Great wall

Pilsen artist Héctor Duarte hasn’t finished the centerpiece of his new solo show at the National Museum of Mexican Art—and that’s the point. Duarte, 57, is painting a 150-foot mural, Destejiendo fronteras/Unweaving Walls, in the museum’s Torres Gallery. You can watch him work every Wednesday and Saturday from 10:30am–1:30pm until May 9. His show, “Muralla sobre lienzo /A Mural in Progress,” is the second of three NMMA exhibitions on immigration.

Born in Caurio, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, Duarte moved to Pilsen in 1985 and has lived there ever since, except from 2005–08, when he returned to his hometown with his family. He recalls that, as a boy, he spent more time looking at his church’s murals than listening to the service. “We didn’t have art classes or museums, nothing,” Duarte says. “I liked the idea that everyone can enjoy a mural and learn about art.” At 22, he decided to become a painter.

The Mexican mural movement offered plenty of inspiration: In the 1920s, the Mexican government hired Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and lesser-known artists to create murals that would educate the public about Mexico’s history, culture and recent revolution. In the 1930s, the program inspired Works Progress Administration murals in the U.S.

A few years after Siqueiros died, his widow opened a mural workshop in his Cuernavaca studio. Duarte became a student there in 1977. Siqueiros’s “attention to the spectator” appeals to him. According to Duarte, Siqueiros developed “polyangular perspective” that ensures his murals interact with viewers walking or driving past them as well as the architecture that supports them. This training helped Duarte and collaborator Mariah de Forest design Lotería (1993–94), a 430'?x?20' mural at the Swap-o-Rama at 42nd and Ashland Streets: The artists incorporated the building’s heating and air-conditioning unit into their vast homage to a popular Mexican card game.

When Duarte first visited Chicago in 1978, he was thrilled to discover the city’s mural tradition had flowered in 1968, when black and Chicano artists took to neighborhood walls to comment on the civil-rights movement and their resistance to displacement. Most artists had given up doing murals by the time Duarte moved here in the mid-’80s, though he’s seen a resurgence since 2000. When asked why Chicago’s mural movement flagged, he replies, “Every artist likes to sell art. They need to sell art. Mostly, the generation that used to do murals, they’re involved with galleries or have other jobs. This was a moment when they were young, and maybe they didn’t have families. I continue, but this is my passion.”

Duarte’s created dozens of murals for the city, local schools, nonprofits and businesses that celebrate Chicago’s Latino heritage. In our favorite, the Ice Cream Dream (2004) mosaic at the Western stop on the Pink Line, butterflies swarm from a paletas cart and flutter around a human heart composed of the Hancock Center, the Sears Tower and a couple of Pilsen homes.

Unweaving Walls addresses the psychological impact of immigration. A barbed-wire fence transforms into butterflies, Duarte’s signature symbol for migration. As viewers move counterclockwise around the gallery, one enlarged wire from the fence continues to the second wall, but its barbs become hands that snap the wire; between them, the tangled wire forms a human heart. On the third wall, the barbed wire metamorphoses into the DNA double helix and swirls around a human fingerprint, tools the American government uses to identify immigrants and sometimes to classify them as criminals: “Oh, you’re indocumentado; you don’t have papers,” the artist intones. “You’re a terrorist!”

On the last wall, a girl flies through the air, unhindered by physical barriers or political borders. “For me, this child represents the future, the new generation,” Duarte tells us. Although he’s outlined the major elements of his composition, he notes that there’s a lot left to do—and to evolve: Once he starts discussing his work with visitors, he says, “I develop more ideas, and more ideas and more ideas.”

“Muralla sobre lienzo” remains on view at the National Museum of Mexican Art through June 28.

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