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A Little Help From Our Friends.jpg

A Little Help From Our Friends

In 2008, Baltimore Green Construction and Rebuilding Together Baltimore contacted Dr. Bob Hieronimus. They asked him to participate in a renovation project throughout the city, including a complete recreation of the 1996 mural A Little Help from Our Friends. The mural is located at Johns Hopkins University’s Office of Volunteer Services and features the faces of Gandhi, Jackie Robinson, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, among others. In 1996, the mural won the best mural award from WMAR-TV and was visited by Bob Marley’s sons, Ziggy and Stephen.

Pathfinder .jpg

Pathfinder Mural

In 1988, Mike Alewitz designed and began to direct the creation of Pathfinder Mural in New York City’s West Village. The mural, measuring 79 x 85 feet, was an international collaboration of 80 artists from 20 different countries including Argentina, Canada, Iran, New Zealand, Nicaragua and South Africa. At its dedication, it was hailed as one of the largest political murals in the world. In 1987, Alewitz had approached the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), of which he was a member, and proposed that Pathfinder Press sponsored a mural for its Charles Street building. The party approved both the project and his concept of the mural: a celebration of the revolutionary struggles in Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua and South Africa, as well as in America. The central image of the mural is a large red printing press. The faces of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Karl Marx, and Nelson Mandela loop around it. The abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth also feature. During the creation of Pathfinder Mural, the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew funding from several controversial projects, prompting a debate on free speech and censorship. For the first few months of this mural's creation, work continued without incident. But in 1989, Patrick Buchanan, a conservative commentator, vilified the mural in the Washington Times, calling it a “six-story shrine to communism, a Marxist Mount Rushmore in Greenwich Village." As the mural neared completion, the dialogue between Alewitz and the SWP started to break down. Alewitz was blocked from attending the mural dedication ceremony on November 19, 1989. During December, vandals threw glass bottles filled with white paint at the mural. In 1996, the mural was removed in order to repair cracks in exterior wall of the Pathfinder building, and by 2003, the building on which Pathfinder Mural was housed was sold for around $20 million.

Margo Muto and inmates, Picturing Our Dreams, Monroe Correctional Facility, Rochester, New York, 2011.jpg

Picturing Our Dreams

Picturing Our Dreams is by incarcerated youth at the Monroe Correctional Facility in Rochester, New York. The mural was created in collaboration with a New York State Library Centre writer, visual artist and Rochester School District teachers. The ideology behind the mural was that inmates could communicate the idea that there is freedom and knowledge inside the jail system. In the centre of the mural, a heart with many key-holes floats around the corresponding keys, and above are the faces of the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Wardell McClain, Sim's Corner Wall of Respect, 618 E 47th St at South Champlain Ave. [Black Neighborhood], Chicago, 2009.jpg

Sim's Corner Wall of Respect

In 2009, Wardell McClain created a mural on South Champlain Avenue in Chicago, Illinois titled Sim's Corner Wall of Respect, that took its inspiration from the 1967 mural, Wall of Respect. It includes the faces of the abolitonists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Malcolm X, Harold Washington, Elijah Muhammad, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jordan, Coretta Scott King, Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington.   

WoBH.jpg

Wall of Black Heroes

In 2006, muralist Joseph Tiberino, along with his sons Gabe and Raphael, painted Wall of Black Heroes for the African American Museum of Philadelphia. When creating the mural, the idea was to provide a portable piece of work that would later be housed in the streets. Measuring 4ft by 12ft, the mural was created on such a scale so as to provide the audience with the sense that the figures of history were life-size. The mural takes the audience on a historical journey, starting with a self-emancipating shackled slave, then moving to the abolitionists Frederick Douglass andHarriet Tubman, then Angela Davis and Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong and Martin Luther King Jr. The mural is now on the side of the Municipal Services Building next to City Hall.

Great African Americans, Malcolm X Blvd. at 124th Street, Harlem, New York, ca.1999.jpg

Great African Americans

An unknown artist painted this mural in Harlem, New York City, on the facade of Dining Heritage. It depicts the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X. It was destroyed in 2015.

Eugene 'Edaw' Wade, Cramton Auditorium Mural, Howard University, 1976 [destroyed].jpg

Cramton Auditorium Mural

In 1976, Eugene Eda Wade created a mural at Howard University  in Washington D.C. The mural depicts the abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Nathaniel Turner attempting to break chains, as well as the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The mural has now been destroyed. 

Wall of Meditation (1970).jpg

Wall of Meditation

In 1970, Eugene Eda Wade painted the Wall of Meditation on the exterior façade of the Olivet Community Center. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. anchor the middle of the mural, and are surrounded by Egyptian figures on the left, and enslaved figures breaking free from their chains on the right.    

(14) Wall of Respect (1975).jpg

Wall of Respect

Borrowing its name from the 1967 “Wall of Respect” of Chiacgo, muralists Ashanti Johnson, Nathan Hoskins and Verna Parks installed their own public artwork in Atlanta. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass is alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and W.E.B. Du Bois, with the North Star between them. Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali are also present. The mural was destroyed in 2007.