Dewey Crumpler's Multi-Ethnic Heritage Murals: Mexican Encounters and Radical Solidarity

At the height of the Black Arts Movement, San Francisco artist Dewey Crumpler (b.1949) traveled to Mexico with an introduction to Elizabeth Catlett provided by E.J. Montgomery. In previous decades Mexico had become a refuge for African American artists, Catlett foremost among them, who sought respite from repressive Cold War politics and unrelenting racism at home. In Mexico, these artists found a space of radical solidarity. Crumpler went to Mexico to learn about mural painting before undertaking his Multi-Ethnic Heritage murals (completed 1974), commissioned in response to African American and Native American students’ demands that Russian-born artist Victor Arnautoff’s thirteen-panel Life of George Washington mural series, painted in 1936 at San Francisco’s George Washington High School, be removed and replaced. Arnautoff, who worked with muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico from 1929 until 1931, shared the Mexican muralists’ commitment to painting as a political act – a means to oppose racism, class exploitation, colonialism, and US imperialism. Meeting Catlett was crucial for Crumpler’s understanding of art’s educative potential, as were lessons learned from muralists Pablo O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros about murals as a spatially dynamic form of liberatory social critique - evident in Crumpler’s three-panel Multi-Ethnic Heritage and his impassioned defense of Arnautoff’s critique of the racist veneration of the first US president in the murals currently slated for obscuration. “If you run away from history, you’ll never change history,” Crumpler contends in support of the radical potential of the vibrant intersectional artistic lineage he encountered in Mexico.