Four Directions "Migration" Totem Murals

North
Our vision is to portray how the north was the beginning for the Monarch and the African Americans. In most cases, the north represents new opportunities not available for them in the south.

There is a yearly one-week-long cultural festival, the Festival Cultural de la Mariposa Monarca, at the end of February / beginning of March.

EAST
The monarch butterfly travels through the northeast to find direction and freedom. Likewise, African Americans traveled to the northeast to find a sense of life and liberty. So we would like to incorporate the adaptations and migration of both to show a comparison.

Artist Moises Salazar

West

Monarch butterflies fly along the Pacific west coast to Canada. But our focus will be the Monarch butterfly tribe that leaves Canada, Northeast, through Chicago migrating southwest, to Mexico where there is a yearly one-week long cultural festival, the Festival Cultural de la Mariposa Monarca, that takes place at the end of February / beginning of March. The celebration attracts many monarch butterflies tourists.

Lou Armstrong, musician

47th Street "Black Metropolis."

Segregation imposed severe economic and social costs and allowed the northern "Black metropolises" to develop an important infrastructure of newspapers, businesses, jazz clubs, churches, and political organizations that provided the staging ground for new forms of racial politics new forms of black culture.

Ida B. Wells

Our images represent how the monarch butterflies unite and travel together to a better environment. This relates to how African Americans traveled to Bronzeville because this was a better environment for them to prosper in.

Gwendolyn Brooks

We learned that the Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that lasted between the 1910s and the early 1960s.

The installation was completed for the Bud Billiken Parade thousands of parade-goers saw the mural project. The and Picnic (also known as The Bud Billiken Day Parade) is an annual parade in Chicago, Illinois, and the oldest and most prominent African American parade in the United States. Since 1929, it has always been held on the second Saturday in August. 

The idea for the parade came from Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender. It is now the second-largest annual parade in the United States. The focus of the parade is on the betterment of Chicago youth. The parade features celebrities, politicians, businessmen, civic organizations, and youth. It occurs in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago's south side and concludes in Washington Park.