Mural Project Research Articles

Citizen Art: A Creative Mural Project for Community Building

Citizen Art: A Creative Mural Project for Community Building

Advancing positive social determinants of health through collective impact and the 100% New Mexico Model

BackgroundCommunities across the U.S. and globally confront the challenge of transforming negative social determinants of health (SDOH) into positive ones. To address this complex social problem, the collective impact (CI) approach has promise but has been critiqued for insufficiently challenging structural inequities. Research applying CI to SDOH is limited. This mixed-methods study examined early adoption of CI in the 100% New Mexico initiative that aims to address SDOH population-wide in a state with strong cultural identity and assets but also persistent socio-economic inequality.MethodsA web-based survey, interviews and focus groups were conducted with initiative participants in June and July 2021. Survey participants rated agreement on a 4-point scale with six items assessing CI foundation adapted from the Collective Impact Community Assessment Scale. Interviews and focus groups centered on motivation to engage, progress achieved in model components, CI core conditions, and contextual factors influencing experiences. Surveys were analyzed using descriptive means and proportions. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis and an inductive approach followed by stratified analyses and co-interpretation of emergent findings with model developers.ResultsFifty-eight participants completed the survey, and 21 individuals participated in interviews (n = 12) and two focus groups (n = 9). Survey mean scores were highest related to initiative buy-in and commitment, and lower related to shared ownership, having multiple perspectives and voices involved, and adequate resources. Qualitative results showed that the framework’s cross-sector emphasis helped motivate participation. Participants embraced the focus on leveraging existing community assets that is characteristic of CI and the current framework. Counties implemented effective engagement and visibility strategies including mural projects and book clubs. Participants expressed communication challenges across county sector teams which influenced feelings of accountability and ownership. Participants did not report challenges lacking relevant, available, and timely data or tension between funder-driven and community-driven desired outcomes, in contrast with previous CI research.ConclusionMultiple foundational conditions of CI were supported in 100% New Mexico, including evidence for support of the common agenda addressing SDOH, shared measurement framework, and mutually reinforcing activities. Study results suggest that efforts to launch CI to address SDOH, which is by nature multi-sector, should include robust strategies to address communication needs of local teams. The use of community-administered surveys to identify gaps in SDOH resource access contributed to ownership and a sense of collective efficacy that may portend sustainability; however, relying on volunteers in the absence of other resources extensively also threatens sustainability.

Monumentalizing “The Collective”

Abstract By analyzing the public mural paintings sponsored by the French state to help artists survive the economic crisis around the time of the Popular Front, this article intends to contribute to the study of the relationship between mass politics and mass culture in the 1930s. After addressing French and foreign views on mural art as well as state agendas behind mural commissions, the study examines the social and political significance of state-financed mural projects. Frequently large-scale and realized in a figurative style, murals portrayed collectivities in instants of conviviality and extolled the solidaristic ties binding them. State-financed mural paintings, I contend, monumentalized “the collective” so to create unity and collective spirit. Thereby, they created a visual politics that helped bridge the gap between art and the people and became agents of mass politics at a time of political instability.

Bricozaje: Between Contested Terrains and Aesthetic Borderlands

This essay examines public artworks by Jari “WERC” Alvarez and Geraldine “Gera” Lozano in San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas. It theorizes “bricozaje,” a concept that combines the terms “bricolage” and “mestizaje,” to argue that the artists enact a reparative relationship to the works’ sites through their use of imagery. The essay first looks at Alvarez’s and Lozano’s sketchbooks to trace bricozaje’s valences as a material practice and critique of bricolage. It proceeds to examine bricozaje as a collaborative practice through the creation of La Entrada (2009), a mural project in San Diego. It then contextualizes the public art project Bright Women (2011) in relation to representations of the US-Mexico border, and concludes by articulating how bricozaje acts as a formal strategy through Lozano’s engagement with gendered iconography.

