Public Art Murals of Famous Author and Poets in New Mexico

A Tale of Ii Murals:

The Divide Between Community Muralism and Street Art in the "Creative Urban center"

Allyson Burbeck

Citation: Burbeck, Allyson. "A Tale of Two Murals: The Split Between Customs Muralism and Street Art in the 'Creative City.'" The Coalition of Chief'south Scholars on Textile Civilization, May vii, 2021.

Abstract: This slice examines the history and legacy of Chicana/o muralism in the historically Chicana/o neighborhood of La Alma-Lincoln Park in Denver, Colorado. Members of the Chicana/o community who participate in, observe, or support mural-making contribute to concrete transformations of the urban landscape while also creating memories that upshot in melancholia attachments to these spaces, contributing to the process of placemaking and a communal sense of belonging for this marginalized group. In recent years, street art has gained popularity in Denver, increasing competition for public spaces. Many people claim that street fine art civilisation provides Denver a positive form of public art that beautifies the city and breaks upwards the monotony of the urban landscape. By comparing two murals in La Alma-Lincoln Park, 1 Chicana/o mural and i street art mural, this piece demonstrates how city officials, urban planners, and corporate developers take effectively co-opted street art practices to commodify the urban landscape in the name of the "artistic city." Street art becomes a blazon of marketing scheme through which to communicate a neighborhood's "actuality" and attractiveness to visitors and members of the upper classes to accumulate profit through tourism and development plans. The appearance of street art murals in La Alma-Lincoln Park transforms its distinctly Chicana/o public spaces, negatively affecting longtime residents' sense of belonging and signaling the gentrification of public space. The author situates transformations to public spaces equally not an effect of gentrification, but rather a cause. This thesis challenges public sphere theory past emphasizing the importance of public infinite to counterpublic spheres. The Chicana/o counterpublic has repeatedly faced geographic displacement at the hands of the U.s.a. authorities and the Anglo-American public, rendering access and control of public spaces specially meaningful.

Keywords:  Chicana/o Muralism, La Alma-Lincoln Park, street art, muralism, urban landscape

Figure 1. Carlos Fresquez and Metropolitan State Academy of Denver students. Su Teatro murals (east wall). 2012. Santa Iron Drive and seventh Avenue, Denver, CO. Photo by author.

        Every month, Denver'due south Fine art District on Santa Fe hosts the First Friday Art Walk, inviting the public to bout the district's many art galleries and wander the street admiring its public art. The art district inhabits the neighborhood of La Alma-Lincoln Park, home to a sizeable Chicana/o community and several Chicana/o murals created during the Mexican American activist-led Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, or el movimiento. As visitors meander downward Santa Fe Drive, they encounter 2 colorful murals directly beyond from each other on seventh Avenue. A massive Chicana/o mural adorns Su Teatro Cultural and Performing Arts Center, which promotes and preserves Chicana/o arts, heritage, and traditions (effigy 1). Created by students from Metropolitan Country Academy of Denver in 2012, the mural features contemporary Chicanas/os playing and dancing to music and colorful figures representing Aztec deities, such as an undulating feathered serpent, that explode beyond the walls.

Effigy 2. Pat Milbery, Pat McKinney, and Jason T. Graves. Honey this City. Landscape. 2016. Santa Atomic number 26 Bulldoze and seventh Avenue, Denver, CO. Photo by author.

        Opposite this artwork stands an as vibrant mural on El Noa Noa Tex-Mex Restaurant (effigy 2). The mural proclaims "Love this City" in cursive letters over a geometric pink heart and features a mishmash of geometric shapes, symbols, and elements of Colorado culture, including a bicycle cycle, native animals such as buffalo, and a jagged silhouette of the Rocky Mountains. Street artist and Colorado-transplant Pat Milbery painted this landscape during Denver Arts Calendar week in 2016, effectively launching a series ofLove this Urban center murals that would punctuate Denver. Backed by the city's tourism and marketing agency Visit Denver, Milbery's street art campaign offers various neighborhoods a slightly dissimilar version of the original design meant to reflect each area'due south graphic symbol and history. While the mural seems to promote a vibrant downtown full of public art, it loses its amuse as the critical viewer wonders how exactly the artist sought to draw this specific neighborhood with vague symbols of bicycles and skyscrapers constitute anywhere in Denver.

        Does this mural truly stand for La Alma-Lincoln Park? Notably, the artist fails to include the neighborhood'due south rich Chicana/o history and customs. La Alma-Lincoln Park became a oasis for the Chicanas/os in the 1960s afterwards the city evicted them from the nearby Auraria neighborhood targeted for redevelopment. In their new neighborhood, the community gathered for celebrations, painted community murals, and mobilized against a local and federal government that sought to assimilate them into white American society. The neighborhood'south Chicana/o murals immune Chicanas/os to accept ownership of their surroundings, empowering the customs to embrace its ancient and gimmicky history, cultural identity and values, and hereafter aspirations. The street art style inLove this Urban centerencapsulates an affront to this history, smoothing over the metropolis's continued deportation and marginalization of the Chicana/o customs and replacing information technology with a landscape that fails to business relationship for cultural deviation and conflicting histories.

