Mike Alewitz
Mike Alewitz is a radical mural painter.
A lower middle class kid from Cleveland, who found himself on the Kent State campus at the moment of the National Guard massacre (he served on the Witnesses Committee, which toured campuses for months afterward); Alewitz actually started out as a socialist agitator who drew an occasional poster freehand. After exciting times organizing anti-war GIs in Texas during the Vietnam years, he settled into being “industrialized” into various blue-collar jobs.[1]
First murals
Alewitz did his first real murals in Nicaragua during the middle 1980s, as part of a solidarity project. Then came his big chance: directing the creation of a revolutionary mural on the wall of the West Street headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party in New York. Alewitz was expelled from the SWP before the project could be finished. Later, it was painted over, like his mural for the striking P-9 meatpackers of Austin, Minnesota and all his murals in Nicaragua.[2]
Freelancing
Alewitz became a free-lancer and, for a decade, the semi-official resident artist of the Industrial Union Council of New Jersey. He and friends headed a union caravan from New York and New Jersey to Pittston, West Virginia, where they worked with striking miners creating Alewitz’s most future looking work is the cross-border mural erected for the FAT, the Authentic Labor Union of Mexico, sponsored by the United Electrical Workers. “Sindicalismo Sin Fronteras/Trade Unionism without Frontiers” shows workers tearing up borders imposed by bosses.[3]
Artist activism
Alewitz formed LAMP, an artists group to protest the Gulf War but mainly to organize art workers to express themselves politically.
All this activity flowed into the Artists’ Caucus for the Labor Party, which he personally headed, supplying the poster designs for LP conventions at the behest of admirer and LP leader Tony Mazzocchi.
His “Without Action There is No Knowledge” pays tribute to Highlander Folk School, organizing center of southern radicals since 1932.[4]