoven,  Terry,  34(,  454,  455,  456,  457,  458i 

Scott,J.C.,479 

Scott,  Larry,  305,  J07 

Scottish  Arts  Council,  483 

Sculptural,  ceramic,  assemblage,  and  relief  murals,  270, 27/t,  313,  314, 
1X6,317,332,333,  339,  343f,  482f,  ■/*'#,  493 

Sculpture  of  a  Woman  Is  Very  Special  (Los  Angeles),  177,  366,  405 

Seaberg,  Steven,  326,  327 

Seale,  Bobby,  59f,  73 

Seattle  Wall's,  298 

Secundo  Barrio  (El  Paso),  194,  195 

Segregation  B.  C.  (Boston),  59,  356,  364 

Self-Help  Graphics,  420 

Seronde,  Adele,  409f 

Servicios  de  Salud para  su  Familia  (Pueblo,  Colo.),  310 

Shadur,  Beth,  493 

Shahn,  Ben,  22ff,  403,  448 

Shamsud-Din,  Isaac,  303,  304,  305,  307 

Shapiro-Kiok,  Susan,  9Sf,  410 

Shaw  Community  Health  Center  murals  (Washington,  D.C.),  395 

Silhouette,  shadow  and  Polaroid  mural  techniques,  98f 

Silva,  Pedro,  219,  221,  320,  434,  493 

Simon  Fraser  University  murals  (Vancouver,  B.C.),  477,  478 

Siqueiros,  David  Alfaro,  24,  29,  45,  69,  86,  89,  116,  144f,  150,  156, 
159,  168,  192,  256,  258f,  267f,  270,  272,  293f,  329,  342f,  389,  iPO, 
397,  398,  399(,  402f,  405,  406  n.ll,  408,  412,  428,  478,  490 

Sixteenth  Street  railway  embankment  mural  (Chicago),  332 

Smash  Plan  2 1  {Chicigd),i39f 

Social  and  Public  Art  Resources  Center  (SPARC;  Venice,  Calif.), 
279,  281,  286,  287,  290,  291,  342f,  386,  417ff,  420,  421,  427 

StKzial  Realism,  228,  403f,  476 

Socialist  Realism,  476f 

Solache,  Saul,  72,  242,  403 

Sol  Brillante  (New  York),  320f,  322,  466 

Solidarity  Murals  ((Chicago),  224,  225 

Sol  y  Tierra  (San  Jose),  268 


Some  of  the  Advancements  of  Man  (Los  Angeles),  287f,  289 

Something  from  Nothing  (Compton,  Calif.),  191 

Song  of  Unity  (Berkeley),  270,  27/f,  342,  361,  378,  387,  403 

Sonya,  262,  263 

Southeast  Community  Organization  (SECO;  Baltimore),  468,  471 

n.22 
SPARC.  See  Social  and  F*ublic  Art  Resources  Center 
Spirit  of  East  Harlem  (New  York),  2 1 5 
Spirit  of  Hyde  Park  (Chicago),  200,  201,  390 
Spirit  of  Mankind  (San  FVancisco),  259,  261( 
Spirit  of  76,  1976  (San  Francisco),  247,  248 
Spirit  of  the  Native  Americans  (Santa  Fe),  310,  311 
Spiritual  Plan  of  Aztldn,  64,  107ff 
StaffofLife  (Denver),  307 
Stahl,  George,  203 

Stevens,  Nelson,  13,  220,  326,  i27f,  345 
Stokely  and  Rap  (Boston),  59,  364,  43 1 
Stoll,  Barbara,  281,2*2 
Stop  Arson  for  Profit  (Chicago),  339,  340 
Story  of  Our  Struggle  (Los  Angeles),  179,  180 
Struggle  of  Native  People  for  Sovereignty  (San  Francisco),  245 
Styker,  Miles,  245,246 
Style  of  murals,  14f,  52ff,  71f,  115f,  219,  250f,  270,  272,  283,  293f, 

324,  389f,  392ff,  395ff,  404ff 
Summerthing  (Boston),  58,  59,  96,  97,  132,  352,  353,  409f,  422f, 

427ff,  431,434 
Supergraphics,  35,  36,  37i,  298,  478f,  483 
Supplemental  Training  and  Employment  Program  (STEP),  155,  413, 