        This newspaper challenges the narrative that theDear this Citymurals reflect and serve the immediate community past exploring the relationship between urban renewal, street art, and deportation. Scholars interested in gentrification have asserted the idea of the "creative city" as a way to describe international cities that use creativity and cultural attractions to marketplace themselves as worthwhile tourist destinations. In the creative urban center, street fine art often becomes a marketing tactic that communicates a neighborhood'south "authenticity" regarding how "street" it appears. Such street art murals attempt to harken dorsum to the days of illegal graffiti writing, a subculture at present thoroughly wrapped into hip-hop and popular civilisation, every bit a way to signal the trendiness and desirability of a neighborhood to visitors and the upper classes.

        How can we consider such manufactured street art truly "accurate" when those in power control it? Such murals are no longer spaces used to fight the ability, but to attract visitors and members of the upper classes, thus accumulating turn a profit for city officials and corporate developers through tourism and urban renewal plans. Murals like toDear this City have emerged within La Alma-Lincoln Park in recent years, transforming the distinctly Chicana/o grapheme of the neighborhood and its public space into a haven for white, affluent people. This street art campaign legitimizes a homogenous form of public art that presents a unified public sphere, thus erasing and displacing La Alma-Lincoln Park's Chicana/o customs, whose culture does not fit into gentrified ethics.[ane] I seek to criticize street art as a tool of gentrification, thus confronting urban citizens and artists with their role in this process. If we can recognize and become critical of our role inside gentrification, hopefully, we can change how we contribute to such a procedure and fight against it.

The Creative City and Appropriation of the Street

        Both urban theorists and fine art historians take extensively debated the relationship between fine art and gentrification. The "fated," lower-class spaces of a city often attract artists with their fundamental locations, low rents, and sense of authentic culture.[2] Artists serve a colonizing function as the frontline who first occupies a neighborhood considered "unsafe," securing it for the residue of the bourgeois.[3] The artistic customs attracts property investment and evolution, easing the catamenia of capital letter into the gentrifying neighborhood. Ofttimes, the gentrification process displaces the initial community of artists who become priced out as the upper classes infiltrate the neighborhood.[4]

        Art historians Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan firmly indict the art world with complicity in the gentrification of New York Urban center's Lower East Side, a historically working-grade neighborhood overtaken past artists in the 1980s.[5] Aided past city officials, corporate developers created the "advisable" conditions to house the white center class and, thus, evict working-class residents.[6] Presently after their arrival, art galleries and a rising street art culture appeared across the neighborhood.[7] However, art critics rarely discussed the concurrent phenomena of gentrification and the rise of the E Hamlet art scene, concealing longtime residents' suffering. Deutsche and Ryan assert that considering artists as the victims of gentrification mocks the real victims: the neighborhood's working-class inhabitants who face up economic hardships that limit their choice to pick up and move elsewhere.[8] The authors argue that information technology is necessary to understand the office the art earth plays in gentrification to avoid aligning the arts with such destructive forces.[9]

        The art world's office in processes of displacement has evolved, becoming more than complicated as 21st-century city officials, urban planners, and corporate developers have identified the connectedness between the arts and processes of gentrification. Every bit global cities compete to fashion themselves as creative cultural centers, the "creative city" co-opts creativity and cultural production by commissioning public art and edifice arts infrastructure, thus attracting the upper classes and increasing property value, while as well displacing established residents and shifting funding and attention away from low-income and marginalized communities.[10]

        Additionally, the creative city functions to occlude differences, exclusions, and conflict to create a singular, homogenized epitome of an urban community.[xi] It allows city officials to normalize a particular type of cultural production by defining the limits of acceptable creativity, palliating commissioned street art but whitewashing community-driven Chicana/o murals.[12] Using the façade of trendy street culture, many cities across the globe, including Denver, have effectively institutionalized street art to co-opt an prototype of a neighborhood brimming with art and culture. In the context of the creative urban center, street art must function at the service of city officials and urban planners, who value property evolution over cultural value; street art in the name of the creative city must support, non critique, its surroundings. In the process, the artistic urban center bastardizes an artistic practice created in opposition to capitalism, consumerism, and other forces of subordination.