Translator Education with University Extra Mural Projects: Literary Translation Practice

The extramural project “Translator education: literary translation practice” (FORTRALIT) started in 2017 at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). It aims at promoting the practice of literary translation through two main actions: the translation of reports written by professional (literary) translators whose subject matter should be their own professional practice, and the (re)translation of literary texts. The article intends to describe the FORTRALIT Project and to briefly expose some of the activities developed in the scope of the Project. In addition, it intends to detail a task carried out in the scope of the Portuguese/English language pair by students of the Language/Literature course, and to report the views of one of the trainees. The pedagogical basis of the FORTRALIT project encompasses discussions about the training of translators as well as researchers’ views on retranslation and its use for teaching literary translation. FORTRALIT favours the teaching of translation as advocated by Hurtado Albir (2005, 2020), in other words, based on the development of (sub)translation skills and on the focus on tasks. In the context of FORTRALIT, the task of (re)translation (a “reading exercise”, “stealth retranslation” or “retranslation proper”) was chosen in these first years of activity. The task seems useful as one offering both a reflection on the “incompleteness” inherent in the translation process - by comparing various translations, for example - and a practical translation exercise followed by reflection and discussion based on a comparison with models that would be “canonical”.

Painting over precarity: Community public art and the optics of dispossession, gentrification and governance in West Oakland, CA

Large-scale arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community art projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California. Community murals of the 1960s to 1990s played a critical social role by making visible minority concerns and galvanizing movements for social justice, but questions emerge about contemporary community art in relation to neoliberal values and urban precarity. The Black neighbourhood of West Oakland has been resistant to gentrification due to decades of disinvestment and through robust activism against displacement in one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research and situated visual analysis, I show how neighbourhood resistance was only overcome when change appeared to come from the ‘community’ itself, through the specific imagery and spatiality of community mural projects that resignify the neighbourhood to accommodate gentrification. I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring. Real-estate interests also appropriate signifiers of ‘community’ to reshape neighbourhood identity, valorize property, and police public space. I argue that in West Oakland the ‘community mural’ is vertically integrated in municipal and capital logics that serve to dis-embed, rather than support, historic neighbourhood populations.

Three monumental murals for Baghdad: Data from Mahmoud Sabri, Shams al-Din Faris, Ahmed al Numan study years in the USSR in context

The first Iraqi undergraduate and postgraduate students to study monumental art came to Moscow in the early 1960s. Mahmoud Sabri (1927–2012) joined the Vasily Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute in 1960, Shams al-Din Faris (1937–83) and Ahmed al Numan (1939–2013) joined the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in 1961. In this article, I will address the subject of the graduation mural projects created by these three Iraqi artists within the ideological framework of socialist realism in art and art education in the USSR, and influenced also by their own historical and political environments. My aim is to answer various questions surrounding the historical framework of the murals, such as by whom, when, where and how they were created, why they became a manifestation of the students’ political and social experiences and hopes and why these grand projects were, unfortunately, never realized. Explaining the history of the artworks and artistic practice, I will argue that, as products of the final outcome of knowledge transfer at that time, these artworks are effectively documents of their era, responding to and reflecting their socio-historical contexts both in Iraq and in the USSR.

