When you walk by Dominic Chambers’ colorful new mural in Midtown, the St. Louis-born artist wants you to think about how to practice leisure and “seek out a life that’s filled with color.”
The mural, painted on one wall of Saint Louis University’s Searls Hall, depicts an outdoor landscape with a massive tree branch hanging over as children and adults fly kites, run, gaze at the sky and rest.
“It’s an invitation to allow those types of experiences back into one’s life,” Chambers said about his mural titled ‘For You: All the Color in the World.’ “[Find] things that fill your life up in the face of a force that seeks to oppress or subjugate your life.”
Chambers’ mural was commissioned by the Kranzberg Arts Foundation in partnership with SLU and the St. Louis Literary Award program. His color-drenched painting explores the legacy of the Underground Railroad and its significance in the St. Louis region. Chambers said he found inspiration in “The Underground Railroad,” written by acclaimed author Colson Whitehead, who will receive the St. Louis Literary Award on April 9.
At a public panel discussion about the connections between art, literature and history at SLU’s Pius XII Memorial Library on April 7, Chambers said the mural is an imaginative interpretation of Whitehead’s book that weaves together themes of magical realism, memory and freedom. It also honors the protagonist, Cora, and her courage to seek liberation by escaping the plantation where she is enslaved.
“It’s meant to be a landscape that celebrates the interior reality of Black subjects, anyone who traverses undesirable circumstances in the hopes of bettering their lives,” Chambers said. “And so that’s what this particular image is meant to, in many ways, embody and represent.”
Chambers’ work is part of The Walls Off Washington series and is the second mural to come from a years-long partnership between SLU and the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, said Visual and Performing Arts Department Chair Cathleen Fleck. The first mural “Endangered Enwildment” was painted by artist Lady Pink on Searls Hall’s east facing brick wall in 2023.
Fleck, who also serves on the university’s newly formed arts council, said SLU should continue promoting arts and creating opportunities for meaningful reflection in the St. Louis community.
“I don’t think that we should be existing as an island unto ourselves within a broader urban network,” Fleck said. “I really think that our role, especially as a Jesuit university, is to speak to the social issues that are around us, and the arts are one of the most logical ways to work that expression into people’s lives.”
As a writer and artist concerned with depictions of Black life, Chambers said his creative work allows him to be a “different type of citizen” who is more engaged with the community around him. That is the type of ethos that he calls on university students to practice in their own studies.
“If you’re the type of person [who] comes to an institution to receive a degree and then leave, then you are in service of this institution,” Chambers said. “But what type of citizen would you want to be? Do you want to be a citizen that participates with the community they live in, who has an active relationship to the things that are happening around them, irrespective of their institution?”
During her talk on the panel with Chambers, Dorris Keeven-Franke, an expert on Missouri’s Underground Railroad history, said art, history and literature are important partners in telling stories about the nation’s history.
Keeven-Franke is working on a book about Archer Alexander, Missouri’s last fugitive slave who is honored on the nation’s Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. and is listed on the National Underground Railroad Network for Freedom.
The program, administered by the National Parks Service, is tasked with preserving and promoting the history of resistance to enslavement, but an executive order issued last month by President Donald Trump has forced the agency to eliminate or soften language about slavery and the Underground Railroad, according to the Washington Post.
“I hope that all of you will take the time to connect with the objects, the history, the literature and the art that bring our history to life,” Keeven-Franke said to an audience of around 40 people. “And as you create and write, I challenge you to consider how your own work may stand the test of time and be perceived 150 years from today.”
This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Cathleen Fleck.
