Early in 2012, we were invited by Harriet Senie and Cher Krause Knight to co-edit a special issue of Public Art Dialogue on the topic of new modes and theories of mural production and reception. Excited to initiate a conversation about a relatively understudied type of public art, yet one with a longstanding tradition and controversial history in the United States, we agreed. We called it “The Mural Issue” with an eye to identifying the special issue's content, of course, but also to highlight the conflicts murals have provoked as sites for public controversy, artistic debate, and conservation challenges. We widely distributed our call for papers and waited to see how academics and artists alike were thinking about twenty-first-century innovations in the art and scholarship of murals. To our surprise, we received few submissions that directly addressed new ways of making murals, startling in an age of ephemeral digital media, and an equally low number of essays that explicitly engaged a methodology of mural scholarship. In other words, neither a coherent field of mural studies nor a historiographical literature on murals emerged in the way we had anticipated when we first envisioned the project.
What we did receive, however, delighted us and blew away our expectations. The whole concept of the mural had been taken far beyond the realm of art history with application well outside the conventions of the 1930s Federal Arts Project and the murals of the WPA or even the energetic, identity-forming, and provocative political murals of the west coast 1970s Chicano Movement. Instead, the submissions foregrounded an organic interdisciplinarity in which murals served as inroads into conversations about urban development, public space, corporate art, vernacular culture, and expressive aesthetics, all with significance for a variety of scholarly fields. Foremost we were impressed with the essays' international range, with contributions from the United States, Mexico, Central America, Europe, and Asia, as well as by their critical focus on cities. Clearly the socioeconomic and cultural implications of the contemporary global city had new implications for wall art.
The relationship of murals to cities was further reinforced by Joyce Kozloff's artist's project submission, “Portals.” We were familiar with her public artwork from the 1970s and 1980s — usually in mosaic form, with an emphasis on the decorative as subject-matter — and were also admiring of her book art; and agreed that she would be a perfect choice. But just as our expectations about the essays on mural painting were challenged, so too were we surprised, and thrilled, by Kozloff's project — pictures of decorated walls, gateways, doors, and windows that she photographed while on a tour of China's Silk Road, the ancient nexus of world commerce. Like many of the essays included here, the artist's project posited a new role for wall art — one more reflective of globalized urbanism with its complex interplay of consumer capitalism, vernacular expression, and counterhegemonic claims to urban space.
Together, the artist's project and the essays allow new ways of thinking about the wall itself. To navigate a city, which all of these works do in different ways, is to encounter walls and negotiate ways of moving around, over, or through them. Kozloff's concept of portals helps us think about the wall as not just a blank canvas upon which to paint, but an obstruction, gate, or threshold to cross. In this new framing, murals serve as a means through the wall, through the city, and through the thicket of traditional thinking about wall art. No longer are there sharp breaks between the decorative and the political; the officially sanctioned and the vernacular; or even the public and the private. The global expansion of capitalism into everyday life has pushed the conversation about wall art into one that's not simply about what the mural looks like, its political or social meaning, or even how it impacts the viewer; rather, the question becomes how does the mural, loosely defined, change our perception of the urban wall both physically and symbolically?
To help promote what we believe is an evolution in the thinking about mural painting, we abandoned conventional categories for the genre and let the essays dictate three thematic divisions: Interior Murals, Claiming the City, and Street Art. We start with the essays that deal with the most conventional murals found indoors on the walls of public institutions and private corporations. These two essays by Kathryn O'Rourke and Monica Jovanovich-Kelley reassess the great mural era of the 1930s, which we tend to ascribe to the “Big Three” muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco in Mexico, and the Federal Arts Project post office and school murals in the United States. O'Rourke's study of an overlooked series of 1929 murals by Rivera for the Ministry of Health in Mexico City reminds us that modernist mural projects were well underway by the 1930s and engaged with prescient topics such as biological science, genetics, race, and the shaping of national identities. Jovanovich-Kelley's essay is an examination of 1930s murals commissioned by Los Angeles' major business interests for new corporate office buildings. During the height of the Great Depression in Los Angeles when there was widespread unemployment, three different corporate patrons — the Title Guarantee and Trust, the Southern California Electric Company, and the Los Angeles Times — commissioned murals as a visual strategy to emphasize their role in modernizing the city. Both essays take the interior mural well beyond decorative embellishment or the resurrection of lost wall art to posit the commissioned mural as a key piece of a historical puzzle that connects local urban issues to national concerns about economics and political power.
The second section of our special issue falls under the rubric “Claiming the City.” In the essays of Andrew Wasserman and Carolyn Loeb, artists and community activists alike deployed huge exterior murals to lay claim to parts of New York City and West Berlin, respectively, during a period of rapid transition in each city. Wasserman's “Beyond The Wall: Redefining City Walls' ‘Gateway to SoHo’” asks readers to rethink the process of gentrification in 1960 and 1970s New York. Resurrecting two destroyed murals by artist Jason Crum (Peace, 1969) and Mel Pekarsky (Untitled, 1972) and placing them in relation to the extant piece, Untitled (The Wall) (1973) by Forrest Myers, Wasserman argues that the bureaucratic and popular claiming of Myers' mural as the “Gateway to SoHo” inadvertently turns a community artwork into a piece of commercial and civic advertising. During the 1970s, as New York underwent the start of what would become extensive urban development after decades of postwar urban decline, the artists' collective City Walls, Inc. produced massive, sometimes trompe-l'oeil, murals to enliven bombed-out and vandalized neighborhoods. As these areas gentrified, such community murals became appropriated as markers of “art” and the real estate values that accompanied it, undermining their original purpose as guardians of public space. Carolyn Loeb's “West Berlin Walls: Public Art and the Right to the City” evokes urban theorists David Harvey and Henri Lefebre's Marxist concept of urbanism as class struggle to explain the explosion of mural art in 1970s and 1980s West Berlin. Produced by professional and amateur artists, and supported by municipal programs, the murals were not just aesthetically appealing works camouflaging firewalls and bullet holes but creative visual strategies to retain public space and community involvement as private interests increasingly capitalized on cheap real estate.
We end with street art because it is a global phenomenon that has emerged as one of the best-known forms of wall painting. With roots in New York's hip hop and graffiti culture of the 1970s, and Los Angeles' long history of gang tags, street art has emerged as a controversial form — some seeing it as vandalism, others condemning it for substituting self-promoting (and well-compensated) artists for those with hard-earned street credentials. Shepard Fairey and Banksy represent two of the most famous street artists whose stencils, posters, and stickers, often reproduced en masse, have made them internationally successful but also spurred anger from anonymous and uncompensated graffiti artists long active in our major cities. The 2011 “Art in the Streets” show at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art controversially highlighted the range of street art by moving the ephemeral and underground into the brightly lit, commercially sanctioned space of the blockbuster museum exhibition. But street art can also include various types of provocative and vernacular painting, which are examined thoughtfully by Rachel Heidenry in her essay, “The Murals of El Salvador: Reconstruction, Historical Memory, and Whitewashing,” and by Lu Pan on the unofficial, unauthorized graffiti art of Hong Kong in her piece “Writing at the End of History: Reflections on Two Cases of Graffiti in Hong Kong.” Pan's unexpected focus on the popular protests in Hong Kong following the imprisonment of the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, and what she calls the “Graffiti Girl” incident, reminds us of how subversive street art can be. This concluding essay, because of its locus in China, returns us to Joyce Kozloff's Silk Road project. Collectively these six essays and “Portals” invite us to expand our conventional notions around mural painting and to consider how its role as a global agent of reform and community imbues it new meaning and urgency.