When I think of the importance of community art, my mind automatically thinks of ethnic mural paintings in the various boroughs, or a specific sculpture that everyone in the neighborhood walks by and makes apart of their day. Living in a semi-suburban neighborhood though, being primarily residential, our community artwork is relatively little. So instead, I’ll talk about a work of art important in the Philippines: the jeepney.
Jeepney’s are converted vans that are the U.S. equivalent to buses. The difference is though, that each bus is painted differently with striking colors that make each bus discernible. In the U.S., they would be beautiful pieces of junk, some fit to be museums, but most a distracting eyesore. To Filipinos though, the jeepney is the main way the community comes together to make art. Your eyes follow across the surface of the bus, and each mark painted has a story. You find everything painted, from graffiti, to names of lovers, religious icons, national icons, maps, or even wishes and aspirations. The point is get noticed. You want someone walking past the jeepney to look at what you painted. Painting on a jeepney may sometimes be the only time in a Filipino’s life that he or she can stand out, and having their ten seconds of fame.
Each jeepney is decorated in ways so different that when studying them, I can often identify with only a few. Since everyone’s individual artistic spirit has a chance to shine, you would think that the jeepney would not be beautiful and the individual decorations would not work together as a cohesive unit. The beauty of this art though, is that somehow, someway, through all the differences between the people actually decorating the bus, something unified is the end product. How can this be? This is symbolic of Filipino resolve. Filipinos are very perseverant and have a fiery passion to them, as indicated by their overthrowing of Spanish colonialism in the late 19th century. The jeepney, is a representation of a mix of two cultures, the traditional Spanish and the modern filipino. Both make the jeepney part of the Filipino national identity.
The jeepney is the provincial mode of transportation that the majority of people take when the cannot walk from point A to B, generally due to age or terrain. This artwork has an important function; it is the mecca of gossip, the national pastime of the Filipino. Talk about a feeling of shared connectedness, imagine riding with the same people everyday and not just staring blankly at them, like on the NYC subway, but actually conversing. The jeepney is where friends meet relatives, relatives meet acquaintances, and acquaintances meet friends. And they are all civil. Represented here, is the ability of Filipinos not only to be civil, but to start up a conversation with a stranger, and develop long lasting relationships that future benefit the community.
