by WILLIAM NORTH IV
Public art has long served to help shape collective memory. While the passage of time can silence voices, dialogue may continue through the vehicle of the arts. A powerful form of artistic transportation is the public mural. The mural has a tradition of acting as a voice for many who felt unheard among the deafening noise of the established order. In the 20th century, murals sprang up in cities throughout the country. For various reasons, many of them disappeared almost as quickly as they were painted. Such is the ephemeral nature of the practice of mural-making. In several communities, only stories remain of the once awe-inspiring public art. Still, there were pieces of art that stood the test of time.
In the humid environs of Houston, Texas, a unique tradition of mural painting emerged, an artistic flowering that was centered at Texas Southern University in the historic Third Ward community. In an area as known for tearing down and rebuilding as reliably as its seasonal floods, artists there were intent on protecting the murals produced from this tradition, helping to define a community and inspire generations. Often, a community can have a tenuous relationship with the past. Absent written or oral records, the knowledge held by a generation is easily lost. Collections of public art play a significant role in preserving a community’s identity through time.
Founded by the artist John T. Biggers in 1949, the art department at Texas Southern University established a tradition of art education which helped to cultivate generations of young artists. Free from constraints of the major US commercial art centers, the art developed at TSU was firmly situated outside of the traditional Western canon. Initially encouraged to pursue art by Hampton University professor, Viktor Lowenfeld, and initiated into the mural tradition by Charles W. White, Biggers brought a unique philosophy of art education to his students. He challenged them to look to themselves and their communities for artistic inspiration.
In the 1995 exhibit catalog The Art of John Biggers, the art historian, Alvia Wardlaw notes that “the struggle of the average black person became a premier subject for the murals.”[1]At this artistic training ground, Biggers and long-time colleague, Carroll Simms, would not only teach their students artistic principles, but also develop an impressive body of public work that would be acclaimed both domestically and internationally. In their groundbreaking text, Black Art in Houston, Biggers and Simms chronicled this work, detailing the establishment of an art department at a historically black college in the twentieth century. At a time when the major museums in the city barred African Americans from visiting during regular hours of operation, Biggers and Simms encouraged young people to see themselves as heirs to a great heritage.
Mural making at TSU did not occur in isolation. The 20th century saw a proliferation of public murals in the United States. They were created in numerous places including post offices, parks, and in large city squares. However, among all of these projects, the murals at TSU are unique, in that they operate as an archive of the dialogue between works and ideas and across generations. As previously stated, mural art was often a temporal expression. It was public art in the truest sense of the word. The work would only last as long as a building owner or neighborhood was willing to fight to keep it up and in Houston, there were no forces in the city operating to ensure that such work could be produced and maintained at a high level. With the establishment of a mural requirement at TSU, that all changed.
At other schools, established artists typically completed the murals that were to stand the test of time. Fisk University housed several early works by Harlem Renaissance luminaire, Aaron Douglas, while Hale Woodruff completed a series of historic murals at Talladega College. Woodruff’s murals were commissioned by the school’s leadership to commemorate the Amistad Rebellion and the American Missionary Association, which founded a number of colleges, including Talladega. Jeff Donaldson was appointed chair of Howard University’s art department in 1970 and along with other colleagues proceeded to inaugurate an era of mural painting at the school. Several years later, Jacob Lawrence would go on to produce a series of murals there and at other institutions. Of course, Hampton housed the famous Charles W. White mural, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy (1943), in which a young John Biggers assisted. In nearly every scenario, one of these established artists also taught for a time at the school in which their mural was housed. In the case of Fisk, Aaron Douglas founded the art department and led the program for decades. The idea that a respected artist would arrive on campus and paint a mural or two with an agreed upon historical theme became an established model.
From the beginning, art students at TSU were expected to execute a mural as part of their graduation requirement. Over a nearly 70-year period, several murals were completed and approximately 128 exist today around the campus. The oldest surviving murals tell histories, centered on the experiences of communities of color that were rarely reflected in school textbooks. The best of the early murals are largely didactic works that present affirming images to the student body. Images of prominent figures such as Booker T. Washington and Thurgood Marshall abound. There are also numerous domestic scenes with images of the cross, bibles, schoolhouses, and family dinners prepared by strong women with repeated references to the Black church, farming communities, families, and military service. Some of the early students were able to attend TSU through the GI Bill and reflected their experiences of war in their art. All of these symbols are carried over into the work of subsequent murals but they would be repurposed by later generations. In time, these symbols would take on new registers of meaning.
The program instituted at TSU departed radically from the practices that came before and after. On this campus, the students were encouraged to place their work on the walls of heavily trafficked buildings. The administration building, Mack H. Hannah Hall, housed most of the murals but there were murals at several other buildings that dotted the campus. The mural art typically involved subjects associated with the buildings. These works were produced by students who themselves were the products of the kind of education offered at the school. While students at other universities were allowed to produce murals at one time or another, the murals rarely survived beyond the historical period that called for their creation in the first place. For example, in the early 1970s there were several murals produced at Howard, but many of them were no longer in existence a generation later. The kind of workshop developed at TSU lasted for years and resulted in work that would continually speak to future generations of artists long after the original muralists had moved on from those halls.
