No easy answers to Bernal mural question

Despite two years of community mediation, the controversy surrounding the Bernal Heights Branch Library mural shows no signs of dissipating.

The debate over the mural, which was painted in 1982 by muralist Arch Williams with the help of neighborhood youth as a way to prevent graffiti, started around 2002 and is rooted in conflicts over race and neighborhood identity.

The neighborhood is split between people who see the mural as a vital representation of Bernal’s unique culture, and those who see it as a blemish on an historic Great Depression-Era building.

The debate became so contentious that by 2009 still no public agency or commission had taken any meaningful steps to address it.
Finding themselves at a standstill, people from both sides reached out to District 9 Supervisor David Campos.

“What I decided to do was a mediation where we brought together the people who were the most involved on different sides of this issue,” Campos said. “My job was to help develop a consensus statement and create a process where the community could provide input.”

Campos recruited professional mediator and Bernal Heights resident Beth Roy to select members for a mediation group that would facilitate the mediation process.

One of the first bumps in the road for the fledgling Bernal Library Art Project was an earlier Library Commission resolution urging the restoration of the mural on the “Cortland Street side of the Bernal Heights Branch Library only, and paint over the mural sections on the east and south sides of the building.”
Roy said that both sides saw this as cutting the baby in half, and that it satisfied nobody’s concerns.

“This is the classic zero-sum conflict, there can only be one or none; there can’t be half a mural. The commission tried half a mural,” she said. “Everybody blew up, and people are activists in this community … this is not a quiet, reticent, compliant community.”

Critics of the mediation process have raised concerns about a lack of public input and transparency; they point to the rejection of the initial resolution as an example of this.

Peter Warfield, executive director of the Library Users Association, is one such critic.

“They betrayed their compromise when they suddenly came up two years later with a plan to remove all of it,” Warfield said. “Mediation is normally understood to mean you bring the parties at interest together; a husband and a wife, a landlord and a tenant, an employer and an employee … in this case, this is a public library, a publicly owned building. The people who own it are the 750,000 people who live in the city.”

But Roy insists that while she hand-selected all 12 committee members, the process was extremely inclusive, emphasizing the care she took to select a broad and representative group.

“I interviewed probably a couple 100 people in the process of putting the mediation together,” she said. “I asked people what people they talked to in their circles who influenced them and paid attention to the names that kept recurring as being opinion influencers. But at the same time, I also looked for people who had not been involved.”

Roy said the debate had gotten so “nasty” that people in between the polar extremes of total conservation or complete elimination were not speaking up, and that she paid special attention to including those people.

After months of contentious meetings, new designs incorporating some graphic and thematic elements from the original mural were made public. Those designs, which are now on their way to final approval by the Arts Commission, are still somewhat polarizing.

Comments collected by BLAP through physical card boxes and email suggest that most people are fairly pleased with the news designs, although some hardliners on either side are still pushing for more extreme solutions.

There is also some controversy surrounding the process used to select the artists.

The art on the Cortland Street side is being done by Precita Eyes, a Mission-based community group dedicated to preserving and creating murals that reflect the city’s unique cultural and political legacy. Initially, the group was vocal in its support for restoring the original mural in its entirety.

Susan Cervantes, the Founding Executive Director of Precita Eyes, is one of the 12 people who sat on BLAP and her group is now the recipient of a contract, which has led some people to suggest that there may be a conflict of interest.

Cervantes could not be reached for comment, but Roy said that any suggestion that Precitas Eyes had received preferential treatment from BLAP could not be further from the truth.

“Precita Eyes did not get any preferential treatment. Zero. None. Precisely the opposite; we actually leaned the other way and held them to a higher standard,” Roy said. “Susan Cervantes was part of the mediation because she’d been a very active advocate for restoring the mural.”

The ultimate fate of the mural remains to be seen, but the strong emotions it has stirred in Bernal Heights for nearly a decade illustrate the difficult social realities of the city’s changing demographics.

Mauricio Vela, an outspoken advocate of saving the original mural, who died in 2010, was a member of BLAP and saw the mediation process as having real potential. But he also had reservations shared by many who have called Bernal home for years, and now find themselves culturally at odds with new residents.

“There’s still a lot of work to ensure the vital images on the current mural return,” Vela said in a 2010 interview with El Tecolote. “Folks need to be vigilant and participate … [the push to remove them mural] is a symptom of the gentrification of our neighborhood, and it’s about a race and class struggle going on in the neighborhood, and right now this is the dispute that’s reflecting that struggle.”

The designs for the replacement murals on the Cortland and Moultrie Street sides are pending final approval and even though everyone isn’t happy, Roy thinks the process has been a success.

“People have said the most positive things … the dedication has been enormous and we’ve done as much as we can.”

Now the designs will go to the Visual Arts Committee for another round of public comment.

The only thing certain at this point is that the controversy surrounding the galvanizing piece of community art is likely to continue.