The Muralist
In Andy Shallal's Progressive Palette, Every Shade but Gray

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006

An extreme makeover is taking place in one of those ubiquitous stultifying meeting spaces where Washington policy intellectuals scheme and dream beneath low-slung acoustical tiles. Artist Andy Shallal is using the dull walls of a think-tank conference room four blocks north of the White House as his canvas.

Here, art is contending with history. A political mural is in progress. Listen:

The lip-smack of rolled-on paint, the hiss of sprayed-on glue: adding faces, inserting words about deeds and ideas.

Rrrriiiip!

This is the sound of refining. Omitting.

A notorious mug from history -- Chile's Augusto Pinochet -- looms too large for the tastes of the artist who pasted it there. So he peels up an edge of the portrait, and with a jerk of his right arm -- Rrrriiiip! -- the dictator is diminished. Just enough is left for you to tell that Pinochet, clad in junta hat and uniform, is weeping into a big handkerchief, as though he were sorry for his crimes.

Next, Shallal tears a hunk out of the enlarged cover of a collection by poet E. Ethelbert Miller, called "Where are the love poems for dictators?"

He paints and sandpapers over part of the funeral march for two of Pinochet's victims -- human rights activists Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, blown up in a car on Embassy Row in 1976.

There is method to the seeming casual defacement of images Shallal mounted in the first place. What history gives, the artist takes away -- alters, pares, even ignores. Those who have seen the vast civil rights collage-style mural Shallal did at his buzzy restaurant/performance space/activist watering hole -- Busboys and Poets at 14th and V streets NW -- will recognize the look.

"History is not what you put in," Shallal says. "What we're omitting tells a lot more about who we are and what we are doing than what we put in."

The "we" in this case is the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank that has analyzed and agitated against war and corporate power, and for the environment and human rights, since it was founded 43 years ago by former members of the Kennedy administration.

The mural -- several hundred square feet wrapped around a 50-seat square room -- tells the story of the institute and the movements it has been part of. Inevitably, the collage proposes a history of the past four decades in the United States and certain global hot spots. It is an alternative history, although one getting more attention of late, as the missteps in places such as Iraq and New Orleans cause more people to question authority.

Left in: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights pantheon. Benjamin Spock and the Vietnam resisters. The late Paul Wellstone, the Senate's lonely progressive. The Teamsters and turtle-costumed protesters marching against corporate globalization. People forming a peace sign in the snow of Antarctica.

Omitted: Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and any Democratic president, for that matter. The rise of Christian activism (as distinguished from the legacy of preachers such as King). The fall of taxes. The extended victory dance of the world's only superpower.

Layer upon layer, with charcoal, paint, grease pen, newsprint and photocopied photographs, the collage evolves in the institute's new digs on the sixth floor of an old art deco pile on 16th Street. The colors are black and white and haycorn-brown house paint. The public will be able to see it during lectures and symposiums.

Here's a line of verse from Pablo Neruda ("They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the coming of spring"); a painted fist punching through a Vietnam-era institute manifesto ("A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority"); the word "peace" scrawled in dozens of languages over news photos of demonstrators; a jigsaw deconstruction of the institute's analysis of the costs of the Iraq war. There's a torn page from a September 2001 bulletin drafted by institute scholars and allies, including Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, titled "Justice Not Vengeance," with the paint-smudged line "We foresee that a military response would not end the terror."

Other think tanks in town remember things differently. They show off other American histories -- though without the avant-garde verve of their more liberal friends.

In the lobby of the libertarian Cato Institute, two documents are reverently displayed: an original engraving of the Declaration of Independence and a first edition of Adam Smith's "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." Outside the conference room -- named for F.A. Hayek, a giant of free-market political thought -- is a signed first edition of Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," and a wall is devoted to more heroes, from John Locke and Thomas Paine to Henry David Thoreau, H.L. Mencken and Ayn Rand.

On your way to the conference center of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, you face a large portrait called "The Four Statesmen." Selected in part because their associations with the institute, these guys are: Gerald Ford, former British prime minister James Callaghan, former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

At the conservative Heritage Foundation, there's a wall-sized reproduction of the painting of the Founding Fathers signing the Constitution. In the downstairs auditorium, panelists are flanked by paintings of the Liberty Bell and the U.S. Capitol.

The Brookings Institution never settled on any revelatory public imagery. It is decorated with abstract art.

Journalist I.F. Stone once said these other, better-funded think tanks are for corporations and the government, while the Institute for Policy Studies is "for the rest of us."

"The movements that the IPS has worked closely with have changed this country for the better," says John Cavanagh, director of the institute.

Cavanagh has been an easygoing pope to Shallal's Michelangelo toiling over a political creation story in this think-tank Sistine Chapel. Cavanagh, IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin and fellow scholars suggested imagery, but gave the artist freedom. They even held their tongues as the artist's search for ever more pared-down expression led him to rip out, paint over, or simply omit bits they liked.

That's a key lesson of this process of turning history into art: Different think tanks may have their own ways of seeing history, but even when a think tank tries to tell its own history, everything can't fit. Some images, words, deeds must be left out, shaped, ripped.

But then, again, everybody edits. That's part of storytelling. (Shall we say more about the art here? The artist?)

Shallal, 51, is one of Washington's Renaissance men. He was born in Iraq. His family moved to Washington in the mid-1960s. He took some art classes but graduated from Catholic University with a science degree. He left a federal research job in medical immunology to open restaurants. Besides Busboys, he owns Mimi's American Bistro and the Luna Grill near Dupont Circle. Another Busboys is coming to Arlington. He's a peace activist who visited Cindy Sheehan's protest camp last summer outside President Bush's ranch.

He's also on the board of the institute, for which he's creating this mural free of charge.

Work began last month in a Kinko's. Enlargements of photos, posters and documents are the building blocks of his collages. He likes crowd scenes, people marching, so his mural "for the rest of us" will be populated with faces history would have forgotten.

"Heroes are fine and good," Shallal says, "but I think it's important showing: Here are masses of people standing behind them."

Some things don't work. He can't fit in a photo of Henry Kissinger shaking hands with Letelier, a Chilean diplomat, even though the image is an institute favorite because of its bitter irony: The administration Kissinger worked for was no friend of Letelier's boss, leftist Salvadore Allende, overthrown by Pinochet. The Letelier-Moffitt tragedy is integral to institute history because they worked there at the time of their murders.

Finally, Shallal writes words in his own hand, a scrim of white graffiti over the collage, speaking of missions and achievements. Unlike the institute scholars, Shallal values the words as much for their visual, physical presence as for their meaning.

He writes "The Second Superpower" in big letters across scenes of international peace demonstrations. The notion is that there may still be two superpowers -- the second one being world public opinion. This sums up the institute's theory of the power of social movements, and its very reason for being.

The institute's scholars recently toasted the artist with champagne at the "opening" of the mural, now called "Ideas Into Action." But Shallal is still adding touches. This could go on for a while: He has refused to sign the civil rights mural at Busboys, saying such a final gesture would preclude him from making slight revisions, which he does with some regularity.

"The hardest thing about something like this is finishing it," Shallal says.

History marches on, new material for more art. But the institute has a lease on its office space. This vision of history will survive at least five years.