RAK Collective in front of their mural, “Fuerza del Amor,” at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City.

Medieval Europe had to get by without many of the skills that had made the classical world so splendid. They couldn’t cast metal like the Greeks and Romans: Emperor Charlemagne’s portrait on horseback was a successful bronze casting, but it fits neatly on a desktop. They could build a big church, but could not put a big dome on it until well into the Renaissance. One way they made up for what was lost was painting on walls, and this was one of the great ages of murals, though most were eventually scraped off or painted over, a fate only too familiar to admirers of today’s many murals.

Another difference between then and now is that today, the most effort goes into, and success comes from painting on the outsides, instead of the interiors. And while there are exceptions for historical scenes and the like, most of the murals we’re enjoying are images of nature, as if a landscape or nostalgic animal figures will compensate us for the sights lost in an urban setting.

One welcome exception is the work of the Roots Art Kollective, which has recently been shown on some of the larger museum walls: formerly at UMOCA and currently at the UMFA. Right now at Finch Lane, however, viewers can go behind the facades and great halls to see what the Kollective’s members think about and how their works come into being. Not everything done by artists is meant to last or deserves serious contemplation, but a good clue that something is meant to do more than grab the attention of those driving by is the sort of statement from the artists that accompanies the many splendid images in RAK Chronicles.

Views of RAK Collective’s Park City Main Street mural.

Convention calls for a brief, abstract, often dense statement from the artist. In its place, Roots Art Kollective offers a lengthy, but accessibly-written introduction to the three founding artists in which they describe their contrasting interests and how they collaborate in the process of designing and executing a mural. Overall, their goal is described as “a unique blend of cultural storytelling and environmental awareness,” which sounds like just what a mural should entail.

As for the visual presentation, in lieu of an actual mural as presented in larger, more utilitarian galleries, in Finch Lane’s living room-like space they offer two smaller versions of each project: a sort of thumbnail and a larger painted sketch, helping the viewer to imagine the final, full-scale version. In the “Park City Historical Main Street, 2020” the first view shows a drone view of the neighborhood, putting the work in context in a way that visitors to the actual work would miss seeing. The second, much larger view depicts the work in detail, surrounded by parked cars to lend veracity. This might be described as the artists’ original, complete vision of something that would have been encountered piecemeal on the site. In a sense, it completes the experience by showing an entire image at once that was necessarily seen only cumulatively in Park City.

Installation view of Alan Ochoa’s tools and working photographs.

 

Miguel Galaz, “Montañas”

Nearby, Alan Ochoa, whom we learn from the text was born in Colima, Mexico, and immigrated to the US when three months old, shows a mixed media assemblage, titled “Tools,” that combines heavily used brushes, rollers, and paint mixing equipment into a collage that invokes a landscape, thereby bridging the distance between small hand tools and the large area a mural must cover. While not made explicit, he raises the question of how someone who identifies with a place he considers home, though he can never really have known it growing up, can be relegated to simplistic categories like “alien” and “immigrant.” It’s ironic that his native born, fellow Americans, who often identify with their European ancestors, dismiss someone with a similar multi-national  background as equally entitled to his own sense of home.

Luis Novoa came to Salt Lake City from Los Angeles, often called “Mexico’s 3rd largest city” (after Mexico City and Guadalajara), where the great muralist movement of the 1920s is seriously remembered and elaborately celebrated. His calligraphy balances on the meeting point of dynamic design and linguistic echoes for a truly international and culturally transcendent effect, which his “Air & Soul” distills.

In his “Montañas,” or “Mountains,” Miguel Galaz demonstrates how he transforms a familiar local icon into a geometric landscape redolent of the desert. Galaz spent his first decade in La Paz, a seaside town on the edge of Baja California, a spiny peninsula that is part of the vast, western desert that is home to Utah.

Luis Novoa, “Air and Soul”

Sooner or later, art is always a market phenomenon. Our mural movement has a great deal to do with commerce and civic improvement, much to our benefit. In Mexico, however, the murals grew out of the Revolution, by which the country threw off an authoritarian government in favor of democracy. There’s a gravity to those giant works, placed indoors and carefully preserved a century later, which may account for the thoughtful and thought-provoking quality inherent in the Roots Art Collective. In as much as the United States now faces its own authoritarian threat, while already in possession of a thriving mural movement, is it too wild to anticipate a role for these grand environmental artworks in our present struggle? The artists have shown they are willing to serve; we have only to support them.

Roots Art Kollective: RAK Chronicles, Finch Lane Gallery, through Jan. 3, 2025. Gallery Stroll reception: Friday, December 6, 6-9pm.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.