History-filled mural, union hall to be restored to original glory

• ILWU union hall considered classic example of '50s modern architecture

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

It has been called a magnificent art experience. It's considered a priceless international treasure. It tells a story of Hawai'i history and is a little piece of history in itself.

Yet for nearly 50 years, "Solidaridad Sindical," a three-story tall fresco depicting the stormy saga of the state's labor movement, has been more or less hidden in a nondescript building most residents and tourists never notice.

The mural (its title means "union solidarity") by artist Pablo O'Higgins is tucked inside the lobby of O'ahu's International Longshore and Warehouse Union building on Atkinson Drive, diamondhead of Ala Moana Center. Unprotected and wrapped around a heavily used winding staircase, it has has been touched, scuffed, kicked, marked, scratched and cracked. A half century of urban soot and cigarette-break smoke has dimmed its true colors and hid its inspirational value, even to those who walk by it almost daily.

Now the mural and building are getting a $2 million face-lift, the first step in what supporters hope will bring the painting, and the labor story it tells, back into the limelight.

"How many other works of art can you point to that have working people in them, and show conditions the way they really were?" asks Leonard Hoshijo, education director for the Carpenters' Union. "How many other works of art can you go right up to and see your own story being told?"

Hoshijo, who helped the Hawai'i Labor Heritage Council and the ILWU raise money for the restoration, sees the mural as an educational tool that can spread the story of organized labor in the state. When the work is complete, he hopes the mural will be more accessible than ever to schoolchildren, other groups and the wider public interested in getting a first-hand look at the art, and the story it tells.

Rogelio Bernal Fernandez, one of four art conservators from Mexico, cleans the mural at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union building's stairwell using chemicals. There are international standards to follow in such restorations. Gregory Yamamoto• The Honolulu Advertiser

The mural was commissioned in 1952 as the centerpiece for the ILWU hall at a time when the union was coming off some of its biggest victories and profoundly reshaping the whole economic foundation of the Islands.

Hawai'i muralist Jean Charlot was the union's first choice to do the mural, but he apparently declined the commission when asked to include some of the harsher aspects of Hawai'i's labor history in the work. Instead Charlot recommended O'Higgins, an American he had met when the two studied together in the 1920s under Diego Rivera, the father of the Mexican school of realism and still the world's best-known muralist.

O'Higgins spent three months in Hawai'i observing and meeting with union workers from the plantations to the docks, filling sketchbooks with drawings of the Islands' multi-ethnic society.

Done in the true fresco style, in which rich pigments of paint are applied directly to wet plaster as the wall of steel-reinforced concrete is built, the mural doesn't gloss over anything.

It starts in the deep blue ocean and red earth tones of O'ahu land and moves bluntly through the decades. At one point, a plantation manager sneers at Japanese immigrants hoeing weeds, and an overseer punches a Filipino cane cutter while most workers look away in shame or anger. Inside a flimsy plantation shack, a Portuguese-Hawaiian family looks sadly at a pay envelope that is almost empty after deductions owed to the company store.

Closer to the top, however, the mural's color turns a rich green as workers go on strike, carry signs of unity, help one another and eventually win labor contracts. At its unveiling, the mural was denounced by some as communist and un-American.

"I used to stop there on my way to work as a union organizer and gain inspiration," Hoshijo said. "There's a real force, spiritual and intellectual, in the painting."

Restoring the splendor

Much of its force had been dimmed over the years by the wear and tear of union members going about their daily business.

"The building and the mural had really suffered from a lack of maintenance," said Norma Jaso, a Seattle architect helping in the top-to-bottom building renovation project, expected to be finished in 2003. "They both had become rather worn and tired."

In the early 1980s, there was talk that the whole building would be torn down. As far back as 1991, union officials and other began talking about restoring the mural to its original splendor and once again making it a piece of accessible art, Hoshijo said.

With the help of former state Supreme Court Judge Edward Nakamura, the nonprofit Hawai'i Labor Heritage council raised about $500,000 for the first phase of the mural project, work that is under way now. For the last three months, four conservators from Mexico have been working daily to bring back the mural's original appeal.

They're treating the Hawai'i work the same way they'd treat a national treasure in Mexico, where the art of fresco painting reached a peak under Rivera, said conservator Eliseo Majangos.

"There are a lot of technical, material and stylistic differences between Mexican murals and other styles," said Majangos, who once studied mural painting with Rivera before deciding to go into conservation work. "We work very carefully to restore it in the Mexican style."

First, the conservators uncovered parts of the mural that had been hidden away by the addition of a lobby counter and closet in the 1960s. Then they set to work giving the mural a thorough dusting and chemical cleaning, steps which revealed the extent of damage over the years.

"You can see where there are cracks and chips, even places where there are little bits of graffiti," said conservator Rogelio Bernal Fernandez.

Painstaking job

Working inch by inch and often lying in tight spaces on scaffolding, the conservators have to walk a delicate line: International standards require them to make the restored and original parts of the mural blend seamlessly to the passing eye, but not so well that a close inspection can't tell the difference.

"The international rule is that a conservator has to be able to see the differences in materials and colors, but they disappear as you move a little farther away," Fernandez said. To do that, the workers paint painstakingly with spaghetti-thin strokes known as rigattino, a technique invented by Italian conservators.

When the work is finished, new recommendations will be offered to keep the mural fresh, but the biggest step already has been taken, Fernandez said.

"It's an elevator," he said. The newly installed elevator will take much of the daily foot traffic and associated finger touching away from the mural.

However, Hoshijo wants more people to see the mural. Much of the mural's significance is enhanced by its place, he said.

Studying the mural as one walks up and down the spiral staircase, from the dark earth and sea to bright sunlight, is an active experience, he said. Seeing the mural in the context of a still-active labor union headquarters enhances the effect, he said. A few sugar plantation workers who modeled for O'Higgins in 1952 and can be seen quite distinctly in the mural are still alive and anxious to see the restoration work complete, he said.

"There are lots of plans," he said. "We're thinking of putting new signage up, bringing busloads of school kids, maybe putting in a computer kiosk to help tell the story. Over the years, the building got dwarfed by other ones around it like the Ala Moana hotel and the convention center, but now people will be able to see the building and mural in a new light, and realize that they are still classic."