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Community Mural

Desi Mundo Breaks Down the 360 Mural

The Community Rejuvenation Project’s highly-anticipated collaboration with The Greenlining Institute, the “360 Mural,” has completed its community input and design review phases. Now it’s on to the actual painting, which begins May 18. But before that happens, we thought you might enjoy a sneak preview of what the finished design will look like, as well as a breakdown of the images, people, and symbolism contained within. Here’s a mock-up of the design: A front-facing view of the same image: Here’s…

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Alice Street Mural Project A Big Hit With Local Media Outlets

  Recently, CRP pulled off a pretty cool feat: within the course of ten days, the Alice Street Mural Project received media hits from the Mercury News , Oakland Tribune, KQED, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s newsletter, Oakland Tribune  (again), and the Contra Costa Times. That’s easily the most attention from local media CRP has ever gotten for any of the 150 mural projects the organization has done in the past four years. Even more impressive was what the media had to…

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Alice Street Mural Project Report-Back

  After a little more than a week of painting the wall at 14th and Alice, CRP is pleased to report the wall is nearing completion. This project has been a real eye-opener; the level of interaction we’ve had with the community has been unprecedented. It’s not an exaggeration to say the mural has started to become a magnet for community-building, even before it’s completed. The project started with covering the entire wall—covered with unsightly and highly unartistic graffiti tags–with…

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South Shore Mural a Shining Beacon in Chicago’s Sea of Bureaucracy and Brown Paint

Chicago, Illinois, is a city with a deep division over public art. A case in point: The city’s controversial “Graffiti Blasters”  abatement program, which for the past 21 years has criminalized street artists and muralists, by linking aerosol expression of any kind with gang violence. Introduced in 1993, the same year as the classic hip-hop albums “Midnight Marauders” and “93 Til Infinity,” Graffiti Blasters – the name sounds like a lightweight racist take on the term “ghetto blaster” – became…

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CRP’s Desi Mundo Returns to Chicago for Two-Week Residency at Hyde Park Art Center

It’s been said you can’t go back home again. For Community Rejuvenation Project founder and Executive Director Desi Mundo, however, that wasn’t exactly the case. After 14 years of living in Oakland, where he founded CRP — which has become the city’s most prolific producers of public murals — Mundo returned to Chicago, the city he first learned the aerosol arts in, for a two-week residency at Hyde Park Art Center, which happened to be celebrating its 75th anniversary. In…

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Nova Scotia Discovers the Solution!

Halifax property owners have discovered a solution for their vandalism problems. Instead of chasing away the youth at night, they are encouraging higher quality works on their space during the day. What they have discovered is that most young writers simply want to express themselves. Given legitimate forums and encouragement, they focus on developing themselves and their style and they create masterpieces. According to the youth, blank walls are a target. But high quality murals and masterpieces invoke respect. Its…

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Gardena and the Inflatable Felony

This is the first of a three part series by the Community Rejuvenation Project on the perpetual criminalization of aerosol culture, the abatement industry and the politics of incarceration. We begin with the problematic issue of “charge stacking,” which occurs when a prosecutor increases the severity of a charge or adds additional charges to an arrest to add leverage when making a plea agreement. This phenomenon was documented in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in relation to the drug…

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Street Art vs. Gang Injunctions

This is the third in a three part series by the Community Rejuvenation Project on the perpetual criminalization of aerosol culture, the abatement industry and the politics of incarceration. In the last two articles, we address the inflated penalties and intense criminalization of the aerosol movement. This is further demonstrated in the article below. MTA crew has been targeted with the first ever gang injunction against a writing crew, apparently in response to a huge “blockbuster” painted on the walls…

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Los Angeles’ War on Aerosol Writers

This is the second of a three part series by the Community Rejuvenation Project on the perpetual criminalization of aerosol culture, the abatement industry and the politics of incarceration.  In the first article, we addressed the methods that law enforcement uses to inflate vandalism charges, pressure them into plea bargains and then cash in with exorbitant fines and fees. In this article, we address the prison industrial complex and the realities faced by everyday youth swept up into this system through…

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ASU unveils 6th mural in civil rights series

This story really touched our intern, Jordynn. “Reading this story sparked a lot in me because it stands for something many people in our city believe in. Being that CRP is located in Oakland we want to show all different aspect of political murals from different backgrounds to express what we stand for.” Indeed, murals have the power to tell our history, honor our heroes, and acknowledge things in our past that are left out of our school history books.…

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