Graffiti Writing and Street Art's Dissident Origins

        Street art evolved from the practice of graffiti writing, which originated in Philadelphia and New York City in the belatedly 1960s and 1970s. I define graffiti as the practice of "getting up," in which a graffiti writer places their signature tag and more avant-garde pieces in equally many places as possible to achieve respect and recognition within the subculture.[xiii] Graffiti writers seek to address an audience of fellow writers who understand the linguistic communication, forms, and value of graffiti writing. The exercise threatens systems of capitalism and fine art by operating exterior the fine art globe's realm of evaluation and commercialism's need for consumption.[14] Graffiti writers challenge norms of public space and law by contesting potency's aesthetic of gild and characterizations of the writers themselves equally "criminal." Their work also defies notions of holding and buying while creating sites of communication and interaction in public spaces by prompting passers-by to think critically near such themes.[15]

        In turn, street fine art refers to a wider variety of art practices situated in public spaces, including stickers, paste-ups, murals, sculptures, and other ephemeral, seemingly unauthorized works of fine art. Street artists target the full general public past reclaiming public spaces often regulated past regime and overwhelmed past advertising. While the practices certainly overlap, some scholars have identified differing socioeconomic associations between graffiti writing and street fine art.[xvi] Graffiti in the U.South. originated in working-class Black and Chicana/o neighborhoods neglected by city officials and urban planners, leading to impoverished, deteriorating conditions. The land and the media have constructed an image of graffiti that connotes danger, disorder, and blight, although graffiti writers come from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

        Street fine art appears every bit graffiti'southward "cultured, grown-up cousin from the suburbs" equally street artists often receive a formal art didactics from recognized art institutions.[17] In his commodity "The Vandalism Vandal," author Sam Anderson follows the Splasher, a graffiti creative person who vandalizes popular and highly valued street art in New York Urban center, exposing the hypocritical commodification of the art form. For Anderson, the evolution of street art from graffiti writing appears as an "example of racial plagiarism," arguing that:

The privileged classes co-opt an art form developed by the urban blackness poor, "improve" it by bleaching out the danger and incivility, then import information technology into white culture, where it suddenly becomes lucrative. It'southward rich kids' getting a contact loftier from poverty. In the carper'southward view, street art has reduced graffiti—the once-forbidden language of the repressed—to a minor-league organization for galleries and museums. Subversive street art is an oxymoron: Modern graffiti is just an infinitely clever guerrilla-marketing entrada for artists' brands, one that's fifty-fifty more insidiously effective than a corporate campaign, considering it hijacks the cultural credibility of the street (rebellion, authenticity, liberty) without paying any of the economic toll (poverty, prison, repression) —and it expertly hides the fact that information technology does so.[eighteen]

The artistic metropolis further appropriates this liberatory fine art exercise by using it confronting its original practitioners, thus transforming working-grade neighborhoods where graffiti writing would abound into middle-form enclaves that vesture the false façade of "streetness."

Chicana/o Muralism in Denver

        Conversely, the residents of La Alma-Lincoln Park accept established a culture of public fine art that supports and reflects its Chicana/o population. Chicana/o art lacks the institutional back up afforded to other types of public art given its marginalization by white American society. Furthermore, white American art historical practices often ignore the histories, practices, and contributions of fine art-making traditions information technology marks as "other." Chicana/o art represents the community'due south refusal to assimilate into the white American culture past rejecting Eurocentric epistemologies and traditions. Instead, they rely on vernacular, community-based art practices and experiences.

        In his essay "Arte Chicano: Images of a Community," cultural historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto discusses the various ways Chicanas/os utilise fine art to form a communal cultural identity. He finds that Chicana/o artists challenge the status quo and imposed hierarchies of the Anglo-American fine art globe by making fine art more democratic and participatory through their community practices.[nineteen] For case, muralist, sculptor, and painter Emanuel Martinez initiated the production of collaborative murals in La Alma-Lincoln Park in the 1970s. Together with local youth, the Denver-native began painting various buildings and homes throughout the neighborhood. In 1977 at La Alma Recreation Center, Martinez and various volunteers createdLa Alma, a mural that stands as the community'southward physical and spiritual soul (effigy 3). It features a gimmicky Chicano and his Indigenous ancestor in identical poses, illustrating the community'southward foundational connectedness to Aztlán, the bequeathed homeland of Chicanas/os. The towering figures appear equally stiff warriors who will fight for the survival of their cultures. His piece of work reflects the spirit of his contemporaries, including boyfriend Denverites Carlota EspinoZa and Tony Ortega, and inspires younger generations of muralists, such every bit Arlette Lucero and JOLT.

Figure 3. Emanuel Martinez assisted past community members.La Alma. Mural. 1978. La Alma Recreation Center, Denver, CO. Photo past author.

