Uptown Mural
The Heart That Beats
A Mural for Uptown
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Just clap your hands for me...this is what we call...the people’s beat....Sometimes the beat of the People is loud, sometimes it’s soft, but the Beat of the People is always there.” ~ Fred Hampton
As students, we all come from varying backgrounds and levels of prior engagement with Uptown. We began our course together with a discussion of maps and the layers of experience and memory which soak into the physical spaces they depict. Maps can be many things, good and bad, but they are never complete. To understand a place, one must look past the surface and see all the layers of human action and experience which elevate us to the present. In our efforts to make this mural represent a more faithful and interpretive ‘map’ of Uptown, Fred Hampton’s evocative words speaking to the “Beat of the People” were a guiding light. As long as there is ‘the People’ then the People have a heart, and that heart has a beat. It can grow stronger or weaker but it can never be wiped out, and we have worked hard to attune our ears to it. Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood has historically been the site of many intersecting movements, including but not limited to housing justice, the struggles of racially and ethnically oppressed peoples, police abuse, and the ongoing fight against gentrification and all its related ills.
Through our coursework this preceding semester, we immersed ourselves in the history of Uptown, and particularly the ‘submerged’ traditions of resistance to displacement and repression. In conceptualizing this mural, we aspired to represent the ‘heartbeat’ of Uptown, beyond the edifice of respectability politics and the hollow echoes of ‘urban renewal,’ to amplify the neighborhood’s spirit of activism and resistance. Despite facing seemingly insurmountable odds, the heart of Uptown has always been beating, albeit muffled at times. The title of our mural, “The Heart That Beats” pays homage to the beating heart of Uptown, its People, and the many local institutions, organizations , and movements that support and uphold their struggles. A thin red line can be seen cutting horizontally through the mural representing the readings of an electrocardiogram (ECG), a device/method used to evaluate the electrical signals of the human heart. This red line further symbolizes the physical CTA Red Line train in addition to the segregated ‘redlining’ practices which created the city of Chicago as we know it. We hope that this mural faithfully amplifies this submerged beat and pays tribute to the spirit of Uptown, past, present, and future.
Along with guiding our education about Uptown, Dr. Guevarra has also facilitated the opportunity to contribute this small gesture of solidarity. This final design underwent many iterations as we moved through studying, brainstorming, voting, and finally implementing it. The mural was completed on a 5' x 8' canvas using acrylic paint on gesso primer. Our art collective worked very hard to design and implement our collective vision, spending many hours doing the bulk of the painting. Our filmmaking collective dutifully compiled interviews and contributed videos documenting our thoughts, feelings, experiences and the process of creating the mural. Our writer’s collective produced the booklet with the seventeen inspirational activists we hope to honor, along with the pamphlet that you are now reading. While we drew inspiration from a wide range of sources in the creation of this mural, our main inspiration remains the legacies of resistance and steadfastness that we hope to honor.
"Every place is, if not infinite, then practically inexhaustible, and no quantity of maps will allow the distance to be completely traversed." ~ Rebecca Solnit
VIdeos documenting the process of making the mural
By Benedicta Anighoro
By Kaliyah Cuadra
By Prof. Guevarra - dedicated to her students
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