Professors Enrique Leal and Laurie Palmer, UC Santa Cruz
M.U.R.A.L. invites proposals from current and former UC Santa Cruz art students for murals to be installed on campus Fall 2020. The irony of making a mural in real space in the time of COVID and when we expect most fall classes to happen online is not lost on us. M.U.R.A.L. provides a forum for expression in this intense time of uncertainty, grief, and rage, as well as a platform for the creative work of students.
We welcome students back to campus with messages of solidarity and community, even if that welcome may be, for the moment, a virtual image of an actual artwork located in real space. One mural will be chosen for installation in each space for this fall. The chosen designs will express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and/or with related movements working in solidarity to end systemic racism, police violence, and/or the prison system. It might do this by re-telling art history or visually enacting other historic reparations. It might honor people or events that have had a significant impact on struggles for social or economic justice. Or, it might address solidarity with these movements and urgent issues in ways that we can’t imagine.