Mural Art and the Psychology of Expression
Interdisciplinary course teaches students that mural art found in today’s cities ties back to cave art as one of the most ancient forms of community building.
With family roots in the city of Camden, including a beloved grandfather who was born on Chestnut Street and went on to work as a box designer for RCA Victor, Associate Professor of Psychology Sean Duffy grew up in the Fox Chase neighborhood of northeast Philadelphia. As a result of his ancestry and geography, Duffy has an abiding affection for these two cities that straddle the banks of the Delaware River.
This semester, in support of Rutgers University–Camden’s Year of the Arts, Duffy is teaching a course in which students gain an understanding of the psychology of Camden and Philadelphia through the common ground of mural art—and other forms of street art—revealing how these forms of expression shape lives and communities.
Duffy spoke with Rutgers–Camden News about the course and the relationship between art and community:
Rutgers–Camden: What inspired you to draw a line tracing the psychology of early human kinship groups to the mostly unrelated humans today living in vast, built cities? Are there more similarities than differences?
Duffy: That is a great question! To what extent are we like our ancestors? Early humans engaged in art; think about the cave art from 30,000 years ago in Chauvet, France, discovered in the 1990s. This is really the first evidence we have of humans recording aspects of the environments they live in.
On cave walls, early humans painted features of their lives—bison, families, hunts—things that were important to the group. This cave sat untouched for 7,000 years until another group of humans painted over or next to the original artwork.
Think about that—some early humans painted on a wall in 30,000 BC, and then in 22,000 BC, another group found the same cave and painted their own work nearby. That difference in time is almost twice as long as the difference between now and the building of the pyramids! So here we are, humans today and humans 30,000 years ago—the one thing we have in common is that we found walls and painted them.
There is so little else we know about what connects us culturally to those ancient humans than our interest in art. And this got me interested in this question: Why today, as we live in Camden or in Philly, do we pretty much do the same thing they did? We paint representations of important things on the walls of nearby structures. Such communality speaks to who we are and what we do.
Rutgers–Camden: What role does art either on the walls of caves or modern buildings play in creating communities and keeping them together?
Duffy: For better or worse, we tend to place things we think are significant on murals. I live in Philadelphia’s Italian Market, and for a year, the image of former mayor Frank Rizzo adorned a prominent wall by 9th and Montrose Streets. But ideas and times change. That mural was painted over in 2020. It was determined to be the right time to cover or obscure historical figures who were seen as out of step with the prevailing views of the day.
Rutgers–Camden: How are your students responding to the course? Will they come away with a better understanding of how to adapt to new, challenging environments? The syllabus has lots of field trips, and students can join you for an extension of this course in Paris this summer.
Duffy: Apart from looking at street art and visiting museums, students will attend the Italian Market Festival or the Arts Festival in Rittenhouse Square. I structure the course so students get out into the world. In my current class, most of them have been to Philly. This is great because I have had classes where I would ask a group of 30 students, “How many of you have been to Philly?” And only five would raise their hands.
Paris has a great street art tradition, so I look forward to exploring that with students this summer. The 13th arrondissement of Paris has recently become a hotspot for street artists and is now known as an open-air museum.
Rutgers–Camden: Talk about the social neuroscience of “third spaces,” which are described as the meeting of borders that mark differing cultures and contexts. Do murals form “third space” boundaries? Notably, the Common Threads mural on North Broad Street forms a third space because it blends historical figures from the past with contemporary youth.
Duffy: Neuroscience is a complicated game. I could have students in an fMRI experiment where we measure blood oxygen levels when exposing them to images or videos of urban areas or rural areas. That kind of work is so correlational that it is hard to come up with conclusions. My take is this: At one time, there were a bunch of psychologists who felt that exposure to and contact with nature was something unique and related to the fact that we evolved from a natural environment. However, I also think we built cathedrals and cities because they shield us from the negative parts of nature.
Psychologists talk about how nature is always beneficial to human well-being. They forget about things like transmittable diseases, but beyond that, it is relatively safe to have a picnic in a place like Cooper Park because that is a type of controlled nature.
My point is that when psychologists say, “Nature is good for people,” they think of a very controlled kind of nature. But actual nature—like what you might experience in Zimbabwe or Australia—can be very dangerous—seven of the 10 most venomous snakes in the world are in the Australian outback. To say that humans being in contact with nature is universally good ignores that uncontrolled nature is risky, whether in the form of predators, snakes, or insects. I think nature is great, but psychologists need to identify better what kind of nature, including what is happening in the built environment, is good for human well-being.
In this course, I teach my students how to navigate the natural and built world with curiosity and a measure of common sense. By looking at murals and street art, we see expressions of community identity and pay attention to the boundaries of communities. Perhaps my students will be inspired to engage in the larger community-building experience.
