Murals, Migration, and Art as Public Argument

A canvas hangs in one collector's house. A mural covers a government building that thousands pass every day. Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists chose walls on purpose: after the Mexican Revolution, the new government wanted art that taught national history to a mostly illiterate public, in public buildings, for free. Scale itself became an argument. A wall big enough to hold four hundred years of history forces the viewer to walk its length, moving through time the way they move through space.

In Rivera's Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, figures from four centuries of Mexican history stand together in one park, crowded chronologically rather than spatially: colonial friars, dictator Porfirio Diaz, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Rivera himself as a boy holding the hand of La Calavera Catrina. One wall compresses history into a single procession anybody on the street can read.

Jacob Lawrence took the same civic instinct and serialized it. His Migration Series is sixty small panels, each built from flat, unmodeled shapes in a strictly limited palette of maybe six colors repeated panel to panel, tracing the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South northward to cities like Chicago and New York across the 1910s and 1920s, decade by decade, boll weevils and lynching driving people out, factory jobs and crowded trains pulling them in. Both artists reject the single salable image for public or serial scale, and both anticipate later installation art, which uses the same room-filling, walk-through address to argue politically with a broad audience rather than sell a single object to one buyer.