This city never ceases to surprise. Spotted recently on a recent sojourn along Broadway Road (but blink and you’ll miss it) - at Arizona Machine & Fabrication Inc., 1410 E. Broadway Road to be exact - a very nice mural in the Social Realist style by Randall Hedden.

Social Realism was partly a reaction to Abstract and Expressionist painting, which were viewed as bourgeois by SR artists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. They preferred figural representations of everyday life, often depicting the issues and social concerns of ordinary working people, which they felt were more appropriate given the desperate economic and social conditions of the times (1930’s). They also had a pretty strong Socialist agenda to express, which makes it all the wierder finding this ‘homage’ to that style on the side of an industrial facility here in good ol’ Phoenix.

For many artists, mural painting was also a reaction against the decadence of art displayed in galleries and private homes, which seemed gratuitous in an era of extreme poverty. Their work was often executed in places for public consumption, so avoiding the commodification usually associated with the art world elite: you can’t exactly buy these works and hang them on your wall.

	You can click these thumbnails of two key Rivera murals to view larger versions and check out the social, political and historical commentary on display, but I recommend listening to Captain Beefheart - Hard Workin’ Man, from the Blue Collar movie soundtrack as you do so:

His 1933 mural for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan featured a portrait of Lenin, and the resulting uproar led to his dismissal and to the mural’s official destruction in 1934. Some of the artists that worked with Rivera on these pieces, such as Clifford Wright, also painted some of the Rivera-inspired murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, which thankfully have not been destroyed:

Randall Hedden, for his part, is a self-taught artist who started in 1972 primarily working in portraiture and illustrations. He later moved on to murals, and many can apparently be seen on the exterior of large buildings in the midwest, particularly one of Red Skelton in Skelton’s home town of Vincennes, Indiana.

He currently has his own gallery in Scottsdale, the Heddenart Gallery, featuring traditional and contemporary Figurative paintings, sculpture and photography.