On the Necessity of Murals in Boston
James Chang
Instructor’s Introduction
In WR120: Contemporary Art in Boston, students visit various sites around the city, exploring how artworks mediate their experience and connect them to broader social issues. As a class, we go to several museums and works of public art together, but students also meander and map the city on their own. Engaging a deep curiosity for public art’s realized effects on the city’s communities, James Chang’s essay, “On the Necessity of Murals in Boston,” transforms the author’s embodied wanderings and observations into a convincing essay. Through his analysis and development of several case studies, James helps readers recognize the essential role murals play in fostering democratic engagement, uplifting diverse and marginalized communities, and forging meaningful human connections.
The construction and reception of public art is especially complicated because there are many factors at play that go beyond the artwork’s form or iconography. As public art, murals engage questions surrounding city funding and policy, corporate development, the histories of a given site, changing neighborhoods and demographics, and shifting physical environments. James develops a clear narrative that beautifully responds to the ways in which different murals across Boston are interconnected with their varied physical and sociopolitical sites. He moves elegantly between describing the murals and locating them in larger theoretical models of site specificity. Readers can enjoy this essay for many things, but perhaps one of its most poignant messages is an implicit call for us to slow down, notice, and invest in the people and places that surround us.
Caitlin Dalton
From the Writer
As opposed to the traditional museum-space that most art occupies, murals are free to breathe their ambiance into the open air. As I argue within my essay, this uniqueness in location and form gives murals a platform for direct engagement with local communities.
I am of the opinion that Boston’s murals have a not-so-subtle effect on daily life in the greater area. They’ve definitely had an effect on me. Last semester I drew a small map of Boston with a circle around each mural I wanted to see – I think I circled a total of twenty locations. My goal was to visit them all before this essay was due. In the end I managed to see only twelve out of the twenty, but in the coming weeks I found that I would quite frequently stumble upon new murals wherever I went. It seems that murals are everywhere so long as we actively love and look for them.
On the Necessity of Murals in Boston
Washington Manor is a housing community just around the corner from Boston Medical Center. In the fall, when the mornings are not too cold, one or two of the building’s residents sit in wheelchairs by the front door. They are watching the busy pedestrians who, walking past the building, crane their necks towards the sky to gaze. These pedestrians are looking at Victor ‘MARKA27’ Quiñonez’s mural titled Souledad. It is hard to ignore – Souledad colors completely the east side of Washington Manor and extends to that point where the sky touches the tops of the wall. The mural is a grand depiction of a woman in African textiles carrying a radiant child on her back (fig. 1).[1] Surrounding her is a Chinese dragon, the Puerto Rican flag, and an abundance of water lilies and wisps of clouds and symbols for double happiness. If one stands directly underneath, falling leaves mingle with pink petals so that one’s person cannot discern that it is actually more the mural that sprinkles the sidewalk with color and less the trees.
As part of its 3-year Transformative Public Arts Program, the City of Boston has stated that in 2021 alone, more than $1 million were allotted to commissioning public arts across the city.[2] With this allotment, artists accomplished 11 large-scale murals and 27 short-term projects, with works spanning across Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, South End, and Allston.[3] Souledad was likely a $60,000 price tag. In the realm of public budgetary concerns, certain Bostonians are quick to object to such figures, instead favoring more pressing issues surrounding housing, health, education, public transportation, etc. Are these prices really justified? And what kind of an investment is this, if it is at all? I argue that, contrary to popular belief, murals do not serve a purely aesthetic function, nor are they limited in any manner by their aesthetic appearance. Murals extend, beyond that of mere decoration, the spark of sociopolitical action, the discourse of public platforms, and the voices of Boston’s marginalized communities; murals are cornerstones of hope and forward progress, and are therefore as much a necessity of investment for the public good as roads and bridges.
