It is not too great a simplification to position the emergence of the greatest public art movements directly in opposition to the great civic deceptions perpetrated against whatever citizenry. It is almost as if those communities sold out in back room deals can only find redress by means of what is put forth in the most public way possible.

What we often find incubating beneath latent, bureaucratic and long-term suppression of an unacknowledged constituency, and what is then released simultaneously with whatever fervor challenges, and occasionally lifts, that suppression, are those grandest forms of public art addressing those grandest possible themes, a broad hand sweeping away the minute equivocations that weasels require. Historically, and worldwide, there may be no means to this end grander and more public than the mural.

El Paso has plenty of them. When they’re not in your own neighborhood you have to go looking for them, sometimes in places you wouldn’t find cause to go looking for much else. For the most part, El Paso’s murals are not seething with the revolutionary zeal of Mexico’s muralistas of the last century. And, for the most part, they are not boiling over with the sharp, timely militancy of Northern Ireland’s. But, and it is as if the form required it, they always have something to say, and it’s never as obvious as it may seem at first glance. Even the ironically titled Carlos Callejo wonder at Virginia and Father Rahm, "El Chuco y Que," presents a challenge at once whimsical and defiant. Defiant toward what? Progress? Branding? The famous, dead, Mexican painter and muralist José Clemente Orozco focused his mural efforts on social realist depictions that took direct aim at what he called “the pestilential shadows of closed rooms.” When the FBI wraps up its work in town, it’s likely El Paso may very soon be treated to another thoroughgoing lesson in what Orozco meant.

What El Paso’s murals are, generally, are an homage to the form’s traditions, an ongoing concern awaiting its call to arms. Chiefly it is a tradition established by Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico City, and elsewhere, during the so-called “Mexican Mural Renaissance” of the first half of the 20th century. These murals are generally expansive in their nature and define their positions positively, more glorifying than vilifying. In the service of the communities in which they are set, El Paso’s murals are not only a source of great pride, but occasionally serve practical, civic purposes as well. Callejo’s spectacular, and even entertaining, AIDS mural at 6th and Ochoa has its obvious intent, and various others, emerging around the odd corner like miracles, provide cryptic lessons in local history that can initiate the sort of scavenger hunt that leads to real knowledge.

There’s a restlessness in El Paso that its strip malls and medical facilities obscure. A tour of the city’s murals is a right reminder of this undercurrent, in particular those throughout Lincoln Park, beneath the Spaghetti Bowl. The area was once contiguous and in commerce with the neighborhoods across from and displaced by I-10, as well as other pockets to the east and south that are no more. These were certainly once, and remain, the neighborhoods of the dispossessed and underrepresented. As one obscure bit of graffiti in the park suggests, this cordoned space has become more than a convenient canvas of concrete structures, it has a history that needs remembering. "Chicano Park II," it reads. This brings us to 1970 and San Diego’s Logan Heights neighborhood located in the path of another great American freeway, Interstate 5. The connection to Chicano Park, situated on reclaimed land beneath an I-5 bridge, is an educated one, and a positive one, considering the hard-won no-man’s land that now showcases world-famous Chicano and Native American murals over eight acres, reaching all the way to the community’s reclaimed coastal property. But in this anonymous and spontaneous renaming of Lincoln Park there is also a clear note of defiance, recalling Logan Park’s decade-long, lost battle for existence, and perhaps raising the question as to who had the right to sanction these murals in the first place?

Sufficiently funded public art programs are typically administered as expensive exercises in palliative outdoor decoration, as if the outdoors was not doing this suitably before the help of grant funding. Wisely, the various entities that have funded the different mural projects at Lincoln Park over the years have let the artists drive the programs and the result is impressively contemplative. What could it really mean, after all, to have a very Hispanic looking John F. Kennedy set on the flipside of none other than a harlequinned Comandanta Ramona? Or César Chavez standing back to back with Pancho Villa? Where would Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ché Guevara, his head locked in chains, have found common ground? Did history need all these characters? Have these towering and muted revolutionary spirits and revolutionaries now come together to create one consensual revolutionary mind? Where will El Paso’s revolution happen? In a repurposed Downtown? Or, like art, will it be found elsewhere?

Collectives are forming. In April of this year El Paso’s Neighborhood Watch collective assembled a one-night-only outdoor show covering over two blocks of the Sunset Heights neighborhood. It included videos and images projected on blank walls. One of its organizers, UTEP student Xochitl Rodriguez, herself the niece of the well-known El Paso and Juárez muralist Mago Gándara, described the event’s purpose as “to bring people from the city to our home to see artwork, to put it right there, right in front of them and make it as obvious as possible that they were welcome to come into the home.”

The Santa Fé and El Paso based collective, Keep Adding, produced a major installation of aerosol murals in El Paso’s abandoned grain silos, which now, silos and murals, are locked up. The abstract forms based on tagging typography suggest the prospect for something new in whatever murals will appear in El Paso in the years to come. Perhaps among the first of these is the one called "Regeneration" by Keep Adding’s El Paso member, Mitsu Overstreet. El Paso’s newest mural, it was unveiled on July 14 at the dead ends of Raynolds and Alberta streets, between Thomason Hospital and the Paul Foster Medical School, and is the first public art project funded by the Two Percent for Arts program, 2 percent of city construction funds set aside for this purpose. “It’s going crazy right now,” says Overstreet of the mural art scene here and abroad. “People are trying to take the energy of graffiti and aerosol murals, not just putting up their names, but putting as much passion and energy into graffiti as murals.”

Overstreet says the abstract images, based on regional medicinal plants, should pose a riddle to passers-by, an objective that is at the heart of what all murals, abstract and figurative, through all of history, have set out to do. Strategically positioned as a rebus for the masses, each mural begs for closer study, it begs not only to be seen but to be read one image at a time.

In 2001 in Kraków, Poland, a young painter named Rafal Bujnowski was given a highly-coveted commission to do whatever he liked with the enormous concrete wall of a former bunker that is situated in a prominent pedestrian area of the city. He diligently set up his scaffolding, put on the recognizable uniform of a Polish municipal painter, and proceeded to paint the entire wall a solid, dull peach color. When he was done, Bujnowski, a figurative painter of such skill that he successfully painted his own passport photo, signed and dated the wall in the bottom right hand corner. Perhaps nothing else could have shined a brighter light on the pestilential shadows of the closed rooms of one of the most sold-out nations in history than this defiant and yet amusing gesture, which went on, in public for all to see, for weeks.

Some useful websites:

-- El Paso Through My Eyes, Youth Initiative Program

-- Murals of El Paso

-- Brown Pride

-- Colors on Desert Walls