DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE

1989
JANET BRAUN-REINITZ, CATHARINA COSIN (project director), NOAH JEMISIN, CAMILLE PERROTTET, FRANCESCO SANTINELLI, PAMELA SHOEMAKER

Third Avenue at 33rd Street, Brooklyn, NY
16’ x 100’, acrylic on brick
with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving)

Photos © Camille Perrottet

Established in 1980, MADD – Mothers Against Drunk Driving – has had, from its beginning, one basic goal: to permanently end impaired driving and resulting casualties. Members of Artmakers and MADD met by chance at a party, the conversation leading MADD to express its desire to sponsor mural highly visible to passing traffic. It took Catharina 15 months to find a suitable wall, get permission, raise funds and coordinate the mural’s design, forging the artists’ many ideas into a coherent whole. 

Horrific images associated with drunk driving and its resulting mayhem inspired the muralists to adopt the aesthetic style of Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist – a style not associated with any of them. However, the muralists knew that the immediacy and directness of a clean, comic book line would unerringly deliver the wall’s warning message.

The thousands of motorists who drove by each day could hardly miss seeing the mural located below the elevated Gowanus Expressway. A bright yellow car violently crashes into a lively bar scene, part of a “film strip” that stretches across the entire factory wall and painted in monochromatic tones of gray. Broken bodies flying through the air, mangled car parts, and a ten-foot tall image of a weeping mother are rendered in brilliant, flat, unavoidable color.