Muralista: Q&A with Christopher Cardinale.

Christopher Cardinale recently returned from Italy, where he presented slideshows at art festivals and in squatter communities-and painted enormous murals. Three of them in 17 days. But then, another trip. This one to the less balmy clime of Sunset Park's Metropolitan Detention Center; a recent Department of Justice report has revealed the widespread abuse of Arab and Muslim men detained there after September 11. Cardinale was researching an illustrated feature on post-9/11 detentions he's doing for World War 3 Illustrated. Public murals and comic-style work are just two of several genres Cardinale navigates. He is an artist determined to slip in and out of established boundaries and communities, and his art does nothing if not travel. It's not uncommon for one of his images to go from the page of a comic book to a placard at a protest (which then may be televised or reproduced again in print via photograph), to the wall of a gallery, then onto a website. "I like my art to move," he says. Cardinale began his formal training-and his identification with socially conscious figurative work-in New Mexico. His influences are as diverse as his art: Sue Coe's starkly vivid depictions of social injustice; the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz; the "big three" of Mexican muralists: Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sequeiros; and the populist broadsheets of Jose Guadalupe Posada. Cardinale is weary of art that cloaks its message so thoroughly in conceptual devices that it meets the viewer devoid of message. "I'd rather have my work called propaganda and be clear on where I stand, than leave things so wide open for interpretation."

When did you start muraling?

In 1996, when I graduated from the University of New Mexico, I did my first community mural project in Santa Fe, with the youth mural program of New Mexico. It was funded by the city, and we painted four garbage trucks with rolling murals of portraits of solid-waste employees. The idea was to humanize the people who are in charge of collecting waste. That was my first project.

The first one here?

My first project in New York was a mobile mural: a banner protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the expansion of NAFTA. It was reprinted in World War 3 Illustrated, and later the original-it's 12 by six feet-was carried in a march. So it goes from print to the street to the wall to whatever. That's the idea.

What is the average lifespan of a mural?

It depends. It's a living thing that is so much like graffiti, because it's oftentimes illegal. And it's not a form of artwork that has permanence; it's something that gets painted over and over.

Have you ever been arrested while working? How do the lines blur between muraling and graffiti?

No, I haven't been arrested. And I don't call myself a graffiti artist. I use the techniques and am heavily influenced and inspired by graffiti, but that's not the world I've chosen to primarily work in. When I lived in Mexico City, I interacted with the graffiti scene there because their parameters of what is graffiti were more flexible in my opinion than what happens here.

How does NYC compare to other cities in which you've worked, both in terms of public art and tolerance for it?

New York has all this wall space, but it's not a city that has a lot of murals. Philadelphia has this big mural program. It's very institutionalized, but the end result is still that there are a lot of murals. Here I see all these giant 15-story banners that are advertisements, and I find them offensive. I think that advertisers should have to pay me to look at their stuff as opposed to their paying for access to that private property on which it's displayed, because what they're really paying for is access to my eyes. So I'd rather see artwork on those surfaces. I'd like to do artwork on the buildings at that scale. Figures that are 15-20 stories high, and I'd also like to have graphics that were printed the same way.

People would flip?

Yeah, when you use those large-format banners on the sides of buildings for noncommercial art, even if it isn't political artwork, there will always be controversy, even if it's the most innocuous thing imaginable. I guarantee you somebody will be offended. So back to the same criticism. I don't mean to harp on it, but we're so used to advertising that we accept it as normal. Even with public art you hear, "I don't want it there because I live here" and so on, but you don't hear that about advertising. Even if you put up a painting of daisies on a public school, there might be some protests.

Has this happened to you?

I work with an organization in Brooklyn, a community mural organization called Groundswell, and they've had murals that were censored despite contracts that they had with people who were letting them paint on the building. There was one mural, and I think it was on the side of a Rite Aid, and the kids doing the mural personified the threat of violence and drugs in the neighborhood as a wolf with dripping blood coming off its fangs. That's how they chose to symbolize this threat in their neighborhood, and for the Rite Aid or whatever it just wasn't pretty enough. So they painted over it. There was a legal battle before they did, but the mural was censored. And that's very common with public art.

Do other cities have a higher tolerance of public art than New York?

I wouldn't call it a higher tolerance. I would say that cities like Philadelphia have mural programs funded by the city, and it's more institutionalized. They're using it to draw tourists. It's fairly representational art, and most of it isn't very challenging as far as the content goes. So I think that programs like those have censorship built into them.

