Religious visions, public memorials, political effigies, historical tableaux and commercial signage found in the Black and Latinx neighborhoods of America.

Chilean-born Camilo José Vergara is a New York-based writer, photographer, and documentarian whose work on America’s decaying urban environments has been compared to that of Jacob Riis, who photographed impoverished conditions in New York City in the late 19th century. Vergara’s most recent book is Detroit Is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age. In the summer of 2019, Cynthia Davidson talked to him about his current efforts to establish the importance of street art in low-income neighborhoods, which he has been documenting for decades. To see more images, visit camilojosevergara.com.

CYNTHIA DAVIDSON: Camilo, you’ve been photographing street art for 50 years. You even received a MacArthur “genius” grant for your work. What first attracted you to these urban murals?

CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA: First as a foreign student, then as a resident, and now as a citizen of the United States, I have been documenting America’s ghettos. My interests include both the buildings and the people who live there. In streets, alleys, and domestic interiors, people express their identity, give form to their memories and their history. The wall is a receptacle of feelings, of what is important, of how people communicate, especially for an immigrant population that doesn’t necessarily read well. On the walls, people paint what they long for, family members they miss, what they admire, or what they imagine the places where they grew up looked like. I could relate to this art because, like the inner-city residents, I was constantly remembering the places where I spent my childhood.  The neighborhood talks to you through these wall paintings and commercial signs. You see a lot of pyramids in African American and in Latino murals showing that they came from mighty empires that built great landmarks. I document these murals with a sense of urgency because I know they are not going to last and I am afraid they will be forgotten.

CD: Why are you making a particular push now to recognize this wall art, or street art?

CJV: Now that famous muralists such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Keith Haring, Gaia, and subway painter Dondi White are celebrated in books, museum exhibitions, and movies, the situation has become critical, because the work of ghetto commercial artists and inspired, untrained painters is completely ignored.

 In recent years, at long last, many African American artists are being recognized for their outstanding work, which is being exhibited, collected, and studied. To a lesser degree, the same is true of Latino artists. In contrast, however, grassroots art created by unrecognized community artists and sign painters, often in low-income neighborhoods, is still almost wholly disregarded by the art establishment and allowed to disappear without a record. Because of this, we lose representations of the values, sense of identity, and perceptions of beauty that prevail in essentially segregated neighborhoods.

            In the 19th century, movements arose to discover and understand the Volksgeist, or spirit of a people – “the imprints of the soul,” to use J.G. Herder’s phrase – which led to the collection and dissemination of popular legends, stories, and melodies. Luminaries such as Jacob Grimm and Antonín Dvořák are celebrated for having rescued songs and tales that otherwise would have been lost. Similarly, in the 20th century in the United States, oral historian Alan Lomax preserved the voices of small, out of the way places such as Clarksdale, Mississippi. Through field recordings, he collected sermons, songs, and folk tales in churches, prisons, bars, and homes. He said that “it is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom.” Lomax reacted to the inequality in our recognition of achievement by defining cultural equity as “the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.”

            Likewise, I feel it is important to record, and in some cases preserve, this ephemeral and unique wall art, particularly now that computer-generated signs printed on vinyl are replacing hand-painted ones. To that end, over the course of five decades, I have been documenting neighborhood murals, graffiti, and commercial signs along streets and alleys, on chain-link fences, and on the facades of public housing projects, storefront churches, barbershops, liquor stores, car washes, and abandoned buildings. The thousands of carefully captioned photographs I have taken in the nation’s largest cities may be the most extensive collection of anonymous street art. Part of my collection is already accessible at the Library of Congress.

 CD: What have you been looking for when you go out to photograph this work? What do you see today?

CJV: Many of these murals depict aspects of African American and Latino histories or show neighborhood pantheons of admired people. They also serve as memorials to the victims of violence. Often, they portray local celebrities – mayors, sport figures – or images of the city skyline and lanmarks. In ethnically and racially mixed neighborhoods, one finds icons of African American and Latino cultures that express a desire for racial understanding and peace. There are also scenes of the rural past, with shacks, ranchitos, cabañas, and grazing farm animals, which often adorn the walls of grocery stores. On churches you find depictions of congregants dancing, of the resurrection of the dead, and portraits of a local pastor and his wife. For residents of segregated areas, murals often interpret or remember events such as the murder of Trayvon Martin, the death of Rosa Parks, and the election of Barack Obama. These elucidate people’s concepts of paradise, the afterlife, current events, and who counts as heroes and role models.

CD: Do you find these murals to be spontaneous reactions to something, or are they commissioned?

CJV: They’re mostly commissioned. For murals and signs, typically it’s the owners of liquor stores and barbershops or pastors of churches, and in the case of memorials, family members or friends of the deceased. The local people who sponsor the street art often give instructions for what they want painted on their property, occasionally asking for their own portraits or those of their family members to be placed among cultural or local heroes and heroines. The painters I have spoken with have told me that they are left alone to do their work.

          I call the representations of people I’ve recorded my National Portrait Gallery, even though two decades ago, when I approached the real National Portrait Gallery in Washington, I was told the institution was only interested in the works of established artists. Harvard University’s research project, The Image of the Black in Western Art, has also ignored inner-city art. Now the Getty Research Institute is starting its African American Art History Initiative. The Getty has allocated millions to start the project, but so far, this effort excludes grassroots works, even though some of the established artists included in the Getty project, such as Mark Bradford and Theaster Gates, acknowledge a debt to street-art signage.

CD: They only want to collect recognized artists? Or they only want original works of art? How do you save a street mural other than through photography?

CJV: When my friend, the cartoonist Ben Katchor, saw my photos, he said, these institutions only want diversity that fits their narrow definitions of art. If the nature of the work challenges the economic basis of their institutions, they won’t recognize it, including street muralists, who work for little money in poor neighborhoods. Their work is meant to be ephemeral and would undermine the economic existence of major art institutions. Unlike the artists selected by the Getty, the largely unrecognized street artists have not enjoyed a privileged upbringing, nor have they had any training beyond high school art classes. Two of them, whose work in Detroit I have documented, spent time in prison for murder, and several others were homeless when I met them. A muralist in Los Angeles was an alcoholic living in his truck, which he parked across from his favorite bar. None of them make a living from their street art. One in Detroit had to return to being a house painter. One woman served food in a Detroit school cafeteria to support herself. The resources at their disposal are minimal. For example, a muralist, who was a resident of a Los Angeles drug treatment facility, had to paint Christ green because it was the only color available. When I spoke to the local people who requested the paintings on the walls of their places of business or storefront churches, I was typically told that they had lost contact with the artists. To create a more complete African American and Latino art history requires, in my opinion, an ambitious program of exhibiting, publishing, collecting, and archiving the “imprints of the soul” that are the work of unrecognized street artists in these communities.

Camilo José Vergara’s collection of photos at The Library of Congress
The Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History initiative

Links to Vergara’s essays on inner city art:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/27/an-artists-mission-to-capture-us-neighborhood-murals-in-pictures
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/05/the-malcolm-x-murals-of-america/559976
https://www.thenation.com/ article/snapshot-malcolm-x-across-america
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/02/the-black-panther-partys-street-art-of-urban-america/552110
http://time.com/50891/the-dream-continues
https://www.world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/insight/the-other-shinola-a-proposal
https://www.metrotimes.com/the-scene/archives/2017/05/09/camilo-jose-vergara-proposes-a-shinola-of-the-ghetto
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/arts/design/murals-of-the-rev-dr-martin-luther-king-jr.html
https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/dream-continues-photographs-martin-luther-king-murals-vergara

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