Community History Visualized: Murals in Place and Cyberspace

Mike Mosher
San Francisco State University
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~envision/conference/exhibit/mosher/

In this presentation, the artist discusses historical motifs in community murals and the development of appropriate subject matter for a physical site. In painting historical murals in San Francisco like "The Mission Reds at Woodwards' Gardens" (1982) and "The City's Music" (1990), he's developed a nine-step "Tennis Game" community process that allows for maximum group input while maintaining artistic professionalism. This process works for adults, schoolchildren, or a neighborhood group of all ages. Several community-based websites and multimedia projects with historical content will be studied for answers, as well as the artist's own mural-faced kiosks like "Collaborationation" (1992) and "Christopher Cumulonimbus" (1991) of which these are but fragments of the murals assembling history in both paint and pixel he hopes to paint in the future.