Art 0109 Mural Design in University of Pittsburgh at Bradford Spring 2011

Parallel with this the course offers cycle of lectures with the theme: Mural Painting in Contemporary Culture. This course provides American students with an introduction to the place and significance of murals in a globalizing world culture. Some new elements in the development of compositional thinking in contemporary art, the problems, themes and spiritual contents, which excite humanity and the ways they find a visual manifestation in murals are reviewed. Attention is paid to some new forms in mural art and its synthesis with architecture and the living environment, the problems of collective creativity and their solution in the creation and implementation of international artistic projects, the specificities of creative behavior and reaction in the situation of cultural integration are analyzed.


The content and its forms of manifestation in contemporary mural painting are subject of analysis and practical work. As part of world's contemporary culture, mural painting is in the process of globalization, which raises two major problems for the future of this millennial art: the first relates to the overall change in the value criterion – mural painting is offered a choice between durability and transience in a situation of continual change of values along with the change in the classic expressive and technical means, to make it competitive in relation to the all-consuming design and advertising; the second problem is the need for each culture to choose or balance between the national and the universal.


The themes of the lectures in this course are: new dynamic compositions; single-diagonal composition; triangular composition; new tradition – murals in public architecture: new “historicity” and political murals; murals in private/residential architecture. Тrompe l'oeil; mural pluralism – stylistic and thematic diversity, advertising murals, mobile murals, new synthesis; street art (post-graffiti); international projects – Agenda 21, Mural Global World Mural Campaign of Farbfieber and UNESCO, and collective interactive and other international mural projects – Mural by Mail, Martenitza para Mexico. All lectures are illustrated with numerous examples from the history of contemporary mural painting.