Engaging Local Youth Through Exquisite Mural Project

During the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, public murals became an essential form of artist response and public voice. They were a means of challenging the status quo and expressing both pride and frustration during a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican American community. Because they threatened established authority, Chicana/o murals were often censored, neglected, whitewashed, or destroyed

As part of the current exhibition ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, the California Historical Society created a program to engage youth, many of Latino heritage, who live and go to school in the Mission District of San Francisco, an area renowned for its murals. We named the program Exquisite Mural after the old parlor game “exquisite corpse,” in which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled.

Over the course of the program, roughly 200 students from Jamestown Community Center and Mission Community Beacon joined us in our gallery to take part in the project.

Before the children participated in the Exquisite Mural Project, I lead them on a tour of the gallery and discussed three of the mural artists featured in the exhibition. The kids have shown an incredible amount of empathy for the artists, asking multiple times “Why did they have to paint over the mural? Why did they have to destroy the mural?” The children are also very keen on knowing if the muralists were still alive and were fascinated when told that I had met a few of them. Some of the kids were able to meet muralist Ernesto de la Loza, who led a personal tour of his section of the exhibition and stayed to participate in the mural making activity.

Resurrection of the Green Planet by Ernesto de la Loza

In our version of the game, a mini mural is created collaboratively as a triptych, which basically means a three-part picture. A child would complete the first panel of the picture, then, two mural artists, one from Los Angeles and one from San Francisco, each drew on one of the remaining two panels. The person drawing did not know what the person before them had created due to the paper being folded, rendering the other images hidden. I explained to the kids that they might treat the Exquisite Mural as a concept drawing that they could use to build on if they were to paint a full-scale mural.

Using stories as a backdrop, the youth explored themes raised by the exhibition and its featured mural artists such as displacement, activism, immigration, cultural heritage, racism, memory, feminism, and censorship. The art created by the kids embodied similar ideas with many of the kids expressing pride towards their heritage by painting the flags of countries from where they or their families are from. Much of the art included imagery of peace, unity, and friendship.

The most fulfilling thing about this project was seeing the kids who were initially adamant about “not being able to draw” or saw themselves as “not artists” come up with really creative pieces of art inspired by iconography that they saw in the gallery. Some spoke with me about how they were used to seeing the Virgen de Guadalupe at home. Mermaids and dinosaurs were other popular subjects that resonated with the group. These conversations were a great opportunity to help the kids understand that anybody can be an artist and that each muralist they had learned about were once kids themselves.

The Exquisite Mural art will be showcased in the CHS galleries beginning August 25th. We plan to celebrate the hanging of the murals with the youth participants and their family during an afternoon reception, poetry reading, and discussion with artists of all ages.

by Erik Zuniga, Guest Concierge and Exquisite Mural project group leader