Edna Collins’s Camp Swift Murals and German Prisoners of War

Edna Collins’s Camp Swift Murals and German Prisoners of War Cynthia Brandimarte (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Postcard of Recreation Hall No. 1 interior, Camp Swift. Figure 2 shows a mural featuring Moses Austin, Baron de Bastrop, and Antonio María Martínez visible on the right side of the rear wall. From the author’s collection. Texas artist Edna Collins left behind a rich record of her experiences when she designed and created murals for recreational buildings at the largest U.S. Army camp in the United States, Camp Swift in Texas, during World War II. Her murals were images of Texas and its history, as well as genre scenes of Mexico. She designed them to adorn buildings used by American soldiers whose knowledge of Texas and Mexico usually did not extend beyond what they knew from popular culture. Assisting her were artistically talented German prisoners of war (or POWs) and a few of Collins’s artist friends. Although the murals Collins created at Camp Swift did not survive the camp’s closure and sale of excess materials in 1948, photographs and sketches of the murals illustrate the work Collins did and amplify her recollections of it.1 For historians, Collins’s reminiscences, sketches, and photographs invite an examination that is relevant to current scholarship. [End Page 127] Collins’s works demonstrate the value placed on murals and other art by the U.S. military during the two world wars and the interwar period. They also record the use of POW artists to create murals in wartime internment camps like Camp Swift. Collins’s story is uncommon; there appear to have been relatively few civilian artists employed by the U.S. military for mural projects, few of those artists were women, and few collections of textual and visual records comparable to those Collins left us have been preserved. Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1885, Collins moved to Austin after her father, a pianist, accepted positions as choir director at St. David’s Episcopal Church and music teacher at the Texas School for the Blind.2 Collins attended Austin High School and took private art lessons from Robert Jerome Hill at the University of Texas (UT).3 Enrolling at UT, she took Samuel Gideon’s architecture class and Raymond Everett’s class in free-hand drawing and watercolors.4 As a sorority member, she met and befriended young women from across Texas and traveled to their hometowns to visit their families and attend their weddings.5 Her work habits and curiosity of mind attracted many friends, and her parents’ involvements in Austin’s cultural community gave Collins entrée to the city’s artistic circles. Amid her school, social, and cultural activities, Collins studied, practiced, and taught art.6 She took a short-term position as resident instructor in the Davis Mountains, where she stayed first at the Kingston Ranch and then at Duncan’s Ranch, absorbing unfamiliar landscapes she would later [End Page 128] depict in murals.7 During the 1910s, Collins became a mainstay of the Austin art community as an educator and exhibitor.8 A member and officer of the Austin Art League and the Texas Fine Arts Association, she was part of the art scene centering on the Elizabet Ney house.9 During the 1920s, Collins moved between Austin, Dallas, and New York City.10 While attending classes at the Art Students League in New York, she studied with Allen Tucker, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Dimitri Romanofski.11 When in Austin, she maintained a studio, taught at St. Mary’s Academy, and increased the frequency of her exhibitions.12 Competing at the State Fair of Texas in 1924, Collins was awarded first prize for oil portraiture.13 In 1925, she entered the Texas Art Exhibition of Fort Worth, at which she continued to exhibit during the following decade.14 In 1928, Collins entered the San Antonio Competition Exhibition, and she joined the Southern States Art League in 1929.15 She also competed in shows in Denver and Chicago.16 Collins worked mainly in portraiture during the interwar period, having received encouragement in this art form from her male instructors...

Heritage Art with an Intent

A collaborative research project called JAL explored the role and potential for the arts to support water security activities in Rajasthan. The intent was to learn about some of the challenges facing people in rural Rajasthan and to draw on the region’s heritage toward arts-led research, practice and thinking to help address critical water issues. One project that emerged from the fieldwork took its inspiration from the murals of Shekhawati and the ancient phad (painted scroll with stories) storytelling tradition of Rajasthan. It involved local artists who painted a wall with water stories in the village Jhakhoda. The artists also painted a scroll that a local storyteller could use to share with other villages. This article offers a report of the mural project, its process and outcome and the insights gained from a close engagement with the community in the village. The experiences signal the rich potential of collaboration with communities and across disciplines, as well as the role of the arts and artists in engaging with and addressing critical global challenges, such as water security.

Breaking Bars: Community-Based Art Therapy Mural Project

This article details a community-based art therapy mural project with young people involved in New York City’s justice system. To address the racial and economic oppression they confront, the project aimed to increase social bonds and create social power shifts within a collective community. Examples from two projects, Good Art: Bad City and Welcome to Our World, demonstrate ways to mitigate power differentials, facilitate community conversations, provide therapeutic benefits, and institute advocacy efforts.

‘We will always be street’

I have learned much about the limits and transformative potential of the street, la calle, as a site of struggle from and with radical organizations fighting against state violence in the urban global South. In this essay, I draw from these experiences as I continue to accompany various street-level social movements in Colombia and Uganda. I draw attention to the street as a site where state violence is enacted in tangible forms across scales. I illustrate, through discussion of a particular mural project in Bogotá, the way the state exerts its power and presence in society as pitted against the image of the urban poor. I urge scholars of street-level social movements and state violence to continue to look at this space of antagonism between the street and the state as a productive analytical space for radical geography and social movement scholarship, while keeping in mind the illustrated tensions. Additionally, in future work, I suggest we take a closer look at the class contrasts in street-level justice-seeking; the street, as a political space of encounter, between people propelled by the emotive forces of indignation and rage in mass acts of justice-seeking and those propelled by the structural forces of inequality and violence.

