Conservation Work on La Casa Cultural Latina Murals

The conservation of vibrant room-size murals symbolizing the struggle of Latina/Latino students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign began in 2016.

The murals, located at 510 East Chalmers Street, were removed from the facility by art handling company Terry Dowd, Inc. and transported to Parma Conservation in Chicago. The conservation project is expected to take six to eight months.  

A mock wall removal was successfully performed to test methods and materials ahead of the removal process.

Murals History:

The original mural inside the former home of the Department of Latina/Latino Studies and La Casa Cultural Latina was painted in 1974 by artist Oscar Martinez, with the help of students, as a measure to prevent the new Latino Cultural Center from being closed. Efforts and petitions to save the murals date back three decades on campus. A feasibility study was performed in November 2013 by Johnson Lasky Architects which outlined recommendations for extraction, transport, and storage.

When the former home of the La Casa Cultural Latina cultural center was slated to be removed in 1974, students protested through art; principal artist Oscar Martinez and others created colorful floor to ceiling murals on the walls of one of the rooms. Their plan worked; over the years much effort—student, departmental, and campus—has gone into saving the art and the idea of a cultural home, if not the actual building. In 2016, when the building was scheduled for decommissioning, the artwork was carefully removed and sent to Chicago for preservation and restoration. That process was lengthy, but the vibrant art is finally back on display on the Urbana campus. As a whole, the mural is called La Victoria, but today the murals are split into panels, with some hanging in the Spurlock Museum and some in the Illini Union.

Brent Lewis, university landscape architect with F&S, acted as the project manager for the process, and Todd Hawkins, Ron Cler, Erik Davis, and Mike Paris, helped secure two of the sections in the southwest stairwell of the Illini Union. People are thrilled to have this culturally important artwork back in the public eye. Whether is sections or as a whole, Martinez notes that the artwork represents “one people, no matter where we come from or live; we share a common experience.”

Available Images:

Images of the murals are available for download at: http://uofi.box.com/murals.  A 3D scan of the room can be viewed at: http://go.fs.illinois.edu/mural3D.  A panoramic image is at: http://go.fs.illinois.edu/muralpanoramic.