LA LUCHA CONTINUA: HOMAGE TO EVA
2002 / restored 2008
2002:
JANET BRAUN-REINITZ, designer/lead artist
JANE WEISSMAN, project coordinator/artist
Artists: Rikki Asher, Karin Batten, Wong Dowling, Noah Jemisin, Nina Lasky, Camille Perrottet, Amy Sananman, Sondra Santoni, Tova Snyder, Rochelle Shicoff, Nina Talbot
2008:
Artists: Batten, Braun-Reinitz, Lasky, Santoni, Talbot, and Joseph Demers, Lady Pink, Sophie Rand, Kristin Reed, Marilyn Rogers, Joey Slay, José Weiss
37 Avenue B at East 3rd Street, Loisaida, Manhattan, NY
2 walls: 9’ x 10’, 9’ x 22’, acrylic on brick
with Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union, Groundswell Community Mural Project
Photo © Margarita Talbot
In 1999, Artmakers founder Eva Cockcroft lost her battle against breast cancer, and over a September weekend, seven of the original La Lucha Continua The Struggle Continues muralists, joined by more than 20 additional artists and volunteers, gathered to paint a mural celebrating her life.
Courtesy of Groundswell Community Mural Project
In the grand Artmakers tradition, they donated talent, time and supplies. Located just six short blocks from the original La Lucha mural park, La Lucha Continua: Homage to Eva memorializes Cockcroft kneeling on a scaffold and drawing the two heads that originally appeared in the crystal ball of La Lucha’s collective mural.
In 2008, many of the original artists restored the mural after rival gangs covered the central globe and beyond in competing tags. This was learned from a volunteer painter from the neighborhood who knew the gangs. After he told them about Eva and La Lucha, the mural has remained graffiti-free.
Generous, impassioned, talented and funny, Eva was a first-rate organizer, a community artist who built bridges everywhere among all kinds of people. In 2017, The Loisaida Center posthumously recognized Eva with its highest honor, The Viva Loisaida Award “for dedication, love, artistry, and service to the people of the Lower East Side.”
La Lucha Continua: Homage to Eva references themes and images found in La Lucha as well as her studio work. Her paintings and drawings, regularly exhibited in individual and group shows, are powerful expressions of socially conscious figurative art. In 1985, she wrote: “Painted images cannot stop wars or win the struggle for justice, but they are not irrelevant. They fortify and enrich the spirit of those who are committed to the struggle and help to educate those who are unaware.”
During her final illness, Eva produced artwork about breast cancer to raise public awareness of this disease. A prolific writer as well as an artist, she co-authored Towards A People's Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement, originally published in 1984 and reissued in 1998 and, in 1993, co-edited Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals. Her articles, which appeared in such leading art journals as Artforum and Art in America, are widely recognized as seminal contributions to mid-to late-20th century art criticism. Eva also taught art history and studio art at NYU, California State University Long Beach, UCLA, and University of California Irvine.
Born in Vienna, Austria, Eva came to the United States as an infant with her physician parents seeking refuge from Nazi tyranny. A graduate of Cornell and Rutgers Universities, Eva earned a reputation as a prominent visual artist during the activist era of the late 1960's. Her large-scale murals in New York, Germany, Nicaragua and, later, in California, reflect her lifelong commitment to human rights. Her last mural, Homage to Siqueiros, was a reconstruction in Los Angeles of David Alfaro Siqueiros' lost mural America Tropical, whitewashed in 1938.