PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

María Galindo:
Bolivian Debtors
a Creative Force

Coco Fusco:
Now Playing:
Exotic People

Michael Schnorr:
Border Works
Tie Local to Global

María Esther Francia:
Uruguayan Youths
With Unruly Tastes

Slideshow:
Mosaic of the Americas

Books

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001 

Out of the Studio, Into the Streets

John Pitman Weber creates public and exhibition art and teaches at Elmhurst College. He has public work in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Chicago. With William Walker, he co-founded the Chicago Public Art Group. With the late Eva Cockcroft, he co-authored Toward a People’s Art (Dutton, 1977; University of New Mexico, 1998). He based this essay on ‘Perspectiva Sobre Arte Público Alternativo,’ his article in the December 1987 Nicaráuac, the cultural magazine of revolutionary Nicaragua.

Alternative public art first appeared in the revolutionary and anti-colonial upheavals accompanying World War I. Suppressed or domesticated during the 1930s, it reappeared in the late 1960s on a world scale, notably in the United States. In the context of mass social movements, the presence of “the people” as a visible and autonomous actor inspired small groups of artists and larger groups of art students in several countries to question their relation to society. The most radical tendency led to the community arts movement. To be revolutionary in art, we declared, is to affirm the people’s right not just to consume culture, but to participate in it.

We necessarily affirmed the pluralism of cultures. This affirmation contrasted with the idea of providing access to “quality” art as defined by the “great, national” culture enshrined by central institutions. Regardless of how far access is extended, we said, any policy that perpetuates hierarchic inequality of cultures leaves untouched a one-sided class character and ethnocentrism. Central to our cultural-democracy agenda was changing the locus of art. Entering the public arena beyond the commodity art market, we reached a different audience in a different way. Our motto: “Out of the studio, into the streets.”

A wave of wall painting began in 1967 when William Walker and nearly two dozen other black artists in Chicago created the Wall of Respect. The participatory aspect of this “mural movement” had appeared earlier in Lilli Ann Killen Rosenberg’s mosaics with children on New York’s Lower East Side. Other types of wall painting—abstract in New York, photo-realist/surrealist and Chicano in Los Angeles—originated at about the same time.

Those of us, mostly women and Latinos, who grasped these examples and became muralists experienced a conversion. We felt a rapidly addictive excitement from collaborating with other artists and our audience, from exercising with big spaces and big ideas, from the complexity and specificity of the context. Absorbed in mastering a monumental art, in negotiating funding and sites, we gave scant attention to cultural theory. Though some of us were influenced by the democratic aspects of Mao’s thought—we knew Black Panther Party activist Fred Hampton’s slogan, “Serve the people, learn from the people”—some of us recognized a clearer articulation of our partially realized ambitions in the thought of Brazilian popular-education pioneer Paulo Freire.

Accompanying community organizing that emphasized grassroots “empowerment,” mural painting spread from black neighborhoods to mixed areas to white ethnic neighborhoods to smaller cities. The movement rejected “leftist” dogma in order to reach local majorities, a necessity for an art exposed to the risk of direct action criticism (defacement). At our best, we tested and extended the limits of the reformist consciousness of our audiences.

The murals only partially constituted an art of protest, and decreasingly so. As monumental art, they were necessarily affirmative. Yet the works affirmed a vision of present and future that diverged sharply from what the mass media and the government were presenting. Claiming the right to “name the world” implies a certain critical activity. Middle-class viewers often misunderstood the work or considered it threatening. Unaccustomed to being outsiders, they had difficulty interpreting an art informed by a different aesthetic and rich in local references.

Though strands of this movement varied greatly—frequently mixing folk art with “high” classical sources—the bright palettes and drama favored by several ethnic groups conflicted with the image of respectability sought by the professional and propertied middle class. Popular murals, moreover, tended to break open or reveal the wall, while bourgeois murals tended to wrap or screen it, reflecting two different attitudes toward expression and “reality.”

Following the Wall of Respect, several waves of community-based artists participated in the movement. Few held academic positions. While the demands of multiple roles, slim and uncertain funding, and isolation from colleagues took a toll, many of the artists found the work a powerful stimulant to their aesthetic development. Community-based public art spread to every U.S. region and took increasingly diverse forms.

In recent decades, however, community arts groups have been under pressure to institutionalize their work, transforming it into a social service and re-establishing “normal, professional expertise” and “distance from the clients.” The clients are now usually community “leaders” rather than grassroots residents. Authentic contact with the audience becomes difficult at a time of demobilization of popular movements. Painted murals in many cities have been abandoned to commercial decorators.

But community-based public art has persisted despite a fashionable rise of decorative architectural illusionism and despite the defunding, collapse or defensive retrenchment of many community-controlled programs. Once established with local audiences, an art form can outlive the political period that gave it birth, perhaps because the demand for culture goes beyond the limits of the immediate political slogan or program.

In the 1980s, new initiatives included deliberately ephemeral or portable work such as window installations, altered billboards, banner murals, spray-can art, street projections and stencils. Other initiatives involved more permanent media—mosaics, concrete relief murals and freestanding sculpture—often in relation to community gardens, self-built parks, schools or play areas.

The 1990s saw a new generation of community-based public artists involved in vigorous experimental efforts to reach new audiences, new contexts. So far, however, the work has no firm rooting in social movements. While public art continues to advance democratic demands in many other countries, it lacks clear perspectives here.

With resistance to corporate globalization on the rise, U.S. artists must take the initiative, with the people, to reinvent cultural forms of struggle. As Guinean freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral emphasized in 1970, movements for social change and equality cannot succeed without movements for democratic culture. “The history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture,” he said. “It is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition.”

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