In order to ground this somewhat lofty claim, let us first turn to art historian Miwon Kwon, whose conceptual discussion of site specificity applies fittingly to the impacts of murals as public art. Kwon suggests that site-specific artworks carry with them both the impetus of past artworks and their current public art counterparts, which dot across a place to form an interconnected site of past and present.[4] By extension, Boston’s murals can be characterized as interconnected. As a prerequisite, they are attached to their sites because they function foremost for their individual communities. Together, these sites form a course of life upon which each site compounds and reflects upon the next in a cascade of imagery. Take, for example, Rob “Problak” Gibbs’ series of murals titled Breathe Life. In Breathe Life 1, a young black kid is breathing dreams like meteors through a residential building (fig. 2). The Boston-raised artist states that his mural gives “a nod to the past in order to breathe life into the future.”[5] This nod to the past alongside Problak’s other Breathe Life murals are all part of the impact of his work, which is a celebration of Roxbury’s history and a method of positive messaging for his community.[6]
Continuing with this framework for the interconnected site, there is also that historical impact garnered from mural movements of the past. These previous movements compound upon present works in Boston, and not without notice. One need only consider the Mexican Muralist movement and its tangible imprints on Mexican national pride in the late 1920s to see the force of murals and social realism on the present. Los Tres Grandes (Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco), or the big three as they were known, were so effective in their delivery that their sentiments spilled into the American psyche.[7] They inspired an entire generation of artists who emerged during the New Deal Federal Arts Project in the United States (fig. 3), and then again in the Chicano movement in the 60s and the mural movements in Chicago in the 70s.[8] These efforts and artworks are still felt today as a legacy of resilience. In consequence, it is the action of painting murals in the wake of past movements, especially those in the style of social realism, that fosters a vigorous relationship with democratic forms of expression. Literature scholar Charles Lesh’s discussion of graffiti is particularly relevant to this discussion, even though graffiti and publicly-commissioned murals occupy different relationships within public discourse. For Lesh, graffiti in Boston connects with what he calls “community publishing,” or a sort of chronicle, a storyboard of noncompliant attitudes spoken loudly into the spirit of the onlooker.[9] When the term is applied here, “community publishing” via muralism is a practice of democratic access to the arts for the common person. Murals, like graffiti, act as a literal communication of absolutes far away from the secluded sect of institutional art.[10] As the late Chicago muralist Eugene “Eda” Wade proclaims, “since I paint for and identify with the masses of Black people, I am creating a realism so that nobody will fail to receive the impact of my ideological and aesthetic message.”[11]
Kwon recognizes this departure from and critique of the traditional system, noting how contemporary site-specific art has exposed entrenched problems within established art institutions. She observes that “a dominant drive of site-oriented practices today is the pursuit of a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life – a critique of culture that is inclusive of non-art spaces, non-art institutions, and non-art issues.”[12] What are these non-art issues Kwon speaks of? In coastal Boston, one such issue is rising sea levels, an issue that disproportionately threatens the futures of low and middle income families in Eastie.[13] Artist and muralist Lauren YS confronts this issue in her piece Plastic Pandora, a mural sprayed onto the side of a two-story condo. It depicts a fantastical, mermaid-esque woman with purple skin sitting in a plastic bottle. She is cutting away at a fishing net that has wrapped itself around her waist (fig. 4). Plastic Pandora is one of several murals in the area that touch on climate change. All speak as a collective call to action against plastic waste, marine garbage, and trashy corporations.[14]
But what does confrontation via murals do concretely? Here we turn again to Kwon, who argues for a “discursive site” as a means for generating site-specific content: “The distinguishing characteristic of today’s site-oriented art,” she asserts, “is the way in which both the artwork’s [relationship to site and to institution] are subordinate to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate.”[15] The underlying point here is that the building blocks for change lie in fluid and ever-growing conversations and interpersonal initiative. The discursive site is an effort to organize communities towards a shared cause; it is an exchange of mutual recognition, of advocacy for one another. “So much of mutual aid and advocacy”, says Lauren YS, “means that you see the community as a part of you, and vice versa, so we are all reflecting off of each other.”[16] If the institutional arts within traditional spaces can be classified as normative, then mural arts are by proxy a direct challenge to the public perception of norm, and can stand as a productive platform for counter-normative action.
