PUSH CRACK BACK

1986
KEITH CHRISTENSEN, EVA COCKCROFT (designer/lead artist), CLIFF JOSEPH, SARAH KLEEMAN MECKLEM, CAMILLE PERROTTET, A. G. JOE STEPHENSON

West 142nd Street & Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan, NY
approx. 15’ x 40’, acrylic on brick

Photos © Eva Cockcroft 

Over Labor Day weekend, six Artmakers muralists, their friends, and several local volunteers painted Push Crack Back on the building directly across from the community garden where Eva Cockcroft had recently finished painting Homage to Seurat: La Grande Jatte in Harlem. 

While she painted, gardeners and local residents stopped by to chat. Praising her work, they also signaled their distress about the destructive effect of crack on neighborhood youth. Immediately outside the garden, the street functioned as a drug supermarket, with vendors openly selling crack, marijuana, and other drugs.

Push Crack Back was Artmakers’ gift to the neighborhood, the mural a public expression of community consensus. It also functioned as a rallying cry: "We have to get together and remove the violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community." These words, painted to the right of the large portrait of Malcolm X come from his 1964 speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet." 

Note the giant, seven-foot hands pushing against the graffiti-covered drug train. (Both images were designed by Cliff Joseph, and provided by Keith Christensen.) They are filled with people crowded together and seen from the rear, their heads almost masked by raised shoulders from which their extended arms morph into straining fingers.