Friday, April 17, 2020

More Murals around the World

USA Today reports (4/15/20) on more Covid-19 themed murals popping up on walls around the world: "Coronavirus inspires world graffiti"

Among the more interesting or witty of these 59 images, in sequence:
  • (Third photograph). From Wynwood in Miami  Two masked figures, a woman in a green Muslim headscarf and niqab over her lower face; and a crouching tattooed figure wearing a jury rigged mask made out of an upside down MacDonald's bag, sipping a drink through a straw. Glimpsed are the two figures eyes, gazing in opposed dirctions.  Perhaps indicative of the strange, unexpected commonalities that keep popping up in these unprecedented times. 
  • On a Lost Angeles wall, a slouching Prince Harry in a hoody (as perhaps befits his newly deconsecrated station)  bearing the words "Keep Calm and Wash Hands" ( a play on the oft citd World War II official edict to "Keep Calm and Carry On"
  • A Baby Yoda in a tiny facemask in Guatemala City, perhaps giving an encouraging blessing to passersby. 
  • In Prague: A bespectacled John Lennon, with a bright red bandana mask marked the words of one of his most famous lyrics, "All we need is LOVE" 
  • In Glasgow, a walking man is tethered to a ball and chain, the ball in now painfully familiar image of the novel coronavirus. 
  • On a London bridge wall, Lionel Stanhope paints a turbaned portait of a amn , copied I beleie from an Old Master, wearing a facemask
  • In San Antonio Texas the muralist Colton Valentine has updated his previous painting of the rapper Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar ("Cardi B", to now wear a face mask.  (Might the artist be playfully seekign to protect the performer, by modifying the image?)
  • In Berlin, Gollum from Lord of the Rings crouches delightedly holding a roll of toilet paper, over which he exclaims "Mein Schatz (My precious), the same phrase by which the character refers to the Ring.
  • In Mumbai, a painted image of a cross legged woman, in mediation postur,  in a sari now wears a blue mask. Her fingers form two mudras, I believe the left  hand forms the
    gyāna mudrā  (mudra of wisdom) and the right hand forms the
    karana mudrā (for the expulsion of ilnnes and evil.
It is interesting note that nearly all cases a photographer has chosen to shoot each mural with one of actual persons walking by or looking at it.  This convention, I suggest, is informed by our enduring sense that an image is quasi alive, and best appreciated in relationship to a living person.


2 comments:

  1. It is interesting that most of the visual art responses have been in terms of public art, as it should be!

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