Mural Program

CRP has been following and researching graffiti abatement policy for many years. One of the trends in the field of graffiti abatement has been the privatization of abatement and the outsourcing of abatement contracts from city Public Works agencies to private corporations. This short article is particularly interesting because the city of San Jose has outsourced its abatement services to Graffiti Abatement Coatings, who also makes graffiti removal products. One important point to note is that the city was forced…

While CRP is opposed to the digging up of people’s burial grounds and the removal (theft) of indigenous materials from museums, we thought this was a cool discovery. We wonder what people will think when our murals are discovered in 500 years. The kitchen of a house in the impoverished town of Chajul, Guatemala, is the unlikely site of a major archeological discovery: centuries-old Mayan murals found under layers of paint. PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT SLABONSKI Lucas Asicona Ramirez, right, discovered…

Venice Beach is home to one of the oldest and most well-known legal walls for aerosol culture. Its is similar to the “free walls,” which are basically a spray paint free-for-all, with the important exception. It has a curator. In the past, aerosol writers regulated the production on walls by a simple code that if you intended to paint over another person’s work, the quality of the new piece had to be equal or superior to the previous work. Failure to…

The Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago has a long history of Xicano artwork and murals. It is home to the National Mexican Museum of Art. A primarily Mexican community for many years, many people have been displaced by gentrification by the University of Illinois at Chicago, who bought up the entire Maxwell Street area on the other side of the tracks and converted it into bourgeois housing for its students. Pilsen has also been a target for development with the emergence of…

Although the Community Rejuvenation Project was formed in 2005, it didn’t take off until the summer of 2009, when Elijah Pfotenhauer, Desi W.O.M.E and Mike 360 created five major murals (including 3 whole building pieces) in East Oakland with 30 youth employment through a summer program. CRP just completed another summer youth employment project on the Greenway in Richmond this summer. This article is another testament to the importance of harnessing the creativity of youth to brighten and transform communities.…

CRP has been closely following the unfolding drama in Corvallis CA. The Chinese consulate has been caught in a case of long-distance censorship, attempting to silence calls for Taiwan and Tibet’s independence and a cease in the brutal repression of their people. This situation speaks to the responsibilities and challenges faced by public artists. There are too many cases when public art (and the arts in general), when the artist criticizes are government or corporation and their work is erased…