The Arvada Center’s “In Sight On Site: Murals” is a big, juicy piece of late-summer bubble gum, a bang-up, heat-beater of an art show where the chewy thrills come in bright colors and eye-popping patterns.
But, honestly, it left me with an uneasy feeling. In the way that candy ultimately disappoints, the fruity flavor ran out quickly, and I found myself looking for a way to dispose of something that didn’t taste quite right.
The exhibit, with 21, large-scale murals by several of the region’s most respected artists, is an experiment of sorts, taking our current fascination with outdoor murals, which appear relentlessly in urban zones these days, and moving it inside. Viewers can get an up-close and air-conditioned look at art that can seem distant and removed, even a bit dangerous, in its natural setting.
In that way, “In Sight On Site” plays out like a family-friendly zoo for art and the artists that make it. Outdoor murals are the wildest breed of pop art around, and the Arvada Center reigns them in, then tames them with things like artist bios and an audio tour.
Like with all zoos, though, the enjoyment is tinged with more than a little regret. Is there good reason, you wonder, to capture this work from its organic habitat — the streets and alleys of urban, multicultural America — and cage it in the calm comfort of a suburb like Arvada? Is it fair to take something loud and proud and force it to speak in the hushed tones of the formal museum world?
To be fair, there’s some value in the effort, thanks to curator Collin Parson’s understanding of the breadth of murals in 2018, and the talent he recruited for the exhibit.
There’s geometric and abstract patterning from Thomas Scharfenberg and Anthony Garcia; flower-power fantasies from Sandi Calistro, Daniel Crosier and Heather Patterson; mind-bending surrealism from Mark Penner-Howell; and text manipulation from Andrew Hoffman.
These are the styles of murals you see around the city, and this exhibit gives you a chance to parse them out, to consider how an artist tries to reflect and impact the immediate environment surrounding a work and take viewers on a journey.
Standing so close to these objects, you get a real sense of just how much thought and effort can go into a piece that looks so simple from a distance as you drive or bike by. Jessica Forestal’s “You See It, Don’t You?” is a visual collage of dozens of machine parts and industrial gadgets, and she painted every line of it by hand. It’s quite a feat. These are all pieces you want to take photos of, wide shots as well as details.
But while it’s easy to like, “In Sight On Site” can be impossible to love. The lesson it offers on murals gets some important things wrong.
There’s a whole bottomless history of murals, of course. You can go back to cave paintings if you want to explore it and dwell for quite some time in the Renaissance before arriving at what we see now.
But the reason murals matter today, why they fascinate us and play a crucial role in contemporary culture, doesn’t go that far back. It starts with 20th century Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who dared to paint a social revolution, and continues through present-moment heroes like Shepard Fairey, famous for creating the pro-Obama “Hope” poster.
On this tour, you stop to look at the Chicano murals of the 1960s and ’70s, the graffiti art of the ’80s and ’90s. This is the art of the streets, created by the unheard and overlooked. It is the art of underclass renegades, some of whom risked jail to make their politics known, or risked their lives — hanging over railroad trestles and climbing up water towers — to tag landmarks just to prove to the world they exist.
The Arvada show hands this legacy over to a crowd of art-school grads, of career creatives who sell works for tens of thousands of dollars or enjoy representation at fine galleries or who have 19,000 Instagram followers. In other words, people who are very much in the current commercial art system and benefiting from it.
There are nods in the exhibit to a more genuine essence of mural-making, including an appearance by Los Supersonicos, the duo of Carlos Frésquez and Francisco Zamora, who actually have been exploring Chicano identity for two decades. But in this setting, the work feels like just another mammal in the zoo, not the king of the jungle that political murals truly are.
Only a few artists seem to get what could have made this show a real value by examining the possibilities of how a gallery setting might enable a muralist to go farther. Thomas “Detour” Evans turns his piece into a musical instrument you can play by plucking its strings. Korri Marshall and Anthony Garcia experiment with wall surfaces. These are things you could only do indoors.
But “In Site On Site” lacks commitment to its subject matter. Murals, by definition and custom, need to be painted directly on a wall or other permanent surface. That’s what makes them powerful — you can’t move them. The only way to shut them up is to paint over them.
But here, the work is done on panels attached to the walls, sure to be unscrewed and offered for sale by it creators — more commercial goods in a mural world that is increasing mucked up with works that are paid for and vetted by governments, or sponsored by beer companies that insist images of their products are integrated in the visuals.
So much of what you see on the streets today is chewing gum, really, the murals that pump up civic pride while ignoring social truths, the product placements, the art made just to brand corporations. Murals are big, bubblicious business in 2018. There could have been a lot to chew on in a show produced by a non-profit gallery.
“In Sight On Site: Murals” continues through Aug. 26 at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada. 720-898-7200 or arvadacenter.org.