        These artists oppose the commodification of art as an escape for the privileged upper classes, instead characterizing it as aesthetically pleasing, educational, and reflective of cultural values. According to Ybarra-Frausto, Chicana/o artists have created alternative outlets for fine art circulation beyond "the official cultural apparatus" of galleries and museums, exhibiting their artwork in community centers and at social events and, thus, reintegrating art with everyday life.[xx] He claims that Chicana/o art constitutes an art of resistance that challenges entrenched ability systems in the U.South. This is undoubtedly the case for Denver's Chicana/o artists, who have relied upon public muralism every bit a key method to showcase their artwork and brand information technology attainable to the community.

        Chicana/o artists often employ their work to circulateChicanismo, the Chicana/o worldview and strategies used to construct and legitimize the community'southward origins, histories, and identities, and facilitate political self-fulfillment.[21] The white American art earth has created a hierarchy that ranks Western fine art traditions in a higher place all others, excluding artists who do not confine to these standards. Chicana/o artists referencing their ain ethnicity and, thus, overtly flaunting their "failure" to assimilate are certainly excluded. Art historian Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino argues that, within mainstream media and the art historical canon, Chicana/o murals have been characterized every bit a reclamation of the urban landscape rather than a legitimate form of art, devaluing the art historical and cultural value of such artworks.[22]

        The whitewashing of muralist and painter David Ocelotl García's muralHuitzilopochtliserves as an instance of such exclusion and erasure. The creative person painted the mural in 2009 on an 8th Avenue building endemic by Sisters of Color United for Education, a local organization that uses holistic health education to heal intergenerational cycles of health disparities. The creative person draws upon imagery found in Mexica (unremarkably known as Aztec) codices and his bequeathed spiritual beliefs.[23] García's mural proudly and colorfully proclaimed the roots of Chicana/o beginnings past illustrating the Mexica patron deity Huitzilopochtli, who often represents triumph and strength, and using neon greens, blues, yellows, and oranges to bring the composition to life. In the eye stands the figure of Coatlicue, holding her son Huitzilopochtli. Life blossoms from her in the grade of water, which flows onto dark-green plants that sprout from the earth. García's landscape reveals the cyclical nature of healing equally the female parent's abundance passes onto her child.Huitzilopochtli was 1 of the beginning murals created in this industrial expanse west of downtown Denver and La Alma-Lincoln Park. García's accessible and culturally valuable creation turns this desert of creativity into a colorful assertion of Chicana/o artistry and culture, giving residents a shining case of their identify within the urban landscape.[24]

        Unfortunately, when a marijuana dispensary leased the building in 2020, the new tenants revealed a full disregard for this mural's significance and Chicana/o murals in general by whitewashing the wall. The Chicana/o customs was devastated, prompting a alphabetic character-writing campaign to the clinic and calls by community leaders for García to repaint the landscape. The creative person has stated that while "he does not make overt political statements in his art, he inevitably partakes in a politicized mural since he affirms lifeways that have continuously been denied and erased in American gild."[25]

        Chicana/o murals function as both a legitimate course of art and a reclamation of urban infinite. The growing scholarly discourse around Chicana/o art indicates the legitimacy of Chicana/o muralism. Scholars such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Tey Marianna Nunn, Guisela Latorre, and Karen Mary Davalos have deconstructed the capricious boundaries placed upon Chicana/o art and have established its nuances, shunning the evaluative terms and potency of the Anglo-American art globe and, thus, working to decolonize the canon.[26] Additionally, Chicana/o murals play an of import role in placemaking by allowing the community to found a sense of belonging in a white American urban landscape that ofttimes seeks to diminish, devalue, and displace its members.

A Tale of Two Murals

        Su Teatro'south brilliant and colorful murals, created by students from Metropolitan State University of Denver, reverberate La Alma-Lincoln Park's distinctly Chicana/o community and history. Thus, the projection readily aligns with the category of community-based murals divers by muralists Eva Cockcroft, John Weber, and Jim Cockcroft in their bookToward a People'south Fine art: The Contemporary Mural Movement.[27] These murals reflect the immediate community'southward histories, values, and aspirations by engaging it in mural design, sketching and painting, inaugural events, and preservation.[28] Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft argue that community-based murals are ofttimes created by nonwhite artists who have a connection to and appreciation for the neighborhood, contributing to that community's sense of civic belonging. [29]

        Creative person and professor Carlos Fresquez offers a class during which MSU Denver students collaborate with local organizations to research, pattern, and paint a mural that reflects the surrounding community. The mural projection for Su Teatro spanned over multiple semesters every bit students worked to wrap the Denver Civic Theater'southward exterior with more 400 feet of murals. As a teenager growing up in La Alma-Lincoln Park, Fresquez witnessedel movimiento, which significantly impacted his later creative career. He attended demonstrations led by the Chicana/o activist group Crusade for Justice and local activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez and participated in the urban center-wide school walkouts on September sixteen, 1969.[thirty] Fresquez remembers, "We stood up and told our teachers that we were marching for better educational activity for the Chicano community. I had never seen anything similar that earlier: a river of Chicanos flooding the Capitol. That day was pivotal."[31] He marks this solar day as central to his own political and cultural awareness, recalling that it was the day that he first declared himself to be Chicano.[32]

