A major mural in Pilsen gets a few more years in the sun | Art Feature | Chicago Reader


Prevent World War III, an 18th Street artwork that dates to the early 1980s, gets a new life thanks to a generous endowment.

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click to enlarge Prevent World War III

Prevent World War III

April Alonso


Fallen Dictator is a familiar sight to northbound travelers on Western Avenue. It's part of a larger multipanel political mural called Prevent World War III, which was created guerrilla style in the summer of 1980 by ten prominent midwestern muralists. They painted it in response to Ronald Reagan's prospective election, and with it, the looming threat of nuclear war and other global and environmental disasters.

The mural was prescient. Raya, 68, recalled that just after he completed Fallen Dictator in September 1980, former U.S.-backed Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle—who'd been overthrown by Sandinista rebels a year earlier—was assassinated in Paraguay. "And now look at what's happening this moment, with democracy threatened in South American countries," Raya said. "That's why this mural is so today."


A survivor from the era of the grassroots People's Art movement, Prevent World War III is one of a number of community murals in Chicago that have remained relevant long after much of their imagery has faded. It was the result of a spontaneous call to collective action. Muralist John Weber invited a number of his artist comrades to paint on the Burlington Northern (now BNSF) railroad embankment wall after Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination. Muralists from Pilsen, the rest of the city, and Wisconsin—including Carlos Cortez, José Guerrero, and Caryl Yasko—heeded the call. The crew didn't seek the rail company's permission. Weber directed the effort, while Mark Rogovin—who'd soon after cofound the Peace Museum—contributed the filmstrip design, a reference to Reagan's acting career.

The mural's successive panels unspool like scenes from a bad disaster movie. As part of the anti-nuke, anti-Reagan theme, artists addressed such issues as political corruption, perpetual warfare, industrial pollution, corporate greed, capitalism, and populist uprise. "I always find it exciting to come back and do this," Raya said. "I've been criticizing how murals went more mainstream. You lose a lot of freedom to be political."

That hasn't been an issue for Raya. He's a key player in the Chicano mural movement who painted many of Pilsen's iconic walls in the 1970s and '80s—the Casa Aztlán exterior at 1831 S. Racine is a surviving example—and has long been an internationally exhibiting artist. In recent years he's become better known for his surrealist paintings and installations than for his work on the streets. Yet revisiting Prevent World War III has rekindled his activism. "More than any other time in the United States," he said, "there should be a cultural resistance against what's happening in the world today."


Mudrovich, Raya's girlfriend and an artist who'd never worked on a mural before, noted that many of the street-art and spray-can pieces she sees in Pilsen "don't make you think."

"You have a responsibility for it to mean something," she said, "to reflect the views of the people—for it to mean something more than just decorating a wall."

Raya agreed. "A lot of people, young and old, came by and said, 'These are the kinds of murals we need these days.' "  v


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