The Murals of El Paso: Understanding a Sense of Place Through Public Art

In many ways this collaboration creates a shared understanding of place and identity.  Since all history is local, as some historians say, historians, too, have broadened the terms of collaboration.  In the process, historians see themselves more as historical agents assisting the community, as opposed to reporting the facts in obscure theory and concepts.  Our research project, The Murals of El Paso is an extension of these recent public history trends and since this project is part of The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP, it underscores partnering with the community to understand the role of public art in the El Paso, Texas, Borderlands as a form of storytelling.

Recently, some public historians have analyzed art to understand community identity in downtown corridors, neighborhoods, and communal spaces.  Public art, in the form of murals, statues, sculptures, and paintings occupy an interesting niche in many communities.  By nature, most public art is ephemeral, up one day and gone the next.  On average murals have a life span on public walls of about three to six months.  This project hopes to act as an archive and repository for murals and public art.  To complete this task, The Murals of El Paso will build on some of the work of Dr. Miguel Juarez who first introduced the importance of El Paso’s murals twenty-five years ago.  The Murals team has also consulted with Dr. Juarez for analytical purposes of understanding the murals in conjunction with different El Paso neighborhoods.  The project will also emulate the documenting process done in other communities nearby—Segundo Barrio, Murals of Phoenix, the Murals of Las Cruces, and the Murals of Albuquerque—just to name a few.  The end result is to illuminate the role public art plays in disseminating identity while preserving this ephemeral artwork in a database for future analysis.  In some ways, The Murals of El Paso will contribute to the preservation of public art, in a digital form.


El Paso wall mural, artist unknown.

To complete this large undertaking in a one-year period, The Murals of El Paso team has organized the project into three distinct phases.

As of this publication, the Murals team is nearing the end of executing the first phase of the project, a mural database.  Over the course of the summer, we outlined the breadth of the murals within the city and their proximity to The University of Texas at El Paso’s (UTEP) campus and El Paso Community College’s(EPCC) campuses.  After creating a digital city grid, one of the team members, Kalycia Kington, canvased neighborhood after neighborhood photographing and surveying the city’s murals.  To date, the team has collected two hundred murals with more than 300 hundred photographs.  While the team acknowledges that not every mural has been documented due to time constraints and some murals are not accessible, we have captured more than 80% of the murals in these communities with the optimism that in the spring 2023 we will sweep through these communities again to update the database and website. 

Finally, it should be noted that during this phase, the murals team discussed frequently what qualified as a mural.  For example, do commercial works for restaurants and business qualify?  Or old faded murals on dilapidated buildings?  In the end, we decided to capture that material, document it, post it, and let the public decide if that indeed qualifies as public art and a contribution to community artwork.  In addition, the Murals teams have also had conversations about the artwork itself and have determined until most of the data is captured it would be too hard to speak on a city-wide level what this art means or represents about the city’s identity.  What we can share is that there is a lot of art that reflects ideas about class, gender, and cultural constructions, especially in terms of race and ethnicity in this part of the Borderlands. 

In addition, in some communities, murals depict popular culture associated with comic books and video games, complicating how some El Pasoans see their community.  Therefore, the team has collaborated with many muralists and Dr. Juarez to better understand what the artwork says about the community.  The murals database is a simple data entry spreadsheet that captures the artwork (if it has a name), the artist, the year of production, and the address and attaches at least one photograph.


El Paso wall mural, artist unknown.

In the second phase, starting in early November, the murals team will convert the murals database into a community-based website.  In theory, local and regional artists will contribute information about murals, artists, and future projects with the website design team.  While the team is still working on the organization and presentation, we plan to use historic districts and college campuses as designation sites for now.  The website will also employ a map with pins to the location of the murals in that community.  The pins will pull up the address, a photograph of the artwork and provide a digital map of how patrons can visit the artwork.  It emulates the very process one would see on Google Maps.  We think when the project is complete, we will have more than 250 murals pinned on the website.  The website will act as a reservoir and archive to document and to continue to document murals now and in the future within the community.  It will also serve as a digital archive that researchers can use as a primary source.

Finally, since public art is ephemeral, it will document the “lost art” of El Paso.  The final part of this phase will see some social media pages created to promote the project but also crowd source for any missing information that might help fill in the holes.  The website will display a photograph of the mural, its address, artist credit and information and if applicable a brief description of the artwork and artist.


El Paso wall mural, artist unknown.

The final phase of the Murals of El Paso project is the trickiest portion of this public history project.  After creating a database, website, and social media pages to digitally archive the contents of this project, The Murals of El Paso team's plans to open a conversation with the administration officials from EPCC and potentially UTEP to advocate for spaces on each of the campus for public art installations. In other words, The Murals of El Paso will prescribe that students have a safe space on each campus to contribute to the city’s extensive public art community.  Ideally, each campus would have either an indoor or outdoor space dedicated to the project.  In addition, a campus mural wall will bring new stakeholders into this public history project: students and faculty from the various art disciplines.  The Murals of El Paso will advocate that EPCC (art) students should have a voice and be allowed to contribute to the city’s larger public art movement.  A dedicated wall would provide a safe and tangible way to support students' career pathways, while contributing to the mural movement.

In theory, since public art has a short life span, so too would EPCC’s murals.  Every semester, a new group of EPCC students, with assistance from the art professors, would paint a new mural decided upon in the art community of every campus. These murals would then become part of the digital archive on The Murals of El Paso’s website, bringing this project full circle.

Written by Jerry Wallace, Faculty Fellow
El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP