Fellow & Others, a collaborative mural
by Olivia Gude and Juan Angel Chávez and community members 1997

Sponsored by Chicago Public Art Group, Chicago Youth Center Fellowship House, and Gallery 37.

Enlivening the entire façade of Fellowship House, a Chicago Youth Center in the neighborhood of Bridgeport, this mural addresses issues of racism and explores the question of how people decide whom they consider an “other” and whom they consider a “fellow.”

In the mural tradition, there are many works about the bridging of difference; this mural is about the creation of difference. If differences are social constructions then racism itself is a social construction, which has taken and continues to take, a great deal of human effort to construct and maintain. One way to make change is to see how racism is constructed and to withdraw our human energies as far as possible from the social energies that create it.

Toward the left side of the mural one finds the “Culture Machine,” made up of objects that disperse information (such as televisions, books, encyclopedias, trademarks, surveillance cameras) and parts of the machinery of industrial production (conveyor belts, cranes, presses). The current Culture Machine produces blocks of racial stereotypes and stores them for future use in “ appropriate” situations. Adults, teens, and children from the Fellowship House community designed the racial stereotype blocks.

The Stereotype Blocks are carried along a conveyor belt and inserted into a projection machine (a human head). Now instead seeing with its own eyes, the head merely projects the images it has been programmed with onto the outlines of people. It is now predetermined if you are a “friendly fellow” or a “threatening other.”