Jeffery, Hannah
(2020)
A Monument to Blackness: Murals and the Black Freedom Struggle.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis offers the first in-depth analysis of black muralism across the US, from interior murals in the South, to street murals in the North and West. It argues that murals played a significant role in black communities at heightened moments of racial protest in the black freedom struggle because of their relationship with space. Focusing on 1930 to present day, I interrogate the currently missing connection between black politics, art, memory and space in studies of black muralism to uncover how murals created spaces of interaction within black communities. Recuperating black history and radical memory, and painting it onto building façades, muralists transformed walls of de facto segregated black communities into sites of education, ritual, performance and commemoration. This thesis traces the genealogy of black muralism throughout the black freedom struggle by uncovering how, why and when murals became interactive sites of black empowerment and imagination across the country at various moments of racial protest in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
In crossing the boundaries of street, high, guerrilla, contemporary, galleried and ephemeral art, murals defy easy categorisation, resulting in their oversight in current scholarship. However, this thesis draws upon material from multiple fields to create an interdisciplinary framework to better understand the significance of black muralism throughout the black freedom struggle. I engage with extensive archival research, original artist testimony, and the fields of memory, urban and Black Studies to demonstrate how walls in isolated black communities were used by communities to empower black residents, protest against social, racial and political contexts, contest geographical confinement, and commemorate black heroes. Split into two parts, the first half of the thesis tracks the evolution of muralism from an interior mode of artmaking in the 1930s to a radical form of public street art in the 1960s. It introduces both the early protest purposes of interior black muralism and street murals’ position as a tangible manifestation of black consciousness. Building upon these two chapters, the second half of the thesis spans the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements, offering three original case studies that explore in greater depth the ways in which murals transform walls of black communities into spaces of interaction. For example, in grassroots communities across the nation, murals became interactive textbooks, newspapers and museums, they healed the physical and emotional landscapes in the aftermath of racial rebellion, they provided spaces of communal ritual performance, and they fostered spaces of commemoration by becoming visual mausoleums marking the physical sites of death.
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