And action does not always take the form of collective organization. Action is also felt on an individual level in the reinforcement of hopes and happiness. This happiness is something Boston-based muralist Silvia López Chavez touches upon within her murals. Joy at Ruggles Station is a brilliant example: even on rainy days, the woman in Joy is blowing bubbles and paving paths like rainbows into the air (fig. 5). In an interview with Boston Voyager, López Chavez has said that she is “creating healing spaces and bringing joy to unexpected places.”[17] Her statement here is not just artful hubbalub. Evidence suggests that López Chavez is speaking the truth: public arts have the capacity to combat feelings of isolation and anxiety, especially in inner-city environments.[18] Murals are important for the health and the culture of Boston’s communities, for friendship and for the little things that tie us together.
In the context of community-centered (and therefore site-specific) arts, Kwon synthesizes that “site specificity … finds new importance because it supplies distinction of place and uniqueness of locational identity.”[19] López Chavez practices this kind of model, stating that her creative process “is fueled by understanding the context of a site, really taking the time to research and learn about the space, the community, and the wall itself.”[20] What both Kwon and López Chavez are in agreement of is a distinctness of place that is special to the people living there, one not to be confused with sameness. An example of “distinctness of place” is Shaina Lu’s and Yvonne Ng’s 千絲萬縷 (Tied Together by a Thousand Threads), a mural on plywood anchored in Boston’s Chinatown (fig. 6). It depicts a grandpa and a kid blowing strands of stories into the wind. I find the strands reminiscent of that Chinese oral tradition which author and activist Maxine Hong Kingston so fondly refers to as “talk-story.”[21] This mural is quite literally a statement on the importance of community, i.e. the threads that tie us together. It is a reminder of neighbors, friends, and heritage; it is a reminder of Chinese-American immigrant culture and what we stand for, especially in Boston’s Chinatown, a historically redlined district now threatened by displacement from high-rise construction and luxury development.[22]
The fight for dreams in Roxbury, the fight against climate change in Eastie, the fight for Joy, the fight for Boston’s Chinatown, etc. are neither singular nor vastly separate events. Just as each mural is part of an interconnected Boston-specific network, so too are their social causes. One might even say that there is a larger fight in Boston, a fight encompassing all of these murals and their sites, a fight for the identities of marginalized communities who will no longer be pushed to the sidelines. By way of murals, the city of Boston is taking steps in the right direction towards representation of all people, which is an act of solidarity with each and every fight (fig. 7). Above all, it must be stated that murals of a person’s face, a person’s culture, a person’s person, are expressions of existence. It is telling people that they are seen, that their voices are heard, that they are strong and supported (fig. 8). “When you see a reflection of yourself,” says Problak, “you check that out for a second. You’re never scouring from it. You’re not hiding. So I feel like these murals … are necessary in a time and in a city where like representation is everything. It is everything.”[23]
Although Boston’s public arts commissions are moving in the right direction, there is still work to be done. Instead of commissioning biannual handfuls of murals for short-term artist “residencies” within the city, I posit that a prolonged cultivating of artists and visionaries is necessary in the form of sustained yearly funding for mural commissions. Artist and muralist Cedric “Vise 1” Douglas puts it best: “If you travel to other cities, street art is everywhere. It’s part of the culture, and the artists who live there will do 30- or 40-foot murals — and that doesn’t happen in Boston that much. I think it’s important to educate people and show them that it does exist here, and there are people here who are able to do it”[24] (fig. 9). Certainly it is an active fostering of this current movement of local muralists that will brightly color our future.
