Hector Duarte wears a characteristic red bandanna. It makes him look swashbuckling, a blue-jeaned pirate of mural art. Mariah de Forest has donned a print dress and a sun hat that ties around her chin; she resembles a home gardener. Today they’re not up on the scissors lift painting; they’re on terra firma talking. They stand together in this large empty parking lot at 4100 S. Ashland and point at a very long building wall full of flying squares and spheres. The biggest mural in Chicago is still a couple of months from being done.
For all its size, the mural is not readily visible from Ashland. It won’t turn necks or snarl traffic. But Mariah says the wall’s relative inaccessibility doesn’t bother her. The challenge is the thing, “to make it as fine as it can possibly be.” She points out that their previous mural, the four-story Chicago Everyone’s City, is on the back of a savings and loan on Milwaukee a few doors north of Division. Displaying four flags (of Poland, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the U.S.) that reflect the neighborhood’s mixed ethnic heritage, and an el that seems to rumble right off the building, this 1991 mural faces an alley and a couple of parking lots. If you don’t live, bank, or park there, you’ll never see it.
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I was awed to learn that Hector had been enrolled at the Siqueiros Mural Workshop at Cuernavaca in the late 1970s and went on to restore some of the master’s works in Mexico: to me, this was a brush with greatness, even if he never met the man (who died in 1974). Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were Mexico’s los tres grandes muralists. Siqueiros was the most radical of the three, aesthetically and politically; he pioneered spatial and compositional techniques that Hector still uses.
Once she didn’t see the point in painting murals; now she doesn’t see the point in painting much of anything else. “I used to think, you can’t sell them, people can’t buy them and put them in their house,” Mariah says. “They fade and peel. But I changed my mind.”
Mexican Americans will instantly identify the loteria pictures; Anglos won’t. But Mariah says that doesn’t make any difference. “We chose images primarily for visual reasons, the ones that would most easily hark back to the culture of Mexico,” she says. “But other people will look at them and sense they’re tied to another culture, too. [The mural] will have a very evocative, mysterious quality to it, an almost strangely surrealistic resonance, with things floating in ethereal space.”
Siqueiros was a charismatic, polemical Communist Party firebrand who with muralists Rivera and Orozco agitated for a revolution in Mexican politics and a renaissance in Mexican art. He was repeatedly jailed in Mexico for his leftist activism and hounded from one country to another. Seeking a worldwide “artists syndicate,” Siqueiros held workshops in Los Angeles in 1932 and in New York in 1936; an unknown Jackson Pollock was a student at both.
The loteria mural’s polyangular grid stayed on the Swap-O-Rama wall over the winter, and the muralists resumed work last May. Now Hector and Mariah have only to polish up a few of the loteria card images and finish filling in the city-lights backdrop. Battling the weather and working into the night under the building’s spotlights, the two don’t expect to be done until mid-November, maybe later. They won’t have a dedication until early next summer–when they’ll be painting the front of the flea market building, too.
