“Not in Our Name • No en nuestro nombre” by Juana Alicia Araiza
“Not in Our Name • No en nuestro nombre” by Juana Alicia Araiza
I assume that one day, my choice of muralist Juana Alicia Araiza as recipient of the winning prize in the newly introduced “political art” category of the Sheridan Art Prize, for her entry, “Not in Our Name/No en nuestro nombre,” her response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, will be seen as having been axiomatic, embodying what one might imagine, all of the characteristics of what “political art” should be, if “should” could ever become an accepted in the art world.
Her massive, 14 ½ x 8 ft. scratchboard mural of Palestinian women, grieving for their dead, applied with wheat paste to a wall in the San Francisco Mission District’s well known and aptly named, Clarion Alley, accompanied by a poem from San Francisco poet laureate, Genny Lim, was not intended to be sold but to be seen by as many people as possible and amplify the demand behind the mural, “a permanent Cease Fire to the Genocide in Palestine and war in Lebanon.” “As artists and poets,” says Juana Alicia, “we use the tools of our craft to change society.”To accommodate her wishes, the Mission’s El Tecolote newspaper has published a full page version “for people to pull out and post.”
In a video that accompanied her entry, Juana Alicia acknowledged that her work was inspired by that of the German printmaker, Kathe Kollwitz, “The Mothers,” from a century ago, who lost a son in World War One and a grandson in World War Two. Behind the nine mothers in Juana Alicia’s work, three of them weeping over an apparently dead child, wrapped unseen within its burial shroud, the viewer sees the billowing clouds that blanket the Gaza sky after another building, an apartment house, a hospital, perhaps a school, has been reduced to rubble by a US provided bomb, with women and children it’s most likely victims. In a direct tribute to Kollwitz’s work, she shows us a boy’s face, peeking out from the women’s robes, marked with horror and fear, as if acknowledging and anticipating his own fate.
At the moment, the US Congress, having unequivocally backed Israel’s war from the outset, is moving to pass laws suppressing all further opposition to it or to Israel, as support for terrorism and antisemitism. As this is likely to occur, Juana Alicia’s mural may come to be viewed as having expressed support for a “terrorist” organization, and the same may even be the fate of the Sheridan Art Prize for having displayed it. The rich history of political art is not short of attempts by governments to suppress it. As well as artists who have resisted.
— Jeffrey Blankfort