        The Chicano Movement inspired the artist-teacher to seek out his own civilisation, history, and fine art-making traditions and, ultimately, to utilise art and muralism as an educational tool to lead others down a similar path of personal and cultural discovery.[33] He designs his course to model the administrative processes used by Denver's public art program, giving students valuable experience in creating a proposal and painting a landscape.[34] For the Su Teatro projection, students met with the manager and various staff members who wanted to see a mural that incorporated ancient and contemporary Chicana/o imagery, reflecting the neighborhood'southward Chicana/o history and civilization. The groups then presented their proposals to the organisation, and the winning proposal came to fruition on the theater walls. Fresquez plays a supporting role equally an advisor, ensuring that the students may merits full ownership of the final product and move away from the hierarchical relationship of professor/student in Western institutions.[35]

        At Su Teatro, Fresquez'southward students portray a broad array of Chicana/o visual culture, demonstrating the complexity of Chicana/o ancestry, history, art, and music. The forepart of the edifice features the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent. The cult of the feathered snake dates back to the Olmec culture, the region'due south dominant culture during the Formative Menses (1800 BCE to 150 CE). The artists painted the deity with bright shades of orange, ruby, yellow, and blue green, evoking the namesake quetzal bird's irised bluish-green feathers. Quetzalcoatl undulates forth the wall, leading the viewer toward the theater entrance, where his body meets his caput in contour. Quetzalcoatl wears a plumed headdress and opens his fanged oral cavity as his supernatural eyes look out toward the viewer.

Figure 4. Carlos Fresquez and Metropolitan State University of Denver students. Su Teatro murals (south wall). 2012. Santa Fe Bulldoze and 7th Avenue, Denver, CO. Photo by author.

        The southern side of Su Teatro further illustrates the cosmology of Pre-Columbian Chicana/o ancestors, namely the Mexica pantheon of deities (effigy 4). The artists use forms and symbols that recall Aztec codices every bit well as a broad variety of colors that pop off the otherwise beige walls. Siblings Coyolxauhqui and Huitzilopochtli encircle a motif that references both an Aztec calendar stone and an Indigenous medicine wheel.[36] The mural evokes the mythic battle betwixt the siblings, after which one claimed their place every bit the patron deity.[37] As the god of warfare, Huitzilopochtli dresses as a warrior and carries a shield and arrows. In contrast, his sister Coyolxauhqui is depicted in a shade of stone gray, decapitated and dismembered, referencing the digging of a similar sculpture at Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capitol, now Mexico City) (effigy 5).[38] In Mexica mytho-history, when Coatlicue became pregnant with Huitzilopochtli, Coyolxauhqui led her siblings in a plot to murder their mother and her unborn kid. Nonetheless, Huitzilopochtli sprung from her womb, fully equipped to defend Coatlicue, decapitating Coyolxauhqui with a snake. Huitzilopochtli shortly later on took his place as the triumphant patron deity of the Aztecs.

Figure 5. Carlos Fresquez and Metropolitan Country University of Denver students. Su Teatro murals (south wall). 2012. Santa Iron Drive and 7th Avenue, Denver, CO. Photograph by author.

        The viewer may interpret this battle scene in several means. Given my discussion of street art in the proper noun of the artistic metropolis, the scene may stand as an allegory for the boxing over public art in Denver, with Huitzilopochtli serving every bit a representation of Chicana/o muralism. While intertwined with graffiti and street art, muralism boasts a much longer history as a medium used by cultures worldwide.[39] I characterize these 3 forms of expression as siblings who often fight for power and attention, similar to Huitzilopochtli and Coyolxauhqui. The viewer may interpret the triumph of Huitzilopochtli in the end equally the triumph of Chicana/o muralism over graffiti and street fine art. Notwithstanding, the battle scene's inclusion may as well symbolically evoke Aztlán, the bequeathed home of the Aztecs, by bringing Mexica mytho-history into the contemporary urban mural. Later on all, during the Mexica's migration south from Aztlán, they stopped at Coatepec ("serpent colina"), where Coatlicue became impregnated with and gave birth to Huitzilopochtli.[40] Although oblique, the reference to the mythic battle scene at Su Teatro evokes the migration. It illustrates the Mexica's ability to make a new home for themselves outside Aztlán, empowering the Chicana/o customs in La Alma-Lincoln Park to practise the same.

Figure vi. Carlos Fresquez and Metropolitan State Academy of Denver students. Su Teatro murals (n wall). 2012. Santa Fe Drive and 7th Artery, Denver, CO. Photo by writer.

