Muralists seek to preserve the city’s murals
By Chine Labbe November 4, 2009
Photo credit: Chine Labbe
In El Barrio, wall painting is a lasting art form. The Spirit of East Harlem, at the southeast corner of East 104th Street and Lexington Avenue, has been in the community for more than 30 years. An ode to the neighborhood’s day-to-day lifestyle, it covers the entire façade of a building and depicts local people playing chess, chatting and taking care of their children, among other activities. “It is one of the great landmark murals of New York City,” muralist Janet Braun-Reinitz said. “I don’t know if the world has mural masterpieces, but The Spirit of (East) Harlem comes close,” local artist Manuel Vega said.
With about 15 murals painted in schoolyards, community gardens and random locations in the street, East Harlem is one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in New York City for outdoor artwork. It even hosts a mural by world-famous artist Keith Haring on 2nd Avenue and 128th Street. Entitled “Crack is Wack,” it was painted in 1986 and remains to this day.
On June 13th though, residents of the neighborhood came to realize that their community’s art was not eternal. On that day, El Barrios’ most famous artwork – The Spirit of East Harlem – was defaced. Somebody tagged the bottom of the wall. “There was a sense of permanence about this mural. In 30 years, nothing that severe had ever happened to it,” Vega said. “The community felt violated.”
A month after the mural was defaced, community based-organization Hope Community Inc. which owns the building on which the mural is painted, sponsored a public forum to debate street art. Confronting local graffiti artists and muralists, it was called “Street art is not a battle.”
“This is just putting gasoline on fire when there is no fire,” Vega commented. “It’s just one graffiti artist that went overboard.” For Bronx-based Graffiti artist Hector Nazario, aka Nicer, of Tats Cru, spray-painting, as any type of street art, functions with clearly defined ground rules. “You can go over a tag with something bigger if it’s covering it, but you can’t tag on a mural,” he said. “We do exactly the same thing as traditional muralists. The only difference is our medium. What scares people is that the spray cans we use are also used to deface a lot of places.”
Graffiti art is not immune from defacing either. Recently, the outer wall of the Graffiti Hall of Fame, New York’s most prestigious legal graffiti spot on 106th Street and Park Avenue, was tagged. Members of Tats Cru though, were very calm about it. “It happens,” Nicer said. He explained that in graffiti art, documenting the pieces through photography is more important than keeping the piece itself. “Most of our walls don’t live for a day,” Bio, another Tats Cru member, said. “The Hall of Fame is in constant transition, whereas the Spirit of East Harlem Mural has been in the community for many years.”
photo credit: Chine Labbe
Vega, who had helped paint the mural in the 1970s as an apprentice and then restored it in the 1990s, said he repainted the mural within days of the tagging thanks to the donation of a single individual. He said the real problem that emerged from this vandalism was the question of how to preserve East Harlem’s long-established murals.
The Spirit of East Harlem is not protected from future tagging. Nor is it protected from the wind, the snow and other weather factors that might damage it over time. Many murals in the community have already suffered from deterioration, including one painted by Vega on 103rd Street and Lexington Avenue. It has faded to the point of being almost invisible. “It is a real ghost,” Vega said.
Not much is being done to preserve East Harlem’s murals and protect them from vandalism, time and demolition, local artists said. “People don’t tend to think of murals as a serious sort of art,” Braun-Reinitz said.
The rapid gentrification under way in El Barrio might not help preserve them, she added. “There is a tendency to think that murals belong only in poor communities that need to be beautified, or in communities that have a complaint. I even know individuals who don’t want a mural in their community because they don’t want their neighborhood to be marked a slum.”
Initiatives are being taken at the national level to restore and protect landmark community murals throughout the country. Rescue Public Murals, a program of non-profit Heritage Preservation, launched its first mural restoration in West Harlem last August. Braun-Reinitz was among the six artists paid by the organization to restore Homage to Seurat: La Grande Jatte, on 142nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
Photo credit: Chine Labbe
On a windy Tuesday morning in September, the petite and authoritative 71-year-old muralist climbed up the stairs of the scaffolding, a tin of dark blue paint in hand. “I do sometimes think that I’m too old for this,” she said, while sitting with deftness onto two pieces of wood, an arm-length away from the wall. “We hope that Rescue Public Murals is going to continue with this,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean that they will be back in New York any time soon.” Out of the other 11 murals identified by the non-profit as “highly endangered murals,” only one is located in New York City. Some of the others are located in Atlanta, San Diego, Philadelphia, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles.
Unlike Philadelphia, where the city government Mural Arts Program has boosted the creation of over 2,800 murals since its inception in 1984, New York City doesn’t sponsor the preservation and creation of community murals and graffiti.
Local artists wonder why the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LCP) does not protect community murals. “They give landmark status to buildings of note, why note to murals of note?” Braun-Reinitz said.
“Murals and painted signs on privately-owned buildings do not qualify for landmark status,” Elizabeth de Bourbon, an LCP spokeswoman, wrote in an email. “Designating the sign of a privately-owned building would prevent the next owner from using the building the way he or she would want to, and would amount to a taking which is not the intent or the purpose of the landmarks law.”
“All in all, the defacing was an interesting experience, because it provoked a lot of things that needed to happen,” Vega said in his studio at 97th Street and Central Park West. “Now is an opportunity to create more murals,” he said.
