The Power of Place

An Important Exploration

Before delving into the meat of my findings I would like to first address why an exploration of memorial murals is an important topic. Memorial walls are one facet of place-making. In communities with many such walls, the images may have a considerable impact of the creation of place. Tim Cresswell, a humanist geographer, writes,

Because places are meaningful and because we always exist and act in places, we are constantly engaged in acts of interpretations. This has led some to talk of places and the landscape as a text. Like a book, the landscape is created by authors, and the end product attempts to create certain meanings. But also, like a book ,the people who “read” the landscape and its places can never be forced to read it in only one way. The text is subject to multiple readings despite the fact that some readings are encouraged more than others. We can thus talk of a hierarchy of readings, with favored, abnormal, accepted readings and discouraged, heretical, abnormal readings-dominant readings and subordinate readings.

Graffiti artists, called “writers, ” often engage in what Cresswell would call subordinate storytelling. Quite literally, creating a place positions people inside and outside, included and excluded. Space and place manage power. They designate proper and improper uses for the area. Beyond just controlling power, they convey it as well. Reading a place reveals dominant ideologies, and oftentimes with the case of memorial murals, resistant ideologies as well. By creating values and reflecting values, places are always interacting with themselves. Given the strong power of place, planners, policy-makers, and strategists of other kinds benefit from a deep understanding of the places they would like to affect.
There has been a recent admission of art as a powerful player in community development. An entire conference at the Pratt Center for Community Development entitled “Art in the Contested City” brought many professionals and New York City dwellers into the same room to discuss issues of public art and struggles over urban space. The conference’s program aptly summarized the day’s events and the processes to be examined.

The role of the arts in urban change has become the subject of intense conversation. Some forms of cultural development-like arts districts, major film festivals, new museums, and iconic buildings-are seen as tools to jumpstart rapid economic development and attract tourism and creative talent. Such development has often seen controversial, as it is perceived to be linked to gentrification, displacement, and even the exclusion of some local forms of art and culture. Other strategies of cultural intervention-like community based theatre, arts education, and street art-are being deployed in resistance to these same paths of urban chance. Here, arts and culture are mobilized as arenas for creative expression and political engagement about what form development should take.

Art as resistance, whether to forms of development, political agendas, or dominant place stories, is an emergent community development strategy. Caron Atlas, a Brooklyn-based community development consultant, embarked a project to raise tough questions with a diverse group of community stakeholders. Her tactic, instead of asking questions herself, was to generate questions that communities themselves would like considered. Atlas’s findings, published in the fall 2005 Progressive Planning journal, highlight the significant intersection between culture and community development. One question that was offered has significant implications with regards to memorial murals in New York City; it reads, “how do we value and respond to the history of a place (particularly if that history is unpleasant or challenging) while designing ways to improve it for its present and future uses?” Memorial murals, in their content, colors, and shapes, tell history and by so doing contribute significantly to place and identity creation.

How Graffiti Memorial Walls Reclaim both Space and History

Space

As illuminated by Tim Cresswell, places designate “us” and “them,” “in” and “out,” “high” and “low,” “central” and “marginal.” Their arrangement “can be thought of as a ‘meta-narrative’-a text of established meanings.” Graffiti takes back space. A significant portion of its roots was laid in the South Bronx. Quite literally, graffiti began as a political activity in the sense that its very act challenges established norms of property rights.

History

Beyond murals’ roots in graffiti and “taking over space,” memorial walls “are much more [even] than artistic representations; they must be understood as fulfilling important social, political, and economic motives within an urban community.” Memorial murals, as a form of political graffiti, publish what the mainstream media does not readily. When reports of violence in poor neighborhoods are conducted, they often sensationalize events, minimizing the extent to which the loss of life affects people and communities themselves. Often, high death rates and trends of violence shock researchers and readers alike into a staggered or overwhealmed state in the face of horrible circumstances. More often than not, however, criminal, academic, and development reports fail to make an accurate account of violence.
Winners write history. The story of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City is no exception. Melvin Delgado, a prominent authority on memorial murals, writes

If the community is marginalized, segregated, attacked, and undervalued by the broader society, then murals must reflect this reality in their content, and seek to capture and record major historical events in a community’s life. Since traditional sources of recording history are often unavailable to marginalized groups, particularly low-income groups, murals serve this vital function.