426 
Sweden,  murals  in,  48 1 
Sykes,  Roderick,  187,  279,  420 
Sykes,  Rozzell,  187 

Taller  (Workshop)  Siqueiros,  314,  474 

Tammuz  (New  York),  37 

Tanguma,  Leo,  25f 

Tania,  35,  36 

Tassananchalee,  Kamol,  177,  178 

Tate,  Wayne,  103,  104 

Tatum,  Charles,  305,  306,  308 

Teatro  Camjjesino,  44,  65,  66,  67 

Techne,  406,  n.3 

Technological  and  Spiritual  Man  (Venice,  Calif.),  290f 

Technology,  criticism  of  by  murals,  147i{,  179,  /*/,  230f,  232,  233, 

234i,  269,  270,  287f,  289,  290,  29lf,  343 
Tellez,  Anna,  295 
Terkel,  Studs,  17 
Tetrault,  Richard,  478 
Texas  Southern  University  murals,  24,  25f 
Than  Ts  ay  Ta,  312 
Thiele,  O'Brian,  249,  250,  251,  252,  253(,  268,  269,  270,  271,  272{, 

361,  364,421 
Thielen,  Anne,  264 
Thiermann,  Ann  Elizabeth,  288,  289 
Third  Nail  (Boston),  96(,  405 

Third  Street  Music  Settlement  mural  (New  York),  316,  317 
"This  Great  Humanity  Has  Said,  Enough"  (San  Francisco),  245,246, 

400 
Thomas,  Richard,  327,  328 
Thomas,  Wilfred,  316 
Thompson,  Nancy,  119,  120,  121 

"Thou  Shalt  End  Racism"  (Washington,  D.C.),  103,  104 
"300  Tays  Residents  Pledge  to  Struggle  against  the  Disappearance  of 

the  Barrio"  (El  Paso),  194,  196 
Tibbs,  Delbert,  court  case,  336,  337 
Tico  Tico  Restaurant  mural  (Los  Angeles),  26,  27 
Tijerina,  Reies,  65,  89 
Time  and  Sand  (El  Paso),  3 1 3,  J/¥ 
Time  Is  Now  (Los  Angeles),  278,  279 


Time  To  t/«»/e  (Chicago),  334,  335,  342 

Tlaloc  (Los  Angeles),  167 

Together  Protect  the  Community  (Chicago),  334,  342 

Toltecas  en  Aztldn,  106f,  160,  161,  416 

Torres,  Anastasio,  313f,  315 

Torres,  Salvador  "Queso,"  46  n.  12,  68,    107,  159ff,  293f,  343,  417, 

427 
"To  Siqueiros,  To  Mexico,  To  Proletarian  People"  (Sicily),  482,  483 
Toward  a  People's  Art,  8 
Tower  q^ Power  (San  Francisco),  155 
Town  artist,  379,  482f,  493 
Treasures  of  Tutankhamun  exhibition,  450f 
Trejo,  Alfonso,  Jr.,  287f,  289,  291 
Treme  murals  (New  Orleans),  104,  105,  111,  328 
Trevino,  Jesse,  197,  198 
Tribute  to  Beale  Street  (Memphis),  326 
Tribute  to  the  Farm  Workers  (Los  Angeles),  167 
Triest,  Shirley,  60 

Triumph  of  Nature  over  War  (Vancouver,  B.C.),  477{ 
Tropical  America  (Los  Angeles),  398 
Truth  and  Education  (San  Francisco),  122,  123 
Tucker,  Keith,  238( 
Tucker,  Peggy,  43,  153,  154,  247,  248 
Tujunga  Wash  Mural  (Sm  Fernando  Valley),  279f,  281,  342,  365,  419, 

428 
Tulare  Street  mural  (Fresno),  113,  114 
Turnidge,  Robert,  274 
12th  Street  Movement  (New  York),  320ff 
Twitchell,  Kent,  179,  420 
Two  Hundred  Years  of  Resistance  (San  Francisco),  245,  246 

Under  City  Stone  (Chicago),  200,  201,  390 

Undocumented  Worker  (SslW  Diego),  295,  296i 

Undocumented  workers  ("Illegals"),  64,  181,  182,  295,  296i,  324 

"Unite  to  End  Police  Brutality,"  (Piscataway,  N.J.),  213 

United  Farm  Workers  (formerly  National  Farm  Workers),  44,  64ff, 

67,  68,  141,  143,  162{,  164,  167,  181,  182,  183,  197,  198,  199,222, 

223,  i\i,315,368 
United  States  Conference  of  Mayors,  429 
Unity  (Sin  Francisco),  153,  154 
Unity  of  the  People  iChicigo),  85,  354f 
Universal  Alley  (Chicago),  200,  359,  393 
Universal  Labor  (Denver),  308 
Universal  Pit  mural  (Oakland),  30 
Unzueta,  Manuel,  113,  114 
Uprising  of  the  Mujeres  (Los  Angeles),  291,  343 
Urban  Dope  and  Rural  Hope  (Denver),  307 
Urban  renewal  and  redevelopment,  19,  50,  93,  94,  100,  103ff,  107, 