Figure vii. Carlos Fresquez and Metropolitan State University of Denver students. Su Teatro murals (north wall). 2012. Santa Fe Drive and seventh Avenue, Denver, CO. Photo past author.

Conversely, the northern wall features contemporary aspects of Chicana/o culture, emphasizing the its present-day rituals rooted in history. A woman dressed in a colorfulCommunist china Poblana blouse and skirt dances thejarabe tapatío, Mexico'due south national trip the light fantastic, every bit a nearby group of men dressed incharro-manner suits play Chicana/o music (figures half-dozen and 7). The mural as well includes a adult female with her face up painted forDía de los Muertos and a sugar skull that peers out from the wall. The sugar skull wears a sombrero with the United Farm Workers eagle, referencing the organization led past César Chávez and Dolores Huerta that helped spark the Chicano Motility. By reinforcing its roots in ancient civilizations similar to the aboriginal Greeks and Romans, the murals challenge the viewer's preconceived notions that Chicana/o culture is illegitimate because information technology is new or unknown to a white public. The artists exercise not shy away from imagery full of conflict, presenting a counter-soapbox ofChicanismo that disrupts the homogenous public sphere and challenges people to explore Chicana/o culture further.

        Directly across the street from Su Teatro'south distinctly Chicana/o murals standsDear this City. Pat Milbery takes design credit for the street art landscape, which he painted during Denver Arts Week with fellow street artists Pat McKinney and Jason T. Graves. The mural spans the height of the two-story building that houses El Noa Noa Tex-Mex Eatery. Milbery's colorful, bright design features elements of Denver culture. Iconic buildings of the Denver skyline, including the state capitol, sally backside a cluster of pine trees and the foothills and peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Milbery also displays a bicycle tire, referencing the metropolis'due south bike-friendly nature, and native animals such as a soaring eagle and a buffalo facing the street. Most unrecognizable at first glance, the buffalo takes an bathetic class, its steadfast nature symbolizing the community's strength.[41] Finally, a pinkish and grey geometric heart with a white banner reading "Love this City" sits atop the composition. Milbery states that the many geometric pieces of the center represent the "many dissimilar layers of dear," from joy to hurting.[42]

        Approaching the mural, the viewer immediately notices its bright shades of blueish, orange, and royal, evoking the art commune's colorful spirit. When designing the landscape, Milbery sought feedback from the belongings owners, one of whom pushed for the bright colors featured in the landscape as they were "reflective of her soul."[43] He recalls that the owners were excited about this opportunity for public art, and he felt honored to give them this gift in celebration of their business.[44] Milbery farther states that limited time and resource prevented him from consulting the larger community and many La Alma-Lincoln Park residents. He prioritized gathering feedback and blessing for the mural from the holding owners, the Art District on the Santa Fe board, Visit Denver officials, and Mayor Michael Hancock.[45] Although the property owners are members of the Chicana/o customs, Milbery's reluctance to consult La Alma-Lincoln Park residents reveals his disinterest in making an artwork that genuinely involves and reflects the customs equally a whole, prioritizing city officials' and business organization owners' needs over residents.

Honey this Urban center fits well within what Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft classify equally decorative murals stemming from an "urban-ecology" philosophy.[46] This blazon of muralism seeks to make art bachelor to the public and improve the city'south advent while supporting artists economically. Such commissions are usually given to white artists with piddling connectedness to the surrounding area, often resulting in projects asunder from the community.[47]Love this Citystyle murals feature abstruse or decorative patterns that avoid any political or ideological content. At first glance, the projection appears devoid of whatsoever substantial message.

        However, Milbery'south political inspiration for the project attaches some substance to the landscape and its messaging. The artist adult the idea in 2016, an election year fraught with particularly divisive and hateful discourse as the country grappled with an intensely debated presidential election.[48] The artist has not publicly vocalized his more political inspirations for the project, instead emphasizing his elusive vision for "a mural that would express his love for the urban center."[49] His alliance with Denver Arts Week, Visit Denver, and other city officials nigh likely influenced this decision to avert possibly divisive content. Visit Denver fifty-fifty helped the artist secure funding and negotiate with property owners and the Art District on Santa Fe to ensure that the projection went smoothly, evidencing the agency'south vested involvement in a pretty nevertheless shallow street art marketing campaign.

Figure eight. Pat Milbery.Love this City. Mural. 2016. 12th Avenue and Acoma Street, Denver, CO. Photo by author.

