Schools Before Jail: mural project

Abstract

Schools Before Jail: mural project Kamala Platt (bio) “Schools Before Jail” is a mural that youth painted in a Summer Mural Project in Austin TX in the mid 1990s. We created shadow murals through a process I learned from Mark Rogovin and Barbara Brown while interning at the Public Art Workshop in Chicago. The youth created a narrative about a chosen topic and some participants acted out the story under “limelight” created by flashlights and slide projectors while others traced the resulting shadow people whom we then painted. One of the murals that stands out most in my memory was “Schools Before Jail,” in which we marked lines over the shadow people to represent being behind bars—something too familiar in the lived experience of the families of the painters. About a decade after that summer of painting at the Barrio Resource Center on Austin’s East Side, I visited one family who had been a big part of the Mural Project and learned what had happened to some of the young artists in the intervening years. Unfortunately, the desire and demand expressed in the mural’s title—putting education before prison—had not been realized, either in the larger geopolitical arena or for most of the students in the Mural Project, personally. When I learned that the prison sentence for one of the youths exceeded his age when we were painting murals, the image of “Schools Before Jail” flashed to my mind. I remembered the young artist posing for the narrative he and his peers developed, but fidgeting all the while, not wanting to sit still. Click for larger view View full resolution My sadness that the legacy of imprisonment continues for another generation is tempered only slightly by the knowledge that the young muralist has continued his artwork, as well as an interest in science, in prison. The correspondence I have kept suggests that he is following another legacy in prison, that of Raúl R. Salinas, pinto poet & a mainstay in East Austin where he was proprietor of Resistencia Bookstore and Red Salmon Press at the time we were painting in that barrio. Raúl was part of a community in prison who transformed the institution set to confine their lives into a place where they were able to take control of their own education and redefine themselves in revolutionary ways that rarely happen in schools. This photo of “Schools Before Jail” is dedicated to those in subsequent generations who, like Raúl, put “schools before jail,” regardless of their surroundings. [End Page 31] Kamala Platt Kamala Platt is a writer, artist, professor, activist & independent scholar living and working in South Texas and at the Meadowlark Center. A forthcoming article in a special issue of Works and Days on women and wars comparatively examines cultural resistance to walls and militarization in Palestine and South Texas borderlands. Copyright © 2010 Radical Teacher