Page History

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Disaffected minorities in the 1960s picked up on the idea of using art to promote social justice. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which witnessed a flurry of art production by African-American artists, predominantly-black communities in economically-destitute areas convened in grassroots movements to create public murals in acts of "guerrilla art" designed to challenge conventional ideas about ownership and rights. Chicago's "Wall of Respect," sponsored by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), was produced in 1969 by hundreds of black citizens and featuring featured a spread of African-American heroes. The collective, communal process of creating the mural infused the South Side community with a sense of morale and empowerment at the same time that it promoted political activism on behalf of civil rights. The very act of creating the mural was process amounted to a reclamation of black identity and culture, both through the content involved -- black heroes -- and in the collective nature of the act, a process that connected those involved with their historical cultural value for community. And the physical act, too, represented a reclamation, a taking-back of private property for collective use. It was also, as graffiti tends to be, an act of defiance, a "defacing" of property for a greater good, a conversion of that property into something more beautiful. Although Although the public works of the 1930s and 1940s under the New Deal were commissioned by the government and thus far from illegal, the principles undergirding their production were similar to those that fueled the creation of Black Arts Movement murals: the use of art to transform people's lives in a highly public manner.