Art & the Public Sphere - Painting the Town Red? The Contemporary Legacies of One Hundred Years of Public Muralism and the Left, Apr 2024

Taking the centenary of the publication ‘Manifesto of the syndicate of technical workers, painters and sculptors’ as the inspiration for this Special Issue, this article introduces the volume through an investigation of the historical, historiographical and theoretical interrelationship between mural painting and leftist politics from 1924 to 2024. It is divided into two main sections. The first section presents a comparative survey of the historiography of murals made in Mexico and the United States in the inter-war period to argue against revisionist readings that interpret them as the unmediated expression of top-down state imperatives. The second section explores exterior mural painting in the decades after 1968 through a focus on two murals produced in London to challenge the notion that they constituted the unmediated bottom up expression of subaltern communities. Both sections argue for a nuanced theoretical model of state patronage and politicized mural production that registers the complex relationship between structure and agency within the context of the heightened class struggle that marked both periods.

This article explores Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural cycle as a site of contested meaning both at the time of its creation in 1933, as well as at the time of the city of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy in 2013. These two historic moments of economic precarity raised critical questions about the social value of art and its relation to the working class. The article returns to the existing literature on the mural in the 1930s as a way of thinking through the more recent debates around the role of art in the recovery of the city of Detroit in the twenty-first century. The contemporary instrumentalization of murals towards urban revitalization efforts and branding initiatives in Detroit calls for renewed consideration of the mural form’s relationship to left politics. As such, Detroit Industry offers a salient example of an artist’s successful navigation of the confines of corporate patronage to create art for the working class.

Professor Bill Rolston began documenting the murals of his native West Belfast in the 1980s. Since then, whilst pursuing a career as a sociologist (and as the director of the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University from 2010 to 2014), Professor Rolston has documented and written about murals across the world and published five books on the Republican and Loyalist murals made in the northern part of Ireland. In December 2022, we met with Rolston to discuss the evolution of his ‘hobby that got out of hand’ and the contrasting histories, iconographies, politics and cultures of Belfast’s two mural traditions. Exploring the emergence of his interest, comparisons with international mural traditions and how the peace process has affected Belfast’s murals, Rolston reflects upon his decades of study and interest in the form.

This article situates San Francisco street artist Barry McGee’s 1994 mural for the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) within Democratic Mayor Frank Jordan’s controversial Matrix Programme, which expanded the role of the police in the city’s anti-homelessness policy. A central figure in the graffiti scene in the mid-1980s–90s, McGee was recognized for his everyman who represented the everyday people he saw while tagging the city, namely the unhoused community and graffiti writers. This figure was central to his CAMP mural, marking it as an important transitional piece in McGee’s career as well as a liminal work of ‘street art’, rather than ‘graffiti’. I suggest a reading of McGee’s mural implicating him as Hal Foster’s (by way of Walter Benjamin’s) ‘ideological patron’ who struggles in the name of the cultural other to legitimize his art as graffiti and contemporary art.