Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey)

Since 1973, the aged facade of Stranger's Home Missionary Baptist Church, 617 W. Evergreen has been enlivened by All of Mankind, a mural by Chicago artist William Walker. The mural is weathered and faded now, but the work's scale and power remain evident. Dedicated to the ideal of racial harmony, the mural features four conjoined multi-ethnic characters at center, surrounded by a host of faces and scenes. The mural also included the names of slain figures such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Malcolm X, Anne Frank and Jesus Christ. The NEA-funded mural took three years to complete. Walker is a supremely gifted artist and muralist whose work I've just discovered in the past year. Across town, Walker created a mural that is a counterpoint to the optimism of Mankind: the stunning Man's Inhumanity to Man at 47th and Calumet, painted in 1975. A detail of the mural, painted on the side of a single-story commercial building, is below:

At once courageous and terrifying, Inhumanity was created by Walker and fellow artists Mitchell Caton and Santi Isrowuthakul. Read from left to right, a cold-eyed Nazi and a pair of Klansmen approvingly look out on a tapestry that begins with a heroic and colorful African figure, then jump cuts to nightmarish set pieces that include flowing liquor bottles; a skull-eyed drug dealer (detail above) with a star-spangled hatband; wilted flowers; illegal pills frozen in mid-toss; a serpent; a couple embracing lustily...and a written plea for peace.

The details provide pointed social commentary: a pimp rides comfortably in a gilded convertible that is strapped to the back of a weary woman; a well-dressed white oppressor holding a bag of money stands over the body of a black man--on second glance you noticed an equally sartorial black man is standing there as well, equally pleased over the fallen state of his brother. One detail is of a man hopelessly trapped inside of a hypodermic needle. A Klansman and a black nationalist  point guns at each other in an angry, futile, stalemate.

The scenes and figures float in a dark and disturbing psychedelica, as if the Yellow Submarine surfaced in grim 1970s Chicago. Decades of sun, wind and rain had worn away the mural's colors and vibrancy, but a 2003 restoration by Chicago artists Damon Lamar Reed and Moses X. Ball returned the works visual--and visceral--punch.

At Stranger's Home MBC, the demolition of the nearby Cabrini Green housing projects is creating a new neighborhood while bringing development pressures to his now-valuable area. But what better place than a regentrifying neighborhood to restore a mural that embraces cooperation, equality and the value of all humanity?