Olivia Gude: It's called "Fellows and Others." Fellowship House is a Chicago youth center at 32nd Street. This is something that mostly I think might be of interest to you when we're just sort of milling around after I stop talking here. This is the original drawing for this mural. When I say original drawing, you'll notice that there's not a single pencil mark on this. In a sense, again, I'm somebody who…my first mural is like the Roseland Pullman Mural. I did them much more in the style of the people who would work on a WPA mural. I tried to create consistent backgrounds. It's like a consistent space. You use pencils, you draw it, you look at people, you draw them. You take photographs. You use those resources. You develop a drawing. Actually, this is [inaudible] basically. By the early 1990s, I decided to take basically a more contemporary approach or something like that to constructing murals. So this mural, in a sense all these different pieces were made, and these are all Xeroxes and collaged together. One thing I was thinking about this mural that I can tell you quickly is that I was really interested in the idea of how people read figures in murals. One of the ways that I described this was based on art historical interpretation. Whenever you see a really gigantic figure in art, it tends to be read allegorically. You know? You see this gigantic woman and she's Justice. So I just did this mural where there's this gigantic farm wife standing there on a mural on De Kalb, and she becomes this grain goddess looking out over the prairies. So whenever you do a really big mural, it has this allegorical reading. Things that are life-sized are on this mural. This is a life-sized person. That's a life-sized person. They tend to be kind of like Ego. That's a person that you identify with. You walk right up to that and at some point all of a sudden, you're looking at this painted image, but it's the same size you are. So it's kind of like your conscious self, your everyday self, your ego self, your normal self. Little figures tend to be read as interior. Like interior spirits. Like inner psychology or however you want to think of it, like that. But it's internal voices or parts of self. The whole little notion of two devils sitting on your shoulder and talking to you, or something. But the notion of this talking and this inner self. The multiple figures that we have in dreams. That ultimately, when we analyze our dreams, we realize they're various facets of our own personality. So those are that. Then the other part of this mural are these little tiny…and then the only time children appear on this mural…and I work with children a lot, but this mural I only interviewed adults for. One of the things that I'm possibly thinking about doing for the extension is to only interview children. I'm not sure, but that's something that we might do. But then there's always like these silent people who walk through the space, who're in the background. So there's this notion of layering of scale that's important to me. I can't say this literally, but on sort of a non-literal level, how the quotes might be read differently, depending on whether you think of what the person is saying as sort of literal, everyday, allegorical or interior dreamlike. So there are multiple layers of interpretation you could have on this. The other thing I say about this mural just from my personal point of view is that I painted this mural right after there had been this incredibly tragic death in my family. I didn't realize it at the time. At the time, I was just kind of an emotional wreck for a couple of years. But when I look back on it, I realize that I was at a turning point in my life. That was the question I was asking myself. And I see that essentially what I was doing was taking this public art form that I had always worked in and basically was thinking of a way to use it to basically address the question that I had. So I think there as an urgency to what I was asking people, "Where are you coming from, where are you going?" In a sense I'm sort of saying, "I'm adrift here. Help me by answering this question." Maybe somebody's going to tell me something that I need to know in order to survive. That I always think is sort of part of the meaning of this piece. The other part of the piece that I think is sort of interesting is that a lot of time when I've done murals, many of the pieces I do is by conscious choice or collaboration. I tend to find that a lot of people I paint with have higher color keys and their color schemes are brighter. People always want to do murals bright. But I have to say, Phil Koran, my career as a muralist is totally affected by him. Because one of the first big murals I did was the Roseland Pullman Mural. At a community meeting, he said, "You know you've got to really think about whether you're going to be painting murals red and yellow and black and all these bright colors. Because there's so much." He's into like the spiritual energy of color. He said there's so much negative energy on the street. There's so much over-passionate energy. You really have to think, even if your image is beautiful, do you want to add to that same energy, or do you want a different energy. And he talked about this idea of violets and blues. And so if you notice that mural's in violets and blues and things. So virtually every mural I've ever painted. If you'll look at my murals, you'll see that the color schemes of them tend to be different than a lot of murals. I honor Mr. Koran for basically teaching me that that was probably something to think about when you do murals. So anyway, one of the things that I always found, still is that…A lot of times I personally think of a quieter color key. I kicked up my color key when I was working with other people. So this mural I did by myself. So kind of did this. I always sort of joke and say this is in some way my mural's central color scheme mural. Because it's got this sort of a very pale…The other thing was I don't know if you remember what a mess that underpass was in those days. So I also sort of painted it to go with the deteriorating infrastructure of the city. Instead of sort of trying to fight it, I sort of went with it. There's a sort of rusty green, red, brown and green pole up there. If you look at the mural, there'll be a rusty red, green and brown patch, here. It sort of blended into the city. The other thing about this mural is that I'm going to give you a challenge. Challenge questions. These are the things you should ask your kids. There's something different about the people in these murals from any mural than I've ever seen. Can you guess what it is?

M: They're wearing coats.

Olivia Gude: That's it. I told you, didn't I?

M: No. I read it on your website.

Olivia Gude: Oh, okay. But yes, they're wearing coats. And so…

V2: Wintertime in Chicago.

Olivia Gude: Yes. Because basically, to look at murals, you think that everyone lives in San Francisco.

M4: Do you think that's because they paint mostly in the summer?

Olivia Gude: Well you know, I think what it is is that kind of like you think, "Oh, we're happy, it's summer." Something like that. It reminds me of when I was teaching over at Earheart School. I was showing the kids [these Horace Pippin] paintings. I was saying, "Look. See how it's like the buffalo in the winter and the sky is grey. And here's one with the sky this other shade of a kind of dull, yellow color." And I'm thinking I'm really getting these kids grooving on interesting colors in the sky. Like, oh, how they're noticing something? So this little 3rd-grader raises his hand and says, "Ms. G? Children don't paint the sky blue because they think it's always blue. They paint the sky blue because they want it to be blue."

Voices: [laughing].

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