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All photos La Lucha Mural Park @ Camille Perrottet 

La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues, 1985, 30’ x 40’, oil on tar and concrete

Rikki Asher, Karin Batten, Thérèse Bimka, Robert Brabham, Marguerite Bunyan,
Keith Christensen, Eva Cockcroft (project director), Etienne Li, Camille Perrottet,
Judith Quinn, A. G. Joe Stephenson, Dorianne Williams

La Lucha Mural Park, 1985-86

Bounded by E. 8th St., Ave. C and E. 9th St., Manhattan
with Charas, Inc.

La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues, 1985
30’ x 40’, oil on tar and concrete

Rikki Asher, Karin Batten, Thérèse Bimka, Robert Brabham, Marguerite Bunyan, Keith Christensen, Eva Cockcroft (project director), Etienne Li, Camille Perrottet, Judith Quinn, A. G. Joe Stephenson, Dorianne Williams

LA LUCHA MURAL PARK

In spring 1985, Artmakers, working in collaboration with Charas Inc., a local housing and cultural organization, sent out a call to artists to create something never before attempted in New York City – a multi-mural park on the walls surrounding a derelict community garden. Led by Eva Cockcroft, a cofounder Artmakers, La Lucha Mural Park grew out of “a desire to return to the organic feeling of the early mural movement when personal conviction and the politics of the artists and the aroused communities coincided.”

La Lucha addressed five issues: local gentrification, frayed police/community relations, women’s rights, U.S. intervention in Central America, apartheid in South Africa and, by extension, racism in the United States. Hugely ambitious in participation, content and size, La Lucha included a large central collective mural and 25 smaller works created by individual and small groups of artists.

The collaborative mural La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues dominated the garden, covering all but the lower portion of the large tarred wall. Vignettes of community life swirled around a central image of a crystal ball containing promising images of the future. Critical, negative images dominated the left side; positive, affirming images balanced the right.

Many of the themes in the collaborative mural are amplified in the individual murals. Making no attempt to find a common style, the artists brought their “signatures” to their sections. The small murals are successfully connected both visually and thematically by black bands that both separate and frame them–-stenciled with the words “The Struggle Continues” in many languages.

Upon its completion, La Lucha Continua was the largest—6,400 square feet—and most impressive collective mural project of its kind. While most of the La Lucha Continua murals no longer exist, and the few that do are mere fragments or ghosts, today the restored garden is a valued community presence, a lush oasis of green in New York’s East Village.