References
Annear, Steve. “Boston’s street art is hitting a growth spurt. Here’s the man behind it.” BostonGlobe.Com, May 10, 2017. https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/05/09/boston-street-art-hitting-growth-spurt-here-man-behind/bpVJNotUvKkLwED5NmraII/story.html
Boston Voyager. “Meet Silvia Lopez Chavez of Chavez Design Studio in South End” BostonVoyager.com, May 22, 2018
Cey Adams, Sophia Dawson, Victor ‘MARKA27′ Quiñonez, Rob “Problak” Gibbs, Rob Stull, No Weapon Formed Against Thee Shall Prosper, 2020. Murals for the Movement, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Chinatown Community Land Trust 華埠土地信托會. “Chinatown Community Land Trust 華埠土地信托會,” n.d. https://chinatownclt.org/
City of Boston. “‘Souledad’ by Victor ‘Marka27’ Quiñonez.” Boston.gov, October 17, 2022. https://www.boston.gov/departments/arts-and-culture/souledad-victor-marka27-quinonez
City of Boston. “11 New Murals Installed Throughout Boston.” October 4, 2023. Boston.gov. https://www.boston.gov/news/11-new-murals-installed-throughout-boston
Conrad, David. “Community Murals as Democratic Art and Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 29, no. 1 (1995): 98–102. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333522
Daniel Anguilu and Cedric Douglas, Untitled, 2018. Burstein Hall, Boston
Denver Theater District. “Happy City Denver: Art for the People Experiments Report,” November 15, 2018. https://issuu.com/denvertheatredistrict/docs/happy_city_report_-_denver
Dexter, Samantha. “Artistic Activism & Self-Expression: An Interview With Lauren YS | Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.” Beautiful Bizarre Magazine (blog), October 13, 2022. https://beautifulbizarre.net/2022/10/13/interview-with-lauren-ys/
Eugene “Eda” Wade, William Walker, John Weber, Mark Rogovin, The Artists’ Statement, 1975. ICAA Documents Project, ICAA/MFAH. https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/781400
Goldman, Shifra M. “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán.” Latin American Literary Review 5, no. 10 (1977): 124–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119069
Jeffrey Gibson, your spirit whispering in my ear, 2024. Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston
Kent, Rockwell. Mail Service in the Tropics (mural study). U.S. Post Office Department, Washington, D.C., ca. 1935–1936. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1982.86.2. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mail-service-tropics-mural-study-us-post-office-department-washington-dc-13589
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976.
Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85-110.
Lauren YS, Plastic Pandora, 2021. 62 Chelsea Street, East Boston
Lesh, Charles. “Writing Boston: Graffiti Bombing as Community Publishing.” Community Literacy Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 62-86.
New England Foundation for the Arts. “Public Art Spotlight: Rob ‘Problak’ Gibbs | NEFA,” June 23, 2022. https://www.nefa.org/news/public-art-spotlight-rob-problak-gibbs
Rob “Problak” Gibbs, Afro Futurism / Breathe Life 1, 2017. UCERM Empowerment Center, 324 Blue Hill Avenue, Boston
Rob “Problak” Gibbs, “Breathe Life 1 — Problak,” n.d. https://www.problak.com/exterior-1/breathe-life1
Sam Adams Boston Brewery. “Interview with Muralist Silvia Lopez Chavez,” November 12, 2021. https://www.samadamsbostonbrewery.com/blog/2021/11/12/interview-with-muralist-silvia-lopez-chavez
Sea Walls Boston: Artists for Oceans. “Boston, USA | ’21 – Sea Walls,” 2021. https://seawalls.org/activation/boston-usa-21/
Silvia López Chavez, Joy, 2019, Ruggles Station, Roxbury
Victor ‘MARKA27′ Quiñonez, Souledad, 2022. Washington Manor, 1701 Washington St, Boston
呂明穎 Shaina Lu and 伍綺雲 Yvonne Ng, 千絲萬縷 Tied Together by a Thousand Threads, 2017. 20 Harrison Ave, Chinatown, Boston
Figures
Figure 1: Victor ‘MARKA27’ Quiñonez, Souledad, 2022. Mural. 1701 Washington St. Photograph by the author.
Figure 2: Rob ‘Problak’ Gibbs, Breathe Life 1, 2017. Mural. UCERM Empowerment Center, 324 Blue Hill Avenue, Boston. Image taken from https://www.problak.com/exterior-1/breathe-life1
Figure 3: Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Tropics, pencil and oil on plywood (mural study, U.S. Post Office Department, Washington, D.C., ca. 1935-1936), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1982.86.2. Image taken from https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mail-service-tropics-mural-study-us-post-office-department-washington-dc-13589
Figure 4: Lauren YS, Plastic Pandora, 2021. Mural. 62 Chelsea Street, East Boston. Photograph by the author.
