By the Chilltown Blues
Jersey City has a mural program, but this piece is not a commentary on any of the murals in it. What it is, is a commentary on a mural not on that program’s map. Chilltown Blues doesn’t know its creator (though of course we tried to find out and, regardless, give all due deference to them), but between writing about it in this particular commentary-based way and hiding all but a portion of it, we don’t need to; and some of the unknowns, of it being “off-map,” is part of the point.
A thing the JC’s mural program’s website says of the work under its umbrella is that they (or at least a portion of them, one would surmise) tell Jersey City’s stories.
There’s a lot of murals under that umbrella, but none that ever seemed to tell the kind of story this mural does.
On the exterior wall of a garage on the city’s south side, in the historically redlined section known as the Hill, where Bergen Lafayette gives way to Greenville, a mural features a depiction of a streetscape through a pair of glasses. There’s the world as seen through the glasses, and the world outside of it at the edges, along with the words, “We Woke.” There’s flames around the border of the glasses but also in the lens — as if the messages of some signs — a few of which are seen in the above picture that shows a portion of them: “WORSHIP MONEY,” “CONSUME,” “OBEY,” and “VOTE FOR US — are par for the course of this metaphorical fire.