        Milbery's mural on Santa Atomic number 26 Drive is only the first mural in a urban center-wide campaign sponsored by Visit Denver. Since 2016, the artist has painted viii Love this Metropolis murals throughout Denver to depict each expanse'due south distinct qualities and histories; all the same, the street art campaign appears homogenous, making it hard for the viewer to grasp each neighborhood'due south unique identity. For example, the artist painted Love this City murals in the Golden Triangle and the River Northward Art District (RiNo) inside two weeks of creating the Santa Fe Drive mural. Both murals include the signature geometric eye and other geometric elements with different combinations of vivid colors. Milbery references the Rocky Mountains with pine trees, mountain peaks, and soaring birds in the Golden Triangle landscape, leaving the viewer wondering how it relates to its immediate surroundings, including the state capitol, city hall, and the Denver Art Museum (figure viii). The RiNo mural features more soaring birds and a rhinoceros, a single reference to this neighborhood's identity as a burgeoning art commune, which occludes its displaced, predominantly Black and Chicana/o residents (figure ix).

Figure 9. Pat Milbery, Pat McKinney, Jason T. Graves, and Remington Robinson.Love this City. Mural. 2016. Broadway Avenue and Arapahoe Street, Denver, CO. Photo by author.

Milbery and Visit Denver have fifty-fifty taken this projection beyond Denver city limits, creating an iteration during a 2019 food and music festival in Chicago. This mural features Colorado cerise rocks, portions of the Denver skyline, and the Denver International Airport, attempting to concenter Chicago residents to the city and further emphasizing this street fine art campaign's role in Visit Denver's marketing schemes. The ever-growing scale of theLove this City mural project squanders each preceding mural'south uniqueness. AsBeloved this City continues to materialize on seemingly every corner, the more the murals appear as street art-Starbucks — corporate entities lacking unique graphic symbol, culture, and history.

Conclusion

        In that location is a stark split between community-based Chicana/o muralism and street fine art in the name of the artistic city, which has begun to transform the visual civilisation of La Alma-Lincoln Park from one that reflects the neighborhood'south rich Chicana/o culture and history to one of homogeneity and gentrification.Dearest this Metropolis disregards the firsthand community to create a vapid mural that allows Denver to market itself as a street art mecca. Ultimately, street fine art in the name of the artistic city attracts corporate developers and existent manor investors, drives up property values, and pushes out long-term residents.

        At Su Teatro, Fresquez and his students strive to reflect the surrounding customs and its histories, values, and traditions in their mural project. They provide imagery that celebrates the Chicana/o community to circulate the counter-discourse ofChicanismo, disrupting the homogeneity of the Anglo-American dominated public sphere. These murals legitimize Chicana/o culture by linking it to an ancient past, ultimately evoking Aztlán. Such imagery makes Chicana/o residents feel at domicile, contributing to the process of placemaking. The intrusion of murals likeLove this City disrupts this sense of belonging and security by threatening the community's command over La Alma-Lincoln Park's public spaces.

        These 2 murals testify how the residents of La Alma-Lincoln Park lack full command over the cosmos of art in their neighborhood. In both murals' cases, the artists worked with property owners to bring their designs to life, resulting in two distinctly different products. Su Teatro's murals fit well within the neighborhood's Chicana/o visual culture and history of Chicana/o muralism. Although some downplay access to public space when considering the public sphere, we cannot discount the importance of public space to groups that lack cultural and political capital letter. Chicana/o murals assertChicanismo, legitimizing Chicana/o history, culture, and origins by reclaiming a slice of the urban mural despite cycles of displacement. By symbolically evoking Aztlán, Chicana/o murals create a feeling of home.

Endnotes

[1] Sig Langegger,Rights to Public Space: Police force, Culture, and Gentrification in the American W (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),viii.

[2] Vanessa Mathews, "Aestheticizing Infinite: Art, Gentrification, and the City,"Geography Compass 4, no. 6 (2010): 663.

[3] Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan, "The Fine art of Gentrification,"Oct 31 (Winter 1984): 103.

[four] See Mathews, "Aestheticizing Infinite," 665-667 for an extensive discussion of creative person's bureau within the gentrification procedure.

[5] Deutsche and Ryan 1984, 91-111.

[6] Deutsche and Ryan 1984, 93.

[7] For a discussion of the 1980s street fine art scene in the Lower East Side, see Allyson Burbeck, "This Will Not Be Available on Canvas Afterward: Graffiti Invades the Fine art World" (Undergraduate honors thesis, Texas Christian University, 2016) and Margo Thompson,American Graffiti(New York: Parkstone International, 2009).

[8] Deutsche and Ryan 1984, 104.

[nine] Deutsche and Ryan 1984, 94.

[10] Sabina Andron, "Selling streetness as experience: The role of street fine art tours in branding the artistic city,"The Sociological Review 66, no. 5 (2018): 1048-1050.

[11] Mathews 2010, 669.

[12] Andron 2018, 1051.

[xiii] The term "graffiti writer" specifies someone agile in the illegal graffiti subculture with a focus on stylized alphabetic character writing and a business organization for their growing reputation amongst other writers. A "graffiti artist" refers to an creative person who takes inspiration from graffiti writing but does not necessarily participate in the subculture itself.