A pressure to keep things simple.

Right. A friend of mine worked on a mural in Philly that had a black man with dreadlocks screaming. I know there are other very positive parts of the mural, but anger is also part of reality for black men in the U.S. The artist was forced to censor it in that program. In New York City you have a lot of edgy artwork, but it usually exists in the gallery world or the museum world. There are the private galleries like the ones in Chelsea where all the trendiest private galleries are, and you can have really offensive stuff there, but as soon as you take that same stuff and put it in the Brooklyn Museum?

It's threatening.

Right, because who's funding it? That's when the Catholic values get involved, or other things. These galleries in Chelsea are open to the public, but they're not public spaces. And hardly anybody from the mainstream would feel comfortable stepping into those galleries.

There are a lot of guerrilla artists making work in the middle of the night and taking the chance that their work will stay up for a day or a week.

That has a huge place in the contemporary art world. Just as graffiti art has a place since it started in the 70s in New York City, there was Keith Haring and that generation of exposure, and now there is the new street art which is a mix of graffiti and other things. Definitely the same tactics as illegal graffiti, but doing wheat-pasted things, stencils, sculptures. And this way we bypass the whole approval process. It's a more direct interaction as well. It's out there, and if their community doesn't approve of it, they or the owner of the building will just paint over it, or maybe it'll get left there. And that's what's really beautiful, when you see a piece of paper that was pasted on a wall and it's there for three years and nothing happens to it.

Have any of your murals stayed up for a long time?

I have one in Bushwick that's been up for almost a year. It was done with kids from a summer youth program called Make the Road by Walking, a nonprofit organization in Bushwick that has all different kinds of programs-environmental housing, there's a youth newspaper, there's education going on, community-supported agriculture and other things. The mural was funded by Groundswell, and I was a lead artist hired to work with Make the Road by Walking. We learned about the process of making murals and artwork in general; we did research, came up with the concept and design. I solidified the design, and then we put it up together, so this is there. Anybody could jump over the fence and paint on it if they wanted to. They haven't yet.

How many community murals in total have you worked on?

Through Groundswell I've just done a few. I've only been here a little over two years, so I got involved with them a little over a year ago. I did a post-Sept. 11 mural jam-which is getting together over two or three days and producing a banner-type mural. One of those was to help youth deal with their feelings about September 11.

What are the origins of urban community murals?

Community murals were a big part of the civil rights movement and the Chicano identity movement in Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s in California, in the Southwest. There is the direct influence of the Mexican mural movement that began right after the Mexican Revolution around 1911. That tradition influenced the Chicano movement to create an identity in this culture where they weren't being given respect, and to redefine their roots? Then there's also the civil rights movement and a lot of African-American muralism, which took place on the West Coast, but also heavily in Chicago. So I'd say basically with those social movements is where it started in the United States.

In what cities are murals most alive?

Chicago has a strong movement. Los Angeles has a lot of institutionalized and not so institutionalized murals. The Southwest does as well-Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and San Antonio. San Francisco also has a huge mural movement.

What's your experience with the fine arts community been like?

The fine arts community has a very different way of doing things, of course. They have a scene that is its own world, and I love to go see stuff at galleries and museums, but as for participating in the actual community, I find the activist scene and the street-art scene far more involved in what's going on in the world. [On the other side] a fine artist might see my street art as almost like propaganda. They see this artwork as propaganda in a sense.

How does what you do differ in function from the fine arts?

With a lot of murals, there's an actual collaboration between the community where they're going to be, and the artists, and I mean there's a really direct link. One example would be when somebody gets killed, and a graffiti artist in the neighborhood does a memorial mural of that person in the neighborhood. That's a huge tradition; you see it all over Brooklyn, all over the Bronx and in parts of Queens, so that's not fine arts at all. I wouldn't call it popular culture either, but popular in the sense you would say in Spanish, popular-very "of the people." This is their tradition, they would recognize that it's a painting, it's art, but they wouldn't do it for art's sake.

Then there's the community mural movement, which oftentimes is focused more on education, interaction and participation with the community. But it is still an actual product, and this is one of the big challenges I find, because I'm very concerned with the product looking good. I want it to be able to be respected by both the street art and fine arts worlds, so that's the challenge.