Murals for the People: Art, Community, and Black Liberation in Chicago ca. 1967

This paper examines the intersections between the Black Arts movement and the community mural movement in Chicago. In 1967, the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) installed the Wall of Respect, a collective portrait of black heroes, on the side of a tavern in a South Side “black ghetto.” As the artists worked, the streets around the mural became a gathering place for a range of activities including musical and theatrical performances, political rallies, protests, and idle spectatorship. An examination of the Wall and the community mural movement it initiated, reassesses the formal debates that defined murals by OBAC and other black artists specifically, and the Black Arts movement more broadly, as a mere rehashing of social realism, or as Elsa Honig Fine described the murals in 1971: “crude, obvious, and primitive.” An analysis of the mural’s visual aesthetics and photographs of the social processes surrounding their production and reception demonstrates the ways that murals proposed community formations that emulated the sociality of urban street culture in a sort of call-and-response between the artists and the people. These projects conjured a radical black collectivity that redefined the so-called ghetto as a ground for the struggle for black liberation and imagined new ways of being in the streets that challenged notions of citizenship, ownership, and agency. This paper proposes that reconstructing the histories of community murals will not only help reassess the much-maligned cultural nationalisms of the 1960s and 70s, but it will also realign genealogies of today’s social practice art.