Collective Murals

I've extracted some descriptions of collective mural activities from a 'zine i'm working on about art and popular education. You can download the murals descriptions here. You can use this document to guide your production of any one of a variety of mural methods. They are good both for popular education work as well as political action.

Murals have a long and respected history in social justice struggle. Producing them collectively can be an important means of engaging in dialogue as well as a means of documenting our struggles. The photo in this post is from a bankelsang production i did with some friends many years ago. We simply took a passage from Eduardo Galeano's Walking Words (Norton, 1997) and created a series of panels that illustrated the words. A bankelsang is a form of street theatre practiced in medieval Germany. Literally meaning "singing banner" it's a means of sharing a short narrative with a sequence of images to focus people's attention. It's a great thing for guerilla art, being very portable.