Conservation process continues for La Casa’s beloved mural

The chirp of screws being driven into wood and the whirr of drills filled the air in the front room of the old white house at 510 E. Chalmers St. that’s the birthplace of La Casa Cultural Latina and the former home of the U. of I.’s department of Latina/Latino studies.

Art-handling company Terry Dowd Inc. project manager Darren Martin and his work crew are creating a roughly 6 feet by 6 feet panel, part of the “bread” that will be used to make a large art “sandwich.”  The “meat” is a section of lathe, plaster and wallpaper of part of a wall covered with a vivid mural filled with bold depictions of heritage and social justice, of individual and community strength.

“We basically sandwich the walls,” Martin said. “It almost turns it into a crate.”

The mural has been the cornerstone and rallying point for the campus Latina/Latino community since Illinois alumnus and artist Oscar Martinez and fellow students painted it in 1974.

The men use large bolts to screw the panel into the wall and then into another wooden frame on the other side of the wall, then cut the wall with a two-bladed saw.  That saw creates less vibration than a single-blade saw, which would crumble the lathe and plaster that holds the mural.

“For most jobs vibration isn’t important, but for this job it’s crucial,” worker Mike Baur said.

The work is part of a $300,000 effort by the campus to preserve the artwork, which will take six to eight months to complete, said Brent Lewis, the campus landscape architect at Facilities and Services at the U. of I. The mural has been photographed in high resolution, and images are available on the U. of I. Box website. A 3-D scan of the room is also available online, as well as a panoramic image.

The mural and the cultural house were born out of a spirit of activism and for a need for a space to make Latino students feel safe and wanted, said Gioconda Guerra Perez, the director of La Casa Cultura Latina. The mural was painted because students at the time were afraid the building would be torn down. 

”The act of doing the mural was an act of resistance,” said Alicia P. Rodriguez, academic advisor and administrative coordinator for the department of Latina/Latino studies.

But the university has come a long way since those times, Guerra Perez said. “What was considered vandalism 40 years ago is now considered artwork.”

The use of murals to tell stories that are unique to Latino culture goes back to the Aztecs and other native groups from the Americas, Guerra Perez said, and is related to the Mexican muralist art movement in the early 1900s. “It’s been part of our culture for hundreds of years.”

“There’s a political consciousness running through these murals,” Rodriguez said. The images on the walls represent the struggles Latinos face on campus and in U.S. society, including the pressure Latinos feel to lose their identity in order to fit in with society, she said.

“For many students, the mural was their Alma Mater.”

The sections of the mural will be taken to Parma Conservation in Chicago, Lewis said. There, a section will be placed on a vacuum table and the back of the frame removed. The lathe and the plaster will be milled down to an eighth of an inch and mounted on linen. The mural will be flipped over, and the surface of the mural will be cleaned and protected. Specialty paints and fillers will be used to repair any damage to the mural.

Once that process is complete, the murals can be rolled up and moved, Lewis said. A destination for the sections on campus has not yet been chosen. “The hope is that (the sections) will be spread out around the campus,” Rodriguez said.