Things Fall Apart

2004
JANET BRAUN-REINITZ, designer/lead artist
Artists: Jane Weissman, Tim Drescher, Laura Reinitz, Rachel Reinitz

Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, CA
7’ x 24’, acrylic on wood slats

Photos © Janet Braun-Reinitz, Tim Drescher

Things Fall Apart is a mural about AIDS in Africa, its title inspired by lines from W.B. Yeats’ poem Second Coming: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was equally inspired by Yeats’ poem, giving his 1958 novel the title Things Fall Apart.

The large heads at each end of the mural represent people of East, West and South Africa. Except for the isolated child, the remaining figures take the form of traditional dolls made by the Ewe people of Togo to honor people who have died. The left side of the central section portrays the burial of a man and woman, victims of the AIDS epidemic. The community mourns as the casket is lowered. To the right, the child, an orphan, has inadvertently wandered onto a heap of unburied bodies of other victims. Bugs, symbolizing the virus, crawl over them.

Early in 1985, Artmakers founder Eva Cockcroft visited Balmy Alley where over three dozen artists – known as PLACA and organized by Ray Patlán – had, over the past year, painted 27 murals. Transforming fences and garage doors into a gallery of potent images, the murals celebrated Mesoamerican indigenous culture and opposed U.S. involvement in Central American wars and the attendant political abuses and human rights violations. The PLACA murals not only left their mark – a placa in Spanish – on the community; they also inspired Eva to create something similar in New York City, the result La Lucha Continua The Struggle Continues in Loisaida’s La Plaza Cultural Community Garden.