Street murals — art trend that matters
I’m ready to declare street murals the art trend that matters in 2020.
The slogans painted on pavement convey powerful messages in big, hardtomiss letters, an immediate response to social issues. They are also relatively inexpensive and easy to create (compared with, say, casting a bronze statue) and are permitted, even commissioned, by cities like Seattle, Charlotte, N.C., and Tulsa, Okla. With many of these murals created by volunteers, they also feel especially democratic and reflective of the communities that create them.
Max Marttila, a youth arts coordinator with San Francisco’s Precita Eyes Muralists Association, says the emphasis on simplicity and making a clear statement brings the art form back to a core belief of many muralists: Public art should speak to the people.
“I think they’re important as real community art,” Marttila says. “It’s getting away from mural art as a commodity of the bourgeois by focusing on messaging, liberation and solidarity.”
For some marginalized communities, the murals also serve as a visible marker stating, “We are supposed to be here!” says Janelle Luster, director of community engagement for the Transgender District, of the street mural the organization recently commissioned in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
The street mural phenomenon first received national attention in June, when District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned Keyonna Jones and seven anonymous artists to paint “Black Lives Matter” in yellow letters on 16th Street Northwest, the thoroughfare that leads to the White House, after protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
The trend quickly spread to other cities. In Oakland, a volunteerpainted mural spells out Black Lives Matter over three blocks on Broadway; near Lake Merritt “All black trans queer nonbinary woman disabled imprisoned lives matter” was painted by the East Bay Queer Arts Center in rainbow colors. A Black Lives Matter mural on Fulton Street in San Francisco was organized by Melonie and Melorra Green, the coexecutive directors of the nearby African American Art & Culture Complex, stretching from the complex toward City Hall.
The latest Bay Area mural organized by the Transgender District was completed on Aug. 23. Designed by artists Kin Folkz, in collaboration with Sen Mendez, Xara Thustra and Monica Canilao, “Black Trans Lives Matter” is painted at Turk and Taylor streets in the pink, blue and white of the transgender flag. It’s near where Gene Compton’s Cafeteria once stood, the site of one of the first transgender uprisings against police discrimination in the country in August 1966.
After visiting several street murals in recent weeks, I’ve realized how often traditional public art requires that you look up to see it, like monuments on pedestals or even some wall murals. There’s often an (intentional) added sense of awe, reverence, even remove, when seeing art elevated above you. Street murals, however, cast your gaze downward, something that Luster says also causes people to notice the conditions of the streets where the work is painted. It is that relationship to place and the way these murals force us to look at the communities where they exist that I believe makes them so effective.
They also speak to the present instead of commemorating the past, serving as monuments to the volunteers who paint them almost as much as to the ideals they express.
I don’t know how many of these street murals will continue to exist after 2020 — paint fades, especially paint people walk and drive on — but when we look back on this year, I believe we will remember the messages that were painted in our streets and, more important, why they were put there.
I’ve realized how often traditional public art requires that you look up. Street murals cast your gaze downward.