Figure 5: Silvia López Chavez, Joy, 2019. Mural. Ruggles Station, Roxbury. Photograph by the author.
Figure 6: 呂明穎 Shaina Lu and 伍綺雲 Yvonne Ng, 千絲萬縷 Tied Together by a Thousand Threads, 2017. Mural on plywood. 20 Harrison Ave, Chinatown, Boston. Photograph by the author.
Figure 7: Cey Adams, Sophia Dawson, Victor ‘MARKA27′ Quiñonez, Rob “Problak” Gibbs, Rob Stull, No Weapon Formed Against Thee Shall Prosper, 2020. Murals for the Movement, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now located at Underground at Ink Block). Photograph by the author.
Figure 8: Jeffrey Gibson, your spirit whispering in my ear, 2024. Mural. Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston. Photograph by the author.
Figure 9: Daniel Anguilu and Cedric Douglas, Untitled, 2018. Mural. Burstein Hall, Boston. Photograph by the author.
Notes
[1]City of Boston, “‘Souledad’ by Victor ‘Marka27’ Quiñonez.” (October 17, 2022 Boston.gov)
[2] City of Boston, “11 New Murals Installed Throughout Boston.” (October 4, 2023 Boston.gov)
[3] City of Boston, “11 New Murals Installed Throughout Boston.”
[4]Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” October 80 (Spring 1997), 103-104.
[5]Rob “Problak” Gibbs, “Breathe Life 1 — Problak” (blog/website)
[6]Rob “Problak” Gibbs, “Breathe Life 1 — Problak” (blog/website)
[7]Shifra M. Goldman, “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán.” Latin American Literary Review 5, no. 10 (1977), 124.
[8]Goldman, “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán.”, 125-127
[9]Charles Lesh, “Writing Boston: Graffiti Bombing as Community Publishing,” Community Literacy Journal 12 no. 1 (Fall 2016), 63.
[10]David Conrad, “Community Murals as Democratic Art and Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 29, no. 1 (1995), 98–99.
[11]Eugene “Eda” Wade, William Walker, John Weber, Mark Rogovin, The Artists’ Statement (1975), 5.
[12]Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”, 91
[13]Sea Walls Boston: Artists for Oceans (website), “Boston, USA | ’21 – Sea Walls”
[14]Lauren YS, Plastic Pandora (Wall Text), 2021. 62 Chelsea Street, East Boston
[15]Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”, 92
[16]Lauren YS (interview with Samantha Dexter), “Artistic Activism & Self-Expression: An Interview With Lauren YS | Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.” Beautiful Bizarre Magazine (blog), October 13, 2022.
[17]Boston Voyager, “Meet Silvia Lopez Chavez of Chavez Design Studio in South End” BostonVoyager.com (May 22, 2018)
[18]Denver Theater District, “Happy City Denver: Art for the People Experiments Report” (November 15, 2018), 8.
[19]Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”, 106
[20]Sam Adams Boston Brewery (blog), “Interview with Muralist Silvia Lopez Chavez” (November 12, 2021)
[21]Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976), 14
[22]Chinatown Community Land Trust (website), “Chinatown Community Land Trust 華埠土地信托會”
[23]New England Foundation for the Arts (blog/website), “Public Art Spotlight: Rob ‘Problak’ Gibbs | NEFA” (June 23, 2022)
[24]Steve Annear (interview with Cedric “Vise 1” Douglas), “Boston’s street art is hitting a growth spurt. Here’s the man behind it.” BostonGlobe.Com (May 10, 2017)
James Chang is currently a sophomore studying Computer Engineering. He likes fishing. On Fridays he is a lifeguard at the FitRec. He recommends that BU students attend a play at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre when they get the chance. His thanks go to everyone in the writing program.