The Disappeared Are Appearing: Murals that Recover Communal Memory

ABSTRACT∞ Relatives of the disappeared during the last civic–military dictatorship in Argentina who were able to recover the human remains of their family members through the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, or EAAF), painted a mural in March 2014. ‘The Disappeared Are Appearing’ is a collaborative and community-based mural project designed, rendered and completed by the relatives of victims of state terror in Argentina. The participating family members of the disappeared had recovered the human remains of their beloved relatives through the tenacious and constant work of the EAAF, a nongovernmental, not-for-profit, scientific organization. It was established in 1984 to investigate the cases of at least 9,000 disappeared people in Argentina under the military government that ruled from 1976 to 1983.

‘Tomorrow we make it better’: an art therapist’s reflection on a community mural in a refugee camp in Greece

ABSTRACTThis paper will explore an art therapist facilitated mural within a refugee camp in Greece. It will present literature regarding a ‘psychosocial’ frame of art therapy and its considered relevance when working with refugee populations, drawing particular attention to theory on working cross culturally, outside the art therapy room, and the art making process. It will describe the context and present a vignette that reflects on the author’s own challenges and discoveries within the mural project that may indicate its significance within the art therapy field. The discussion will explore the possible benefits and value of art mural practice, including thoughts on symbolism within the process and final image. Limitations and further recommendations will be explored and considered. The paper will conclude that a psychosocial approach provides an appropriate framework for art therapists working with refugees and that community murals may hold therapeutic value that could be further explored with primary research and data gathered from participants to expand the discussion of its relevance as a practice within the field. The implications of this paper are that future research into art therapist facilitated community murals is possible within a similar framework and can be used when working with a community of people who have experienced displacement in order to address some of the psychological and social needs.Plain-language summaryThis paper is an art therapist’s reflection on a community mural co-facilitated by a team of art therapists in a refugee camp in Greece.The paper will examine a ‘psychosocial’ approach within art therapy, whereby the psychological and social needs of a person/s are considered, it will also discuss ideas on working outside the art therapy room and theories relating to the healing elements in a therapeutic art making process.A vignette will describe the personal experiences of an art therapist facilitating a mural within a refugee camp in Greece. The paper will then discuss the possible therapeutic value of the mural, and the benefits of art therapist facilitated community art making that could be drawn from the vignette.The paper will conclude that further research is needed into art therapist facilitated community murals to enhance the discussion and that it would benefit from participant’s voices to understand how they experience the practice and to determine any therapeutic value. The paper implies that community murals are a relevant practice to consider within the scope of the art therapy profession and that within a similar framework it can be employed to address the psychological and social needs of a displaced community.

Communicating computational concepts and practices within high school students’ portfolios of making electronic textiles

ABSTRACTPortfolios have recently gained traction within computer science education as a way to assess students’ computational thinking and practices. Whereas traditional assessments such as exams tend to capture learning within artificial settings at a single point in time, portfolios provide more authentic opportunities to document a trajectory of students’ learning and practices in everyday contexts. Furthermore, because communication itself has been defined as an important computational thinking practice, portfolios give students a place to practice this skill in the classroom. In this study, we report on the implementation of a digital portfolio with a class of 21 high school students used to capture the process of creating of an electronic textile mural project. While students’ understanding of computational concepts were only partially captured within the portfolios, their engagements with computational practices – such as debugging and iteration – were better highlighted. Much of this was due to the students’ existing communicative strategies themselves, both in terms of how precise they were in describing issues, as well as how they leveraged images and code to explain their process. Recommendations for designing more effective portfolio assessments are discussed, which include greater emphasis on creating shared classroom discourse, and leveraging students’ existing experiences with multimedia.

Convivio: Tolerance, Diversity, and Campus Identity During the Trump Era

In May 2017, twenty “student-artists” at Mary Baldwin University collaborated to create a mural about our institution and our very diverse student community. As a three week May Term course, the mural project continued a difficult conversation about diversity and inclusion on campus that occurred in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States. The purpose of this article is to discuss how ethnographic methods were used to develop mural themes, as well as to discuss the ways that the mural itself, and the process of its creation, reveal student anxieties about and responses to the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration. Despite the very real threats to their own safety and that of their family and friends, student-artists challenged the inherent insecurity caused by administration policies through their insistence on inclusion, tolerance, and co-existence.

Medical History as Fine Art in American Mural Painting of the 1930s.

