By Farha Rizvi Contributing Writer
Friday, February 23, 2007
To highlight black history in South Berkeley, 10 murals painted by students and community artists were put on display Wednesday at Malcolm X Elementary School.
"We wanted to create an outdoor gallery that celebrated the community of South Berkeley," project coordinator Sara Bruckmeier said.
The murals, which line a chain-link fence at the intersection of King Street and Ashby Avenue, are double-sided--one side depicts senior residents' stories and the other side features the children's artwork.
"This project is special because we wanted it up for Black History Month," said Mark Coplan, Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson.
Children from the arts magnet at Malcolm X took a semester-long after-school class to make 4-by-4-foot murals telling the history of South Berkeley.
Bonnie Borucki, whose child used to attend the school, started the mural project with a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of its California Stories initiative.
Borucki and other community members taped oral interviews from seniors at the South Berkeley Senior Center and their neighbors. Local artists listened to the interviews and translated them into visual representations.
"Each mural tells the event in the history of South Berkeley and is grounded in the personal experience of a senior, someone who lived through it," Bruckmeier said.
While the murals focus on contributions of blacks, other groups are represented in the art project.
"The art is issue-centered. It's supposed to tell you about the neighborhood, and so much of the history of South Berkeley involves African-Americans, like those who came to work in the shipyards during World War II," Borucki said.
Other murals depict the effects of Japanese internment and housing discrimination against minorities during the 1950s and 1960s.
Borucki got the idea for the project after working with Epic Arts, a nonprofit group that facilitated a mural painting across from the Ashby BART station four years ago.
"The neighborhood improvement had such a great response we were looking for something else to do," Borucki said.
Contact Farha Rizvi at frizvi@dailycal.org.
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