Mural of America

Americans have a long habit of painting the country on its own walls. During the Depression, the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts commissioned more than 1,300 murals between 1934 and 1943, many of them for post offices. Small-town lobbies got harvests, rail yards and local heroes, painted where people waited in line for stamps.

The flag on a brick wall comes from the same impulse, minus the government. It turns up on the sides of garages, feed stores, VFW halls and corner bars, often painted by someone local, and it weathers along with the building.

This picture is that wall, done with a stencil and spray paint.

An eagle's head fills the right side in white over blue, with the crisp edges of a stencil and a soft cloud of overspray around them. The pale eye looks left. Stars fill the upper left corner, and the stripes run through the lower half in orange-red and chalky white. The brick shows through everywhere, mortar lines and all. Red and blue spatter runs in drips toward the ground, and at lower left the faded figure of a rider shows through the stripes like an older painting that was never fully covered. It belongs in a garage, a bar or any room with exposed brick of its own.