To illuminate popular notions of medical progress during the inter-war era, this article examines four large mural projects depicting medical history. Aside from portraits of individual medical heroes, such as Pasteur and Lister, artists also created imagery strongly contrasting traditional and modern medicine in general. This analysis features the works of four stylistically distinct artists (Bernard Zakheim, Charles Alston, William C. Palmer, and Victor Arnautoff), whose 1930s murals may be viewed today in San Francisco, New York City (Harlem and Queens), and Palo Alto, California. These murals are significant works of art in themselves, and they form an unusual group of special interest to historians because they took on an uncommon subject for the fine arts - the history of medicine - rather than what had long been the far more common portrayal of medicine by artists, namely contemporary medical scenes from their own era.

Pedagogies of being with: Witnessing, testimonio, and critical love in everyday social movement

This conceptual article explores education and the relational in everyday social movement. I highlight a single, local community event—a Speak Out—and travel with scholarship on public pedagogy, witnessing, and Latina feminist theories of coalition to articulate pedagogies of ‘being with’ in community activism for racial justice. My interpretive vignettes of the Speak Out are part of a larger ethnographic study focusing on a segment of a rural/small city community that moved with intention to teach and learn racial justice. While larger concrete goals were crucial and at the center of the community’s curriculum for justice, the various sites and forms of race-conscious pedagogy in public life—community forums, vigils, celebrations, mural projects—were also enactments of a profound commitment to the relational, to finding common ground in difficult solidarities. With a focus on the testimonios of three women of Color participants in the Speak Out, I show how witnessing and testimonio were at the center of pedagogies of ‘being with.’ In this work of education, the women (1) redefined community, accountability, and ally work, (2) exposed the fissures in social justice organizing across difference, describing commitment to social action with rather than for those most affected by institutional violence, and (3) affirmed the knowledge, histories, and self-determination of people of Color while challenging self-defeating stereotypes. Critical love sustained an ethics of openness to difference and facilitated the intentional work of creating race-conscious learning communities.

Toward an Ethical Reflective Practice of a Theory in the Flesh: Embodied Subjectivities in a Youth Participatory Action Research Mural Project.

The focus of this paper is to demonstrate how embodied subjectivities shape research experiences. Through an autoethnography of my involvement in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) after-school program with low-income and working-class youth of Color from predominantly Latinx communities I examined my embodied subjectivities, via an ethical reflective practice, as these surfaced in the research context. Autoethnography is presented as a tool to facilitate an ethical reflective practice that aligns with heart-centered work. Drawing from an epistemology of a theory in the flesh (Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981), embodied subjectivities are defined by the lived experiences felt and expressed through the body, identities, and positionalities of the researcher. The article concludes with implications for the development of community psychology competencies that attend to the researcher's embodied subjectivities.

Spaces of emergent memory: Detroit’s 8 Mile wall and public memories of civil rights injustice

ABSTRACTThis article introduces emergent memory, a conceptual extension to rhetorics of public memory, to describe memory’s genesis in sites built without commemorative commitments. Examining Detroit’s “8 Mile Wall,” a site built to reinforce segregated housing, this project argues the rhetorical tenets of emergent memory present in this space. As a relic of segregated history, the wall symbolically recalls the city’s controversial past, but has recently been the subject of a local mural project to redefine the wall’s purpose. Some consider this a step toward reclamation, as it visually repositions the disturbing remnant. For others, the murals simply cannot overwrite troubling memories of the city’s discriminatory history. This essay uses emergent memory to describe how the wall’s complicated mnemonic legacy simultaneously harkens to a difficult history and how the mural additions use that same legacy to convey an optimistic future for Detroit and those marked by this urban space.

Crossing Borders, Building Solidarity: Affective Labor in Shaping Coalitional Murals

In art worlds, as well as in popular representations of social movements, the product—whether it be a sculpture, painting, or performance for the former; or a demand, legislative win, or march for the latter—is often held as the measure of success for a communicative action. In this article, using the history of the collaborative United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) and Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT; or Authentic Workers’ Front) Cruzando Fronteras (Crossing Borders) solidarity mural project, we excavate the process of public art production as a practice of affective labor (Weeks 236; Federici) in the service of creating coalitional moments (Chávez). In so doing, we join critiques of interdisciplinary scholarship that reduce affective labor to “immaterial” status and question rhetorical scholarship’s preoccupation with the symbolic function of finished works. Instead, we elaborate the background work that goes into making public images. This builds upon already-rich scholarship in rhetoric of labor, feminist studies, affect studies, and Chicana studies.