Art builds the city. Boston community murals and local identity = Arte que faz a cidade : Murais comunitários e identidade local em Boston

• Autor(a) principal: Cordeiro, Graça Índias
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Ferro, Lígia, Sieber, Tim
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/108329
• topic: Antropologia; Anthropology

Three anthropologists visited community murals in Boston, concentrating on the black and Latino neighborhoods of Roxbury, and Dorchester. With common interest in the ethnographic perspective, they moved toward a joint reflection on local murals. Our encounter with these murals drew on our previous ethnographic experience with festivals and neighborhood representation in Lisbon (GIC), with graffiti and street sports in Lisbon, New York, and Rio de Janeiro (LF), and with architecture, music, and urban planning in Lisbon and Boston (TS). We thus report on our resulting work in progress on a particular form of urban visual culture, community murals, that document, mediate, and represent local urban histories, places, and identities. These public works of art offer commentary on related dynamics of collective organization, of residential, economic, and ethnic segregation in the urban setting, inter-ethnic and inter-generational relations, and the role of youth in cultural continuity and change. The researchers concern is both with substantive cultural analysis of the murals, as well as with the serendipity, synergy, and collaboration they experienced in the field, that helped them draw on their past urban ethnographic experiences in order to focus on a new, common object for analysis.