M2: Olivia, would you like to tell us something about just the general history of murals in Chicago?

Olivia Gude: You know, it would help me a little bit to know what kind of timeframe we're on.

M2: We've set aside 'til about five. It's an hour and a half. We'd like at some point to walk over and have…

Olivia Gude: As some part of that time before five, you want to do that also?

M2: Yes.

Olivia Gude: Yes. I would actually suggest something different, and maybe not walk over to the mural today. I know, just because I've done lots of mural tours, and I can calculate that 10 people would take this long and 8 people would take this long to go on the walk. What I have with me today is the archival material that was used to make that mural. Just given that we've got an hour, it might make more sense to spend time looking at that than have people spend their time looking at the mural. So I hadn't prepared anything in particular, because I didn't exactly know what I was going to be doing. Well I can tell you, just like tonight, to get a sense of overlap with what I do. I'm a community muralist and a mosaicist. I've lived for 18 years actually in the Pullman district, and it just got to be too much to be driving this way, and I now live in Bridgeport. So I'm a long-time Southsider. I was a Hyde Parker actually for eight years before that. My whole time in Chicago has been spent on the Southside. I'm proud of that. I'm also the Coordinator of Art Education and Associate Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. So I'm in charge of the Art Education Program. Something that I've been doing a lot of that overlaps in some ways with a lot of my work as a community muralist, and before I met Jennifer [inaudible] at Hyde Park, is that, a couple of years ago I put together a program called Contemporary Community Curriculum Initiative. The purpose of it was to look at the fact that the way that art is taught in schools is so out of sync with contemporary art and community issues. It's got this very, very reductive, formalist, "Let's do some lines, let's do some color wheels," kind of quality to it. But what I realized in being also involved in the National Community of Art Educators, was that it's one thing for people to sit around and write articles about the need for a post-modern curriculum. But then teachers are like, "Well, what the hell are we really supposed to teach?" Exactly what I know is as somebody who's taught high school myself for ten years, is that it's very difficult to have the time and the support to write curriculum when you're teaching. That's why something like this is really exciting to me, too. The thing that I'm really interested in as an art educator is the whole issue of area curriculum development. I'm very impressed in the web as a way that people can actually meaningfully trade curriculum. I mean the edge that the textbook manufacturers have had all those years was that they could print colored pictures, and share them. Right? At some point it becomes a little depressing to get the curriculum handed to you as another purple ditto sheet or as a grainy Xerox. But now with the web, we have access to the same technology that the most sophisticated textbook-type companies do. I've been very conscious of the fact that the whole history and notion of when textbooks are put out. You probably know this. The biggest textbook market in the country is in Texas. So one of the things they always want to make sure of is that every textbook will be sellable in Texas. For that reason, very few social studies textbooks ever have any pictures in the antebellum South of people being tortured or hurt in any way. What you get are these sort of sweet plantation black people, kind of happy and everybody's kind of grooving together, because Texas won't buy pictures that really have what they call negative depictions of slavery. So that's just one tiny little instance of why it's so important for teachers to seize control of the curriculum. It gives us the opportunity to really make choices about what should be in the curriculum, based on what we believe children should know, and not based on these huge interests. And what I think is important about it too, is that it also doesn't mean that somebody else can't decide to do something different. But it also means that we are not beholden to these huge companies. So our education of the Contemporary Curriculum Initiative, it brought together 26. You can't bring all the people, but when you're going from 50…it's 26 urban and suburban teachers. One of the things we really liked was the partnering of the city and suburban schools. Basically, the teachers work with three artists and residents like myself. Bernard Williams actually painted [inaudible] one of the artists. And Mary [inaudible] who's a video artist, with a wonderful history of doing activist work in Chicago. And Heather McAdams.

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