Powerful messages in art on city walls

For years, whenever New Yorker (and part-time Amagansett resident) Jane Weissman passed a vacant lot in the city, she saw a potential garden. As the director from 1984 to 1998 of the community gardening program, Operation GreenThumb, she would pause and say to herself, “We could have a really nice garden here.”

More recently, Ms. Weissman has been stopped in her tracks by blank walls as well. To her, they look like empty canvases awaiting an artist. “I think, ‘What a gorgeous wall. There should be a mural here,’” she confessed during a recent interview.

In fact, Ms. Weissman has been instrumental in transforming a number of those featureless city walls with community murals. Now she and her artist-colleague Janet Braun-Reinitz have published a book that introduces readers to these remarkable art works, which have enlivened neighborhoods and delivered some powerful messages over the past 40 years.

“On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City” (University Press of Mississippi) is the product of six years of research and hundreds of interviews. Between its covers, along with text that tells their stories, are 150 color photographs of the murals—collaborations between artists and neighborhood groups whose aims go beyond beautification to “educate, protest, celebrate, and often, motivate residents to action,” according to Ms. Weissman.

As an offshoot of the book, Ms. Weissman has curated “Images of the African Diaspora in New York City Community Murals,” a traveling exhibition on view through June 30 at the Amagansett Free Library, where she and Ms. Braun-Reinitz will give an authors’ talk on June 19 at 6 p.m. A free family art workshop for children 6 and older will be held at the library on June 20 at 2 p.m. Participants will create an original work of art based on traditional symbols found in the mud cloth of the Bamana people of Mali.

That the city has such a rich history of mural-making will no doubt come as news to many readers. Even seasoned New Yorkers will likely be surprised to learn that there are committed artists and organizers who exist apart from New York’s hyped-up, pricey art market and are passionate about creating art that will never sell and will always be vulnerable to assault—if not demolition—by the forces of nature, gentrification or a neighborhood critic with a paint bomb.

Ms. Weissman recalled that it was in the 1980s that she and Ms. Braun-Reinitz joined forces as activists for community murals. At the time, Ms. Weissman was directing the city-sponsored Operation GreenThumb and launching Artists in the Gardens to enrich the horticultural project with murals. Requests for proposals had gone out and, in response, Ms. Braun-Reinitz, a painter who is currently president of Artmakers, Inc., appeared one day at GreenThumb headquarters with some suggestions.

“She showed me her stuff and, of course, it was gorgeous,” recalled Ms. Weissman. “We ended up working together, painting murals together,” she went on, though she hastened to add that, unlike Ms. Braun-Reinitz, her role is not primarily as an artist.

As Ms. Weissman tells it, the book project was generated by a shared sense of urgency. Six years ago New York was the only major city without its own mural book, she explained, and, having been involved in murals for more than two decades at the time, “we saw those early murals disappearing.”

The two women were well positioned to document the more recent history of community murals, but when they began their research, they made some exciting discoveries.

The assumption had been that Cityarts Workshop, New York’s best-known community mural organization in the 1970s, which had produced landmark murals on the Lower East Side, had been first in the field.

“Then in our research we found out about some of the early murals that had escaped people’s notice. It was very exciting,” said Ms. Weissman. “What it did,” she said of their discovery, “was that it sited the first community murals not on the Lower East Side but in Harlem.”

Alas, none of those murals remain, but through determined pursuit of every possible lead, surviving Harlem artists and organizers were tracked down. To bring them together again after some 30 years, Ms. Weissman organized a reunion. Then, moved by her contact with these pioneer muralists, she was inspired to develop the exhibition that is now making a stop in Amagansett with selected images discovered in her research.

The exhibition is presented by Artmakers Inc., which was formed when murals with politically sensitive content could no longer be funded through Cityarts, said Ms. Weissman.

“Janet and I head up Artmakers which broke away from Cityarts because of funding issues,” she explained.

Brooklyn-based and artist-run, Artmakers Inc. is described in its literature as a “politically oriented community mural organization that creates high quality public art relevant to the lives, work and concerns of people in their neighborhoods.”

“It was a pretty wonderful opening,” Ms. Weissman said of the Harlem celebration at which “Images of the African Diaspora in New York City Community Murals” was unveiled to the public. All three of the surviving participating artists were there, along with many others from the neighborhood and beyond.

While Ms. Weissman calls the discovery of the Harlem artists and their murals “our biggest research coup,” she was also amazed when colleagues brought to her attention a cluster of murals in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn dating from the 1970s.

“We didn’t know about them,” she said. “No one really knew about them and those artists didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the city either.”

Though the Harlem and Crown Heights murals were conceived independently, Ms. Weissman noted similar concerns. She found that despite the disparity of time and geography, artists in both places had filled their murals with images of the African Diaspora. That realization informs her exhibition, which examines through the 30 murals on view the traditional meaning of diasporan images and symbols, the philosophy underlying them, and their visual representations, such as black Christ figures, Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts and Nedebele house painting.

In their book, Ms. Weissman and Ms. Braun Reinitz present many more murals and track the evolution of themes and aesthetic styles, always mindful to place the murals in the larger social, cultural and political context. Each has a story. Sometimes the story ends badly, as was the case with “Peace Is Not a Dream in Storage,” which went up in Brooklyn in 1993 with a theme protesting violence against women.

Though there had been no hint of dissatisfaction during its creation, protests erupted upon its completion, spurred by some in the neighborhood who found its images too strong. It was a battle ultimately lost by the muralists, who woke one morning to find that their mural had vanished under a coat of whitewash.

Such controversy over murals is not unknown, Ms. Weissman acknowledged, but she stressed that “most of the time the issues get resolved.”

That was the case with artist Robin Michals’s “Black Inspiration Mural” in Brooklyn. It was painted in 1986 on “a tough corner” when crack was wreaking havoc in the city. It was to have featured Martin Luther King and Winnie Mandela, still well respected at the time, but week after week, the question from young passersby was always the same: “Where’s Malcolm?”

Eventually the artist returned to the sponsoring community organization, the problem was aired, and a consensus was reached.

“They thought long and hard about it,” recalled Ms. Weissman. “At first they didn’t want to make any change,” she said, “and then they decided that these kids were part of the community too.” Winnie Mandela was scratched, replaced by Malcolm X, and Robin Michals acknowledged that the design was stronger for the change.

“It’s a collaboration,” said Ms. Weissman. “You put something out there. People respond to it.”

The feedback is important. Things that the artist may have failed to consider come up “and that is really helpful,” according to Ms. Weissman, “because the message represents the community sponsor and they want the message to be faithful to their mission. The murals become very important in the lives of the community. We see them as a window to the unofficial history of the community. They really tell us a lot.”