For instance, it is common for memorial murals in New York City to reveal cases of police brutality. Although professional literature and the popular press usually focus on violence within and/or between communities or the role of drugs, a serious discussion of death in inner cities demands attention to the role that police play. The police have killed 126 New Yorkers since 1999 and the past few months have seen the political mobilization and outrage of many communities under the gun.
On November 25th, 2006, Sean Bell was killed in a hail of fifty bullets when leaving his bachelor party in Jamaica, Queens. Only twenty-three years old, unarmed, and hours before his wedding, Sean is considered one of the most recent and severe victims of police brutality in the country. His memorialization process is a potent example of public grieving and an expression of political resistance.
One of the most explicit pieces reflecting injustice is the Amadou Diallo mural in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. In 1999 the West African was shot and killed by four police officers that believed that he was armed and dangerous. As it turned out, Amadou was neither and his violent death exposed a serious case of police brutality. His memorial mural portrays four police officers wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods and pointing guns, a burning American flag, and a skeletal statue of liberty holding a gun instead of a torch.

Image Pending

Amadou Diallo memorial on Wheeler and Westchester Avenues in the Bronx

Clearly, Amadou’s memorial attempts to re-write history and expose the reality of injustice that caused his death.
The memorial for cousins Anthony Rosario, age eighteen, and Hilton Vega, age twenty-one, similarly attempts to make public the story of their brutal deaths committed by police officers in 1995. The police department claimed that Anthony and Hilton were killed in a shootout in the Bronx when in truth two policemen shot them and their friend Freddy Bonilla twenty-eight times. Rosiario was shot fourteen times, with at least six bullets in his back. Hilton was shot eight times with five bullets to his back. Bonilla was only shot once in the leg, but he pretended to be dead, thus living to tell the story. Anthony’s mother decided that a memorial mural would do more than honor the lives of her son and nephew, it would also publicize the manner in which they died.

Image Pending

A Memorial for Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega, killed by police in University Heights, the Bronx.

Mrs. Rosario went one step further by creating an organization, Parents Against Police Brutality. Part of the mural for her family members acknowledges other victims of police brutality around the country.
Although it might not come to mind first, Princess Diana’s mural on the lower east side of Manhattan is in many ways the epitome of a memorial wall that attempts to reclaim history. Although there are many obvious reasons why Diana is a completely different kind of victim from those usually memorialized in murals throughout New York City, they all have one important trait in common—they are victims of the media. While the lack of press coverage and attention for many of the city’s worst-off neighborhoods perpetuates their poor conditions, Diana was literally killed my too much attention. When Chico put up a memorial mural for her it was continually defaced. (See right-hand image below.) Apparently, people who felt they had to fight for cameras to cover their problems were sick and tired of everyone focusing on the death of a princess. In response to Chico’s wall, A Charles created another one. (See left-hand image below.)

Memorials and political statements in one: Princess Dianas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A Charles’ mural on the left is a reaction to Chico’s on the right. Chico’s mural was defaced with the words, “no saints, no sinners” and “we spent years of toil to break free from the TYRANNY of british rule.”

With the arching pink bubble words “media overkill” above her wheat-pasted portrait, this second mural is critical of all of the attention that her death received. In contrast to many victims and communities that have had to fight to publicize their struggles, Princess Diana’s death was dramatically produced and portrayed by the media. A Charles’ memorial wall for her on Houston Street makes a political statement by retelling the story of her tragic death with different colors, ones that emphasize the dually negative role that the media can play.