Mural Arts on Social Practice

Abstract

Social practice, community-based art and socially engaged practice are all terms that have been used to describe art-making that changes the relationship between artist and audience, the audience and the work of art, and the artist and the work created. From the perspective of Mural Arts, social practice at its core means engaging its closest audience—those who know most about why a work of art is made—directly in the creation of its meaning.

Understanding the social implications of Mural Arts’ work requires consideration of several shifts in art practice over the past 50 years or so: the activism that re-ignited muralism in the 1960s in Los Angeles and Chicago and sought to represent struggle and milestones around social equity and racial identity;  the art world’s evolution away from making objects toward creating memory and experience, whether as part of the art-making process or as someone who simply encounters the work in the midst of his or her daily experience; and finally, dramatic changes in what is considered art and who makes it.

Mural Arts’ genesis was in its social purpose. Amid the effort to address deficits of investment in education, housing, economic revitalization and rehabilitation that resulted in blighted, trash-strewn, gap-toothed neighborhoods, it quickly became clear that the graffiti-writing youth we served early on also had a lot of talent and determination behind their spray cans. They had intuitive (and carefully honed) skills in graphic design, deep intellectual curiosity about contemporary art and artists, a knowledge of the city and its neighborhoods born of hours devoted weekly to wall hunting, and problem-solving skills developed in the service of painting in “challenging” locations. While rarely acknowledged for its value, the willingness of these “writers” to participate in mural painting along with graffiti removal was the seed from which Mural Arts’ “asset-based” social practice has grown.