(From left) John Malinoski, Ashley Kistler and Rob Carter atop the Hope Wall
If you happen by the corner of Shields and Grove avenues during mid-afternoon today, Jan. 17, the people you will see installing art on the wall there aren’t graffiti or mural artists. This is the Hope Wall, which for more than a year has featured a rotating collection of posters from artists around the world that address the theme of hope for social and racial equality.
Richmond is a city of murals that are often vibrant and illustrative — but static. Ashley Kistler, whose wall it is, serves on Richmond’s Public Art Commission. Over her career she has been a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University’s former Anderson Gallery.
“The idea was born about a year and a half ago,” she explains, “during a studio visit with [graphic designer] John Malinoski."
Kistler saw a poster of Malinoski’s with the word “Hope” in the design of “wonderful, playful characters.” The piece came from a commission that didn’t materialize. She offered her wall as an alternative site to display the poster.
“John and Rob Carter are both poster and wheat-paste people, among many other things, and this is an aspect of their design practice,” Kistler observes. “As events in and outside Richmond unfolded, I thought this would be a way to demonstrate some form of belief in the future. I give credit to Rob for the more expanded vision.”
The Hope Wall is an ever-changing commentary with the participation of many voices. Among them is an international array of designers and artists along with a strong Richmond contingent. Young designers are represented in addition to well-established professionals. They include Jean-Benoit Levy, David Carson and Chicago-based artist Joseph Michael Essex, a 1970 graduate of Richmond Professional Institute (VCU’s precursor).
This method of capturing ideas or presenting images has a long history, similar to Morris columns covered in advertisements that can be seen in the plazas of European cities. In Holland, there is the “muurkrant,” literally, “wall [of] news.”
“John and I have been involved with wheat pasting posters since our VCU days together,” Carter says. “We were office mates, have like philosophies. We’ve always been advocates for posting up public messages. They’re immediate communication. And you are right, this is a mural city. We looked at this as an opportunity to expand that with more transformative language.”
They started wheat pasting years ago through a VCU faculty and student exchange program with the renowned Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Carter recalls, “We got involved in wheat pasting posters on brick walls outside of the Pollak Building and got in trouble with VCU cultural police for posting without permission.”
Kistler thinks of the wall not as a gallery, but as a form of canvas. “It’s important to us, too, the whole history of the wheat-pasted poster plays into this sense which is open-ended and fosters a little different dialogue,” she says.
The project is do-it-yourself and inexpensive. Malinoski cooks the wheat paste in his kitchen. The poster ideas are sent to the Hope Wall team by artists and former students via JPEG or PDF. The posters are printed for about $11 each.
Before the commodification and homogenization of nearly everything, poster art provided lively and often provocative commentary and was a source of information. Carter points to the history of theatrical and political posters in Poland. John Heartfield’s anti-war posters and photo montages (mashups, we might say today) on the walls of Berlin protested the rise of Nazism. They’re proto-memes.
“They were often putting those up in the dark of night for fear of reprisal,” Carter says. “Not the way we do it here. We do it in broad daylight.” Wheat pasting is a way to convey information visual and verbal. Once they’re put up, the posters have a life expectancy of a few days or a couple weeks. “The whole wall is a layered substrate of visual ideas.”
Malinoski says they had to strip the wall bare during 2020’s unusually warm and wet autumn. “We didn’t really have the glue amount right,” he says, “so we started to have a double problem,” in that through the process of clearing the wall for new work, the previous pieces came to light. “That created a wonderful juxtaposition of imagery.”
One of the intriguing components of the project is how the posters manage to jibe. “Some speak louder than others,” Malinoski says. “Once they get on the wall — and this happens every time with the series — they all relate well to each other.”
By the projected end of the run, around August, some 150 posters will have gone up, and gotten covered over. The work is being documented by the husband-and-wife team of Brian and Erin Hollaway Palmer.
“The plan is to create a book out of the project at summer’s end,” Kistler says, adding, “Rob and John are book designers, so we couldn’t conclude this without a book.”
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