Olivia Gude: Yes. I mean I'd have to look at the list. But pretty much, if there's anybody who's a living artist in Chicago, who's painting murals, I would say I know them. And I became a muralist, by the way, first of all, by trying to make murals with my students as a high school teacher. I hooked up with somebody who knew about the Chicago Public Art Group. I started taking that practice then into the schools. Actually at that point, in the early to late 1980s, by the mid-80s, the notion of painting murals in Chicago had kind of died out for a while. Although [inaudible] and they were doing mosaics and the community sculptures stuff was getting going. So really it was a lot of the work that I did that got people painting murals again. Reinventing in that practice. When I say reinventing the practice, I mean in two ways. One, rethinking the technical requirements of painting the murals. A lot of those older murals, the reason they're so chippy, is because they were painted with like an enamel paint. Now we paint with acrylic. But it was like rethinking how we were going to do some of those things. The other thing is that we do some of the things the early muralists did, in terms of the kind of scaffolds and ladders and stuff that they painted from. So we kind of reengineered to make a safer standard. The other thing that happened with that generation and now this new generation of muralists is that we also started painting the murals much bigger. One of the reasons was that my job and some of the other artists. Some of these murals-we saw pictures of them before we saw the actual mural. You know what I mean? You talk to a muralist and they show you pictures and then you go off to the neighborhoods and see them. I think one of the things that I know that I did…I don't know if other people have the same experience…I misinterpreted the size of the murals. I thought they were bigger than they were-those early murals. Partly because, if you think about it, by the time I went to art school, it was in the 1970s. Color field painting had come in. Paintings were no longer like this. Paintings themselves in the museums were 12 feet high. So a 14-foot high mural doesn't seem that big, because people are painting paintings that big. So we basically kind of shot up to this two-story scale a lot of the time. It was actually nice doing this piece "Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?", which was actually a smaller…one of the smaller outdoor pieces I've ever done. Or one of the smallest. Because the intimate scale of that I think is very nice. So that's just one little thing I can tell you. The other thing I just wanted to say is that maybe it might be more helpful for me to talk by just answering questions of people. When you started talking about the Pullman Mural, all of a sudden something hit me that it could be a wonderful part of the curriculum work that you're doing. One of the things that I could tie to this very location right here…in 1992, I was painting, "Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?" I made that mural by standing on the corner and literally stopping every person who walked by and asking them, "Could I ask you a couple of questions?" I had a tape recorder and a camera, and I'd ask them, "Where are you coming from, and where are you going?" And they would answer in all these different kinds of ways. One person might be going to work. Another might be coming from a really difficult time in his life. Another might talk about it spiritually. People would talk in all these different kinds of ways. One of the things that was so amazing was like for example in quotes that are on the mural. A woman who was like a PhD in Economics-a candidate at the University of Chicago. She was saying, "I'm hate Hyde Park. I feel like I'm in a prison." Then she was talking about how she hates that mural over there because it's so run-down and crummy looking. It was just unbelievable. Then there was another woman on the same mural. Where this woman was probably about 45 or so, and she said, "I raised my family, I returned, I went to the Theological Seminary, I'm filled with such joy as I walk through these streets." It's like, amazing, you know, it made me think about the notion of how our perception about space is so psychologically based. But also that it made me interrogate the whole notion of my tradition. This is a tiny digression, here. One of the most fascinating things about the community mural movement, is that it is the art movement most associated with representing ethnic specificity. In other words, the whole roots of the mural movement are in the Black Pride murals, and African and Mexican-American murals, etc. At the same time, it's also the art movement in the country most associated with trying to image a multiracial society. You know, I think that's fascinating that the same movement has these two very different profiles. Sometimes, you know, UIC has a very sophisticated, post-modern art school group and an internationally-known graduate school. Sometimes people who are very sophisticated kind of look down on community murals as, "Oh, what is this? Happy people with different races together. In an unjust society, it's just fake, like imaging and blah-blah." Like it's kitsch. People will say, "Oh, I'm better than that." But one thing that I've looked at and think of as very fascinating is if you go and look at the history of the world, including the history of advertising, you don't find a movement which concentrates on this notion of depicting a harmonious, multiracial society. And I'd be really happy to have somebody contradict me on this at some time. Even the great Mexican murals of the revolution, they depict La Raza, which was the mix, the blend of the new people…the Spanish and the Indian. It's only when you get to the community mural movement that started here in the United States that you get this imagery. I'm sure there are a few things here and there, but again, look at WPA murals. They don't have black and white people and Mexican people. They don't have it. So it's just like this fascinating thing, I think. This is in a sense a movement that you could say underlies, is intrinsically related to the civil rights movement, I think. It comes out of that same sensibility. I always say that it's true that Bennington ads have a level of falseness. Like all of us together. But the thing is that the community mural movement in a sense, is that those early artists who invented that practice, risked being called fools and utopians, in order to actually stamp on the imagination of people, the possibility of a multiracial society. But making that image available for a critique in the instruction. But in a sense, you've got to have the image before you can talk about whether or not the reality matches the image. You know? I think that's one of the really significant things. In my career as sort of a third-generation muralist coming from two art educations, one at the University of Chicago and the other with the Community Murals Movement. A lot of my work is kind of involved on one hand with paying homage and tribute to those elders who invented this movement. The other hand is then deconstructing that. In, "Where Do we Come From? Where Are We Going?" is an idea that I think asks the question, as a mural, are we a community just because we live in the same geographic location? When we think of Hyde Park, do we think of it as one of the oldest multiracial neighborhoods in the country, or as a multiracial community? I think that that's an implicit, underlying question of that mural. So that's that part.

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