The Red Tree Murals

The Red Tree Murals

(Published in No Frame Around It: Process and Outcome of the A Space Community Art Biennale, 2001.)

“Run between the raindrops!” urges the teacher to the last, straggling student jogging across the field of the Scarborough Foreign Mission. It’s a grey spring morning at the end of a long, grey winter at the grey intersection of Kingston Road and Brimley Road in Scarborough, Ontario. Shining through the rain, however, are four brilliantly coloured murals painted on three sides of a concrete handball court. The Red Tree mura;s are a testimonial to life, colour and resistance to all things grey and death-dealing.

On the east-facing wall, artists and students repainted a mural the villagers of Taniperla, in the region of Chiapas, Mexico, completed on April 9, 1998, and which the Mexican army and police destroyed two days later. Life and Dreams of the Perla Valley was created by the villagers with the assistance of Sergio Valdez Ruvalcaba and since its destruction has been repainted in six countries as an act of solidarity.

The Red Tree Collective, a Toronto-based group of artists and cultural workers formed in 1989, undertook not only to repaint the Taniperla mural, but also to paint three other murals along with it – one by six professional artists, one by two groups of high school students from Scarborough, and one by six elementary school students (almost fifty participants in total). They were joined by two visiting artists from Mexico, including Ruvalcabe. It’s the riotous mix of images, styles and themes that gives the series its power and energy. Text, including the names of the participating artists, gives some context to the work. There is also a study guide for use in schools.

In his article, “Dialogic Aesthetics: A Critical framework of Littoral Art,” Grant Kester calls for a new critical discourse for socially engaged art practices. Traditional or mainstream criticism looks to the formal appearance of physical objects as the carrier of aesthetic significance and meaning. “Littoral” is a word used to denote that part of the shore that is both land and water, and “littoral” art is a phrase used by Kester, Bruce Barber and other theorists to describe socially engaged art practices that take place on the border between art and social interaction. Such projects may range from facilitating communication among disparate groups to active political resistance. Assessing littoral art projects is “disperse through multiple registers” rather than in the art object or “in the imaginative capacity of the single viewer…characteristic of modernist formalism.” (The article can be downloaded at HYPERLINK “http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/forum1.html” www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/forum1.html.)

Thus littoral art projects will have different meanings for participants and passersby. In this case, it will be different again for students who ready the project’s study guide and perhaps follow the instructions on how to paint a mural. At the front and center of this piece, of course, is the social and political meaning of reproducing a work of art censored by the state. For the critic, the question is whether these social interactions left a trace in the work itself.

The volume and complexity of the imagery, the epic size of the piece viewed as a whole, and the varied artistic styles required that some effort be expended to read the murals. There were clearly different levels of skill and technique. But the initial confusion, the different sorts of renderings, and the continued mystery about some the imagery were in themselves a testimonial to the preservation of the process, the social meanings, and the multiple registers in the completed work. The artists, high school students, and children first created one kind of homage by repainting the Taniperla mural, and then another by painting their own responses to it.

While the imagery is discursive, a common theme emerges from all four murals: the celebration of life, and the depiction of that celebration through art, is an act of resistance to the forces of repression. The Taniperla story is proof that art itself is part of this celebration—this celebration that threatens state power, and therefore must be stamped out.

That the mural has been repainted around the world is testament to the face that it can be erased in one place but never eradicated. Fifty people in Toronto gave us our own, particular proof – between the raindrops.