[14] Susan Stewart, "Ceci tuera cela: Graffiti every bit crime and art," inLife After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture, ed. John Fekete (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 161-180.

[15] Run into Jeff Ferrell,Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Misdeed (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996); Gregory Snyder,Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York'south Urban Underground (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Alison Immature,Street Fine art, Public City: Constabulary, Crime and the Urban Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Caitlin Bruce,Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).

[xvi] See Edward Fuentes, "The brainchild of content and intent between murals and street fine art,"Visual Inquiry 7, no. 1 (March 2018): 9-17; Javier Abarca, "Graffiti, street art, and gentrification," inGrafficity: Visual Practices and Contestations in Urban Space, ed. Eva Youkhana and Larissa Förster (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 221-233; and Sam Anderson, "The Vandalism Vandal,"New York Magazine, May 25, 2007, http://nymag.com/news/features/32388/.

[17] Abarca 2015, 224.

[18] Anderson 2007.

[xix] Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, "Arte Chicano: Images of a Community," inSigns From The Center: California Chicano Murals,ed. Eva Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez (Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resources Middle, 1990), 56.

[20] Ybarra-Frauston 1990, 56.

[21] Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino, "Murales del Movimiento: Chicano Murals and the Discourses of Fine art and Americanization," inSigns From The Centre: California Chicano Murals,ed. Eva Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez (Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990), 90.

[22] Sánchez-Tranquilino 1990, 92.

[23] David Ocelotl García, "Molding a Creative Life with David Ocelotl García," interview by Latino Cultural Arts Center, Latino Cultural Arts Center, June 17, 2019, https://www.lcac-denver.org/unmarried-postal service/2019/06/04/molding-a-creative-sustainable-life-with-david-ocelotl-garcia.

[24] García 2019.

[25] Nancy Ríos, "'Is America Possible?': The Space Betwixt David Ocelotl Garcia'southward and Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Worship," History Colorado, December half-dozen, 2020, https://www.historycolorado.org/story/2020/12/06/america-possible.

[26] See Alicia Gaspar de Alba,Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: UT Press, 1998); Tey Mariana Nunn,Sin Nombre: Hispana and Hispano Artists of the New Deal Era (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Guisela Latorre,Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin: UT Printing, 2008); and Karen Mary Davalos,Chicano/a Remix: Art and Errata Since the Sixties (New York: NYU Printing, 2017).

[27] Eva Cockcroft, John Weber, and Jim Cockcroft,Toward a People's Fine art: The Gimmicky Mural Movement (New York: Dutton, 1977).

[28] Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977, xxx.

[29] Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977, thirty.

[30] Estevan Ruiz and Carlos Fresquez, "Carlos Fresquez,"Metrosphere, July 2019, 113.

[31] "Carlos Fresquez," Our Past, Metropolitan State University of Denver, accessed February 7, 2020, https://www.msudenver.edu/our-past/ourpeople/carlos-fresquez.shtml.

[32] Carlos Fresquez, "Carlos Fresquez Artist Interview," interview by Chicano Murals of Colorado Project (Lucha Aztzin Martínez and Jillian Mollenhauer), March 21, 2018, video, 39:03.

[33] Ruiz and Fresquez 2019, 116.

[34] Fresquez, interview.

[35] Fresquez, interview.

[36] Lucha Aztzin Martínez, "Heritage and Identify: Chicano Murals of Colorado," inMurals of the Americas: Mayer Center Symposium XVII, Readings in Latin American Studies, ed. Victoria I. Lyall (Norman, OK: Academy of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 159.

[37] The story of their boxing is taken from Davíd Carrasco,Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition, Revised Edition (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2001), 166.

[38] Martínez 2019, 159.

[39] Most chiefly, the ancient Mesoamerican cultures depicted in the Su Teatro murals and the Mexican Muralists of the early on twentieth century utilized muralism every bit a master medium, proving inspiration to gimmicky Chicana/o artists.

[twoscore] Constance Cortez, "The New Aztlán: Nepantla (and Other Sites of Transmogrification)," inThe Road to Aztlán: Fine art from a Mythic Homeland, ed. Virginia Fields and Victor Zumudio-Taylor (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art, 2001), 360.

[41] Pat Milbery, phone conversation with the author, February 11, 2020.

[42] Milbery, telephone chat with the writer.

[43] Milbery, telephone chat with the author.

[44] Milbery, telephone conversation with the author.

[45] Milbery, phone conversation with the author.

[46] Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977, 29.

[47] Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977, 29.

[48] Milbery, phone conversation with the author.

[49] Nate Ferguson, "See the Artist Backside Denver's 'Honey this City' Landscape Campaign," Visit Denver, last modified December 21, 2016, https://www.denver.org/blog/mail service/artist-behind-denvers-love-this-urban center-mural-entrada/.

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