A Matter of Scale

On September 16, the mural at the intersection of McDonough & Sawtell was painted over. It had been created in mid-August by the Argentinian artist Hyuro for the street art event Living Walls 2012.  The plans that had been submitted to the city indicated that the mural would feature images of chairs.  But when the artist saw the wall, the dimensions were different than she had expected, so instead she painted a mural that featured multiple images of a nude woman.

Not unexpectedly, the controversy started right away.  There was a church across the street, and a mosque not far away.  While the leadership of the church made no public statements as far as I know, the leader of the mosque made clear that he found the images inappropriate and offensive.  Still, there was a good deal of thoughtful conversation among the residents of the neighborhood; there were people who liked the work and wanted it to stay, people who liked the work but thought it was in the wrong place, and people who didn't like it and wouldn't have liked it anywhere.

The Chosewood Park Neighborhood Association convened a meeting on September 10 to discuss the mural.  A motion to leave the mural as it was didn't pass, and one to have it removed did pass.   But before anything was done, on September 12, the mural was vandalized by someone with a can of spray paint who couldn't spell ("TAKE THIS SHIT TO BUCHHAD") and on September 16, Living Walls staff covered the figures in the mural with gray paint.  Now, it's gone.

I haven't been back there, since the Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago when Sarah and I went to see it.  It's a pretty bleak area, across the street from the Federal prison, on the periphery of the site of the old GM plant site; the church across the street is really all there is in the immediate area.  For a month, there was a wonderful piece of art there, but now it's gone.

Still, it's right that it was left to the community to decide.  An artist from another country changed her mind about what she was going to paint.  I assume that the organizers of the art festival don't want property owners to be concerned about participating in the event next year.  The majority of the neighborhood (or at least of the ones who were eligible to vote) wanted the work to be removed.  So it was.

I've been thinking about what I hope will happen next.  Hyuro's work is gone, and I don't think she's going to come back from Argentina to paint pictures of chairs on the wall.  But I hope that there is a neighborhood effort to replace that blank wall with something beautiful and amazing.  I am sure there are artists in the neighborhood, and someone could paint something that the community would value and support.

A misplaced mural is the kind of problem a neighborhood can address, and that's what the Chosewood Park Neighborhood Association did.  But it's hard for a neighborhood by itself to do anything about an abandoned industrial site.  The Lakewood GM plant has been closed for more than 20 years.  I know that many of the people who live in the area felt that the mural didn't belong in their neighborhood, but that swath of industrial desolation left by the closed auto plant doesn't belong in anyone's neighborhood.  That's a problem beyond the scale that a neighborhood can address on its own.   What's channel 2 doing to make people aware about that threat to the neighborhood?   Maybe -- until there's something else on that wall -- the neighborhood could use it as a giant whiteboard for brainstorming on what they want on that old GM site, Neighborland-style.  And then I think they should call channel 2.