in Bronzeville is the city's best.
Murals around town are often friendly affairs with
rainbow hues, smiling faces and heroic figures.
Then there is Man's Inhumanity To Man, a
courageous and absolutely terrifying piece of public
art in the Bronzeville community.
Created in 1975 by William Walker with fellow
artists Mitchell Caton and Santi Isrowuthakul,
Inhumanity plays out across the broad side of a
single-story commercial building on the northeast
corner of 47th and Calumet. Read from left to right,
a cold-eyed Nazi and two Klansmen approvingly
look out onto a tapestry that begins with a heroic
and colorful African figure, then jump-cuts to
nightmarish set-pieces that include flowing liquor
bottles, the skull-eyed drug dealer with the
star-spangled brim (pictured above), wilted flowers,
illegal pills frozen in mid-toss, a serpent, a couple
embracing lustily---and a written plea for peace.
The mural boasts some truly remarkable details.
There is a man hopelessly trapped inside a
hypodermic needle. A Klansman and black
nationalist point guns at each other in an angry
statemate. A female figure on a chessboard walks
past fallen bodies as a garish, open-topped
pimpmobile (pimp included!) sits lashed to her
back.
The scenes and figures float in psychedelica, as if
the Beatles' Yellow Submarine surfaced in 1970s
Chicago. Dark and disturbing, the work comes two
years after Walker's optimistic mural at Stranger's
Home Missionary Baptist Church near Cabrini.
The Stranger's Home mural threatens to fade into
oblivion, as did Inhumanity. Decades of sun, wind
and rain had worn away the Bronzeville mural's
colors and vibrancy, but a first-rate restoration in
2003 by Chicago artists Damon Lamar Reed and
Moses X. Ball has returned the mural's visual
punch---and shows its message is just as important
today.