131,  148f,  175,  194,  195,  196,  201,  202,  203,  257,  334,  339f,  342, 

481,487,^*9 
Urban  Walls  (Atlanta),  298 
Uyeda,  Bob,  97 

Valadez,  Jaime,  268 

Valadez,  John,  287,  288 

Valdez,  Luis,  65,  430 

Valdez,  Raul,  314,  i/5 

Valley  Ford  Market  mural  (Valley  Ford,  Calif.)  461,  462 

Vanport—The  Promise  (Portland),  303,  304 

Varrio  Artistas  de  Aztldn,  176,  177 

iVarrio  Si,  Yonkes  No!  (San  Diego),  292,  342 

Vega,  Salvador,  329,  331,412 

Velasco,  Fran,  258f,  260 

Venice  High  School,  Class  cf'54  (Venice,  Calif.),  173,  /  7-^ 

Venice  Pavilion  Murals  (Venice,  Calif.),  16,  173,  174,  175,  365 

Vernacular  art  (primitive,  folk,  or  naive  art),-26ff,  10 If,  104 

Vida  Breva  de  Alfonso  Fulano  (Los  Angeles),  179,  180 

Vietnam  Mission  District  mural  (San  Francisco),  146 

Villa,  Esteban,  67,  68,  163f,  165,  276,  300,  379,  409,  433 


Index/  515 

Violence  and  armed  self-defense  as  themes  in  murals,  57ff,  62,  78ff, 

82,  84f,  11  If 
Viramontes,  Xavier,  243 
Visionary  and  Surrealist  styles  in  murals,  75,  78,  79,  17H,  184,  lllii, 

238,  404,  482 
"Visit  Crosswijk  ..."  (Netherlands),  481,  482 
Las  Vistas  Nuevas,  109( 
Visual  Arts  Program  (NEA),  424 
"Viva  Nicaragua  Libre"  (San  Francisco),  263,  264 
Viva  La  Raza  (Berkeley),  268,  269,  382i 
"Voluntary  Labor  Is  the  Keystone  of  Our  Communist  Education" 

(Havana),  476 
Voshell,  James,  206,  207f,  323 

Wagner,  Bill,  156,  157 

Wainwright,  Kristan,  431 

Wakefield  School  murals  (Fresno),  297,  298 

Waldrop,  Ralph,  i25f 

Walker,  William,  7,  24,  45,  50ff,  53,  54{,  56{,  72,  79f,  81,  84,  86f,  88, 

120,  134,  150,  205,  224,  243,  334,  336,  337,  344,  350f,  364,  377, 

389f,  392,  393{,  395,  404f,  41  If 
Walking  murals,  249,  250,  476 
Wall,  The  (Austin,  Texas),  314,  316 
Wall  of  Brotherhood  (Chicago),  69,  70 
Wall  of  Choices  (Chicago),  86,  »7,  3  5  5 
Wall  of  Consciousness  (Philadelphia),  103 
Wall  of  Daydreaming  and  Man's  Inhumanity  /o  Afen  (Chicago),  205,  351, 

364,  393f,  J95ff^ 
Wall  of  Dignity  (Detroit),  45,  50,  53,  54,  55,  72,  134,  362,  393 
Wa//o^Ge«era/«o«.f  (Chicago),  203 
Wall  of  Meditation  (Chicago),  82,  393,  405 
Wfl// o/Pn^  (Chicago),  55 
Wall  of  Respect  (Atlanta),  326 
Wall cf  Respect  (Chicago),  45,  50,  51,  52f,  57,  62,  68,  72,  75,  78,  82,  93, 

101,  122,  134,  340,  344,  351,  362,  392f,  409,  422 
Wall  of  Respect  for  Women  (New  York),  11,  224,  360,  387 
Wall  of  Respect  for  the  Working  People  of  Chinatown  (New  York),  3 19,  i2/ 
Wall  of  Truth  (Chicago),  53,  82,  134 

Wall  of  Visions  (hos  Angeles),  187,  188,  189,  190,  279,  365,  377,  420 
Wall  that  Cracked  Open  (Los  Angeles),  110 
Wandsworth  Mural  Workshop  (London),  486,  487 
WAPAC  Mural,  257,  258 

WAPAC.  See  Western  Addition  Project  Area  Committee 
WAPP.  See  Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places 
War  and  peace,  murals  about,  45,  46,  69,  70,  74,  89,  123,  124,  125, 

129,  131,  146,  192,  193,  197,  200,  201,  477,  478 
Washington,  Abraham,  25 
Washington,  Horace,  155,  245 

Washington,  D.C.,  Commission  on  the  Arts  and  Department  of  En- 
vironmental Services  Wall  Mural  Program,  103,  235,  324 
Watts  Towers  Art  Center  (Los  Angeles),  191,  277 
Watts  Towers  Art  Center  murals  (Los  Angeles),  277,  278,  279,  280 
Wave,  The,  (Chicago),  94,  95 
Weber,  John,  8,  58,  59,  86,  87,  93,  132  n.  18,  224, 225,  334,  337,  338U 

342ff,  345,  353,  i55ff,  365,  377ff,  386f,  404,  41  If,  425f,  433,  436f, 

451,474 
Wehrle,  John,  459,  460 
Weiss,  Cvnthia,  333{ 
Welton,  Roland,  279,  280 
Western  Addition  Project  Art  Committee  (WAPAC;  San  Francisco), 

257,  258,  342,  395,  466 
West  Philadelphia  Boys  and  Girls  Club  mural,  208,  209 
West  Side  Community  Development  Corporation  (San  Bernardino), 

470  n. 15 
When  the  Prison  Doors  Open  (Frontera,  Calif.),  236 
White,  Charles,  24,  40,  345,  395,  403 
Wiegand,  Robert,  37,  452,  «J 

Williams,  Arch,  «,  131,  154, /55,  245,  2^(Jf,  2-^*,  264,  342,  i57,  416 
Williams,  Caleb,  155,  246 


516  /  COMMUNITY  MURALS 

Williams,  Douglas,  2J5 

Williams,  Sonva,  286,  287 

Winds  of  Change  (Berkcky),  269,270,  342 

Winters,  Emily,  17S 

Wolverton,  Ken,  493 

Women  as  a  theme  in  murals,  12f,  73,  82,  84,  95f,  98f,  112,  113,  164, 

16S{,  187,  190,  203,  219,  220,  336,  337,  338,  339 
Women  Hold  Up  Half  the  Sky  (New  York),  219,  220 
Women's  Mural  {Sin  Diego),  164,  165f 
Women's  Struggle  (Chicago),  20.? 
Woo,  John,  298,299 
Wood,  Clarence,  14,  101,  102,  103,  208,  209,  323,  356f,  365,  376f, 

413 
Woodruff,  Hale,  24,  101 
Work,  Education,  and  Struggle:  Seeds  for  Progressive  Change  (New  York), 

218{,  476 
Work  Force  (Chicago),  225,  226 

Work,  need  to  make  it  creative  and  cultural,  17ff,  41,  466f 
Worker  and  community  controlled  enterprises,  467,  470  n.  17 
Workers'  control  necessary  for  art,  385,  406  n.5,  467 
Working  people  as  creators  of  civilization  and  culture,  227f,  247 
Works  of  Art  in  Public  Places  (WAPP),  42  3f,  439  n.27 


Works  Progress  Administration  (WPA),  150,  177,  428 
Wyatt,Jr.,  Richard,  29,  i/ 
Wynn,  Dan,  103,  104 

Yamagata,  Susan,  293f,  295,  342,  360 

Yamashita,  Sachio,  94,  95 

Yanagisawa,  James,  88,  203,  204i,  224,  226{,  243,  364,  379,  403,  405 

Yaiiez,  Ren^,  18,  40,  149,  155,  242,  343,  352,  384,  413f,  421f,  426f, 

429f,  434,  436 
Yasko,  Caryl,  88,  200,  201,  225,  226,  227,  228i,  235,  243,  329,  332, 

341ff,  353,  364,  377i,  390,  404,  437 
Yo  Soy  Chicana;  Olmeca  (Chicago),  329,  332 
Young,  Bernard,  103 
Young,  Milton,  278 
Young  Lords,  93 

Young  Muralists  Workshop  (Brooklyn),  316 
Youth  Liberation  Conference  (Denver),  64 
Yucatan  (New  York),  320 

Zellerbach,  Harold,  429,  452 
Zeno,  230f,  2i2,2ii 


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