As was the case with many universities, the 1960s were a time of great change at TSU. A singular event of this period was the conflict that would come to be known as the “TSU Riot” by the press. Long-standing tensions between the community and the police boiled over in May 1967. Earlier protests on May 15th, led to a campus blockade that evening followed by debris thrown from dormitory windows at police cars. The exchange escalated further that night. Exact numbers vary but somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 rounds of ammunition were fired into the male dormitory. The disturbance resulted in the death of a Houston Police Department officer and led to nearly 500 arrests. Wardlaw mentions that during this traumatic event “even the housemother of the upperclassmen’s dormitory was forced to lie outside on the ground.”[2] The charges were ultimately dismissed and it was found that the officer died as a result of ricochet fire from other HPD officers. Still, the impact of the event reverberated through the community. Today, there aren’t many symbols to commemorate these and other events in a city like Houston, not known for reflecting much on its past. But in the moment, there were cultural responses to the “TSU Riot” and many other similar occurrences. In addition to word-by-word retellings of the events during that period, a reenactment reflected through the process and subject of mural development may help in more clearly understanding the implications of these moments.
For Robert Blackson, memory, history, and performance play critical roles in reenactment, where an “openness to interpretation,” is key.[3] Reenactments give individuals engaged in acts of repetitive ritual and memory the license to depart from established historical precedent in a retelling of past events. Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Alex LaRotta notes that in the years following the TSU conflict, “a lack of historical markers or public recognition of the incident, official or otherwise, represents a kind of collective shrug towards reconciling that past.”[4] While this is largely true, the artwork produced at Texas Southern during and after this period operate as mediations on this time period, departures from the establishment’s historical precedent.
The artwork created and maintained at TSU served as a reminder of the radical movements that were part of shaping the community. Three murals on the second floor of a campus administration building portray the turmoil that characterized this period at the University and throughout the world. The ritual of creating the mural, the subject of the mural, and the ways in which the mural interacts in an environment with other artwork can become grounds on which an audience can approach and consider events from the past anew.
In interpreting the murals, I am interested in how each generation responded to the previous generation through the art on the walls. After the students graduated, the murals remained, there to engage in a silent dialogue with prior generations’ murals as new audiences came to view them. The bureaucratic nature of the administration building that houses the majority of the murals contrasts with the radical nature of some of these works. In these heavily trafficked arenas, people rarely have the time to stop and linger. However, the speed with which people move in and out of these spaces for administrative purposes did not mean the art was without its share of controversy. Wardlaw acknowledges that some faculty viewed the “subject matter of the murals [as] too raw, too violent, too political, and too black.”[5] Viewers may not have much time to stand by the murals engaging the work but they will be rewarded if they do. While responding to the specific challenges of their time, the students had to utilize the skills they had developed throughout their years at the university, with most of the pieces taking several months to complete. Throughout all these tumultuous periods, students continued to create. LaRotta reminds us that “cultural productions such as music, art, folklore, literature and oral histories offer ways to rebut one-sided narratives to create more meaningful and impactful stories of who we are — as citizens of shared spaces, cities, states and nations.”[6]
The iconic mural executed by Edward Mills is notable for its draftsmanship and precise, muted palette. When one climbs the stairs of Hannah Hall and turns the corner they are immediately confronted with the gripping image on the wall. The central figure in the composition pulls back the US flag to reveal the violence visited upon Black citizenry. The cross is no longer a symbol of pious religious devotion and family. In Mills’s mural, it becomes a tool of the KKK and recalls the numerous cross burnings that were used as tools of terror in communities across the country. Two young people are positioned to the right of the mural. One young man is holding a balancing scale while the other is holding an eternal flame that recalls the memorial to John F. Kennedy, Jr.
At the time of the publication of Black Art in Houston, the painting attracted interest through “its grim fascination and not through what viewers would ordinarily call ‘beauty.’”[7]Given the complexity of the composition and the challenging subject matter, it is difficult not to be reminded of what John Biggers said when describing the mural which was not published in the original text. “I think we should put everything on the table. Those events were a focus of our national attention. We were caught up in that chaos. This was especially true of the muralist himself.”[8] It was this philosophy that would lead to a great deal of consternation on the part of some university officials. Despite this, historians maintain that students were not censored in their subject matter. There is a lyrical quality to Mills’s work. The words “injustice,” “inequality,” and “bigotry” are scrolled on the top left corner of the work as clear problems of the day. “Black power” is written underneath as a solution. Taken together, the mural functions as one of the most complete political statements in the hall and it sets the tone for what will follow on the second floor. In my interviews with other muralists, Mills was viewed as an artist that pushed the envelope. Barry Morris described him as “the revolutionary… he was Nat Turner for us.”[9]
Edward Mills’s work represented a high point in a process of maturation that had taken decades. The impact that this artistic environment had on students cannot be overstated. Barbara Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the American South, once remarked that her earliest memories of her alma mater were the hallway murals that John Biggers was responsible for. Another former student, Karl Edward Hall, described the TSU experience with Biggers as transformational: “It gave you the opportunity to look in the mirror and see something positive. It was alright to be black, it was alright to have an afro.”[10] He remembers going through the halls at TSU and being astonished that the images he saw were created by students only a few years older than him.
One such student was Maurice Ellison. His work entitled Campus Life: Turmoil of the 60’s (1972) directly addresses the friction at TSU between students and the city leaders while alluding to national tensions through a facility with compositional space. Completed only five years after the campus invasion by police, the work continues to echo much of what was present in that moment. Ellison pulls the viewer around the mural from the idealized students in the foreground to soldiers entering battle. Proud symbols of America such as the bald eagle are critiqued and further problematized with a noose held in its mouth. Although the national challenges are prominently displayed, the local element remains a strong aspect of the overall narrative. He depicts the atmosphere on a college campus through the presence of figures devoid of military garb or other identifying embellishments. He also subverts earlier, affirmative symbols projected by the murals at TSU. Gone are women presented in a solely domesticated role as they were in the past. The young lady is no longer the happy homemaker simply fixing dinners.
She is transformed into a leader of student movements. In addition, there is imagery that directly references Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two sprinters who famously raised their fists during the American national anthem at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The two figures on the right with their black berets are immediately recognizable as Black Panther Party members. Their smiles are in stark contrast to the more common deadpan or angered expressions that characterized the BPP in most media outlets.
Previous generations of muralists championed military service in their paintings as a way of showing black loyalty to the US cause. Instead of an exalting narrative, the US soldiers are presented here as figures marching to their doom at the behest of a country that still denies them the full freedom of opportunity. The iconography recalls John Biggers’ own creative response to the reality of war in generations past. In his mural sketch, The Dying Soldier (1943), Biggers presented a lone, dying soldier at the moment of his death. There are flashes all around him of his life. The actual mural was lost but the sketch remains and shows a developing student artist already exploring complex narratives in his work. This complexity was clearly conveyed to his future students and lives on in their creative output.
Finally, the eye catching, In Search of the Watermelon (1980), by Barry Morris operates as a personal reflection on individual achievement in the face of numerous obstacles. The mural is located next to the President’s office and is immediately distinguished by the preponderance of hands The large, detailed hands are a John Biggers hallmark. The unique emphasis on rendering hands is also a trait that is recognizable in many of the students that went through the program.. The importance of powerful hands was something that Biggers always expressed. According to Morris, Biggers would often encourage him to add size to a figure’s hands. “The way he saw it, hands were where the power was. That was where strength lied. Because that is how the work is done.”[10] In Morris’ own work, the abundance of hands and forearms add a rhythm to the mural along with the numerous diplomas. Completed in 1980, the work echoes the turmoil captured by previous students in the 1960s and 1970s while articulating instabilities of the present moment.
The hands, diplomas, watermelons, birds, and oil barrels are images that are repeated throughout the work and help to guide the viewer’s eyes around the composition. In Black Art in Houston, Biggers and Simms discussed an early recognition of the need to develop a new vocabulary for their students as they built the department. This was necessary as more was asked of the art produced here. The work was not only decorative, it needed to help educate and transform the community. Decades later, this complex language is clearly understood when expressed in Morris’s work. He is the central figure of the work, his face is hidden behind the large watermelon he is carrying. At the same time, groups of men are grabbing him and pulling him back. He continues the tradition of institutional critique that characterizes previous murals on campus. This time, instead of overtly criticizing the mythology of the United States or US foreign policy, the young artist is pointing a finger directly at the University administration and what he perceived to be its ties to the Shah of Iran. In the background there are figures locked together dancing around barrels of oil and the letters “TSU” are in flames.
In addition to functioning as a self-portrait, the piece also operates as a surreal indictment of the previous TSU president’s administration. Regarding the two pieces that were produced before him, Morris says “I walked down the hall to see what everyone else was doing to see how far I could go…These guys have put some things on the wall that is going to outlive me…It became a sense of family. And I [said] I am going to get mine up there no matter what.”[10]
The former students that produced these murals have gone on to have careers in diverse fields and many are now retired. Sadly, few records remain of the murals outside of the artworks themselves. I have been working with the team at the University Museum at Texas Southern University to assist with tours and to attempt to document the development of the murals. To this end, I worked to assemble former students for panels and other discussions with current students about the work that adorns the walls. Currently, there are discussions in place to develop new projects that respond to the turmoil of the period outlined in this paper. Ultimately, each of these murals belong to a larger cycle of ritual and reenactment in the service of collective memory.
Two of the three works discussed in this essay were produced within a five-year period following the infamous TSU conflict with the Houston Police department, and the third was produced a little over ten years after the same event. While direct references to that day in 1967 are not blatant, the message reflected in the work on the walls is clear and connected. The team of artists and art historians that built the department over the years created the environment in which these episodic pieces could emerge fully realized. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the students had created and maintained murals for decades. They were building on what had come before. The allusions in these three murals are not the direct symbols presented by previous generations yet they are no less powerful. The works each call and respond to one another and these inspired visions of resistance are some of the most compelling images in this temple to the imagination.