Robert Fishbone has been painting murals in St. Louis since before it was cool—200 or so across 51 years. Fishbone co-founded On the Wall Productions with his wife, Sarah Linquist, when the two were fresh out of Antioch College. Fifteen years after Linquist’s death from ovarian cancer, Fishbone, 74, is still going strong, making murals with his daughter Liza and, sometimes, son Tyler.
Now that work is being honored with a career-spanning exhibit at The Luminary. On The Wall Productions: 50 Years of Mural Making You Never Knew Existed is a limited-run, pop-up showcase that has its opening night party tonight and will be on view through August 31.
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The showcase includes not just photographs of Fishbone’s favorite murals, but also some of the other highlights from On the Wall Productions. Linquist and Fishbone produced inflatable versions of the horrified figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, selling nearly a quarter-million copies (one iteration was 4 feet tall, another 20 inches). Fishbone has also recruited collaborators and friends, including Cbabi Bayoc and Killer Napkins, to each paint their own 7-foot-tall paint stirring stick, which will also be on display in the gallery. “We’re just hanging them in the space now,” he reported on Tuesday, “and they are incredible-looking.”
It’s an overdue retrospect for an artist who has often flown under the radar—in part because his style resists easy categorization. “All of our murals basically look totally different from each other,” Fishbone acknowledges. “And at the beginning, that worked against us, because people didn’t realize we had eight, nine, 10, 12 murals around town.”
Fishbone says that chameleonic quality stemmed from the fact that he and Lindquist considered each site individually: “Our approach was not to look at a wall and think, Whoa, gee, I could do this, or I want to do this, but we would either stand on the roof or stand with our back to the wall and ask, What does the wall see? What has the wall seen? And that would be the driving factor in how we would begin to design it.”
Another factor that’s made it harder for their work to gain greater attention is that murals are ephemeral. The piece that put Fishbone and Linquist on the map, a portrait of aviator Charles Lindbergh called “Lindy Squared,” was only up from 1977 to 1981 before the building was torn down. The oldest one that’s still up today is across the street from New City School, but, Fishbone warns, “You wouldn’t know it’s there unless you knew it. Some of these are like shadows now.”
Even as the paint on On the Wall Productions’ work has faded, though, St. Louis’ appreciation for murals has grown. Large-scale projects like The Walls Off Washington include multiple murals and are marketed as a place to see the city’s art scene at its most vibrant, while the city used American Rescue Plan Act funds to commission two new murals for every ward. And while the majority of its work is here, On The Wall Productions has now made murals in cities from Dallas to New York City.
“When we first started doing murals in the ‘70s, you know, you were kind of isolated as a muralist,” Fishbone recalls. “There was one conference, like, in 1978 in Chicago, and there were about 200 muralists from around the country who attended it. Well, the only way you could see other people’s murals was in the very few books that were published, or maybe a newspaper or magazine or you went to this conference. Otherwise you had no idea what other people were doing. But now, of course, it’s different.” He continues, “So we felt that, since murals are becoming so popular again, that it would be nice for people in St. Louis to see what some of the foundation of public artwork in the form of murals was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
Looking back on his 50 years of making art, Fishbone has mixed emotions.
“There’s a certain sadness, because so much of what was significant I did with my wife, and then we raised two kids, and they both followed in our footsteps,” he says. “So, I miss her. She’s here, but she’s not here. There’s a lot of great pictures of her when she’s, like, in her 20s. So that’s pretty cool.
“And,” he adds, “I’m really impressed by what we accomplished.”
On The Wall Productions: 50 Years of Mural Making You Never Knew Existed runs from August 20–31 at The Luminary (2701 Cherokee). The opening reception is Friday, August 22, from 6–9 p.m., with a closing reception August